You conveniently leave out the first part of my comment - that git started out as a quick hack to move linux source control off Bitkeeper, which is proprietary., when people complained It achieved that goal. But that doesn't mean that Linus is now obligated to do the docs - it's a poor use of his time, and as such, simply not a rational option.
The intersection of good coders and good technical writers is not 1:1. That's reality, and no amount of whinging is going to change that. It's why for-profit companies have separate job functions for coding and documenting. So why should we expect the open-source world to apply a less efficient approach?
And really, if it's such a problem for you, why don't you fix it? Or if you don't have the skills, find ways to encourage others to? Even Stallman says there's nothing wrong in paying someone to fix something in open source.
After all, if you're complaining about how hard it is to use, it's because you're either using it, or tried to use it and gave up... or you're just repeating something someone else said. If the latter, honestly, you have zero skin in the game. If the former, you might want to look here.
The kids continued to use the account right up until the day it was finally deleted, so they had the password. The parents were properly sued because they were negligent in not providing proper supervision of their children's conduct for months after being so informed. But I agree, Facebook has liability as well.
You will not bully, intimidate, or harass any user.
and section 3.10
You will not use Facebook to do anything unlawful, misleading, malicious, or discriminatory.
and 4.1
You will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission.
and 4.7
You will keep your contact information accurate and up-to-date.
and
4.8 (the account was created by one student, then shared with another)
You will not share your password (or in the case of developers, your secret key), let anyone else access your account, or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account.
and 4.9 (see above)
You will not transfer your account (including any Page or application you administer) to anyone without first getting our written permission.
Facebook deletes accounts all the time without being required to be served a court order. Or did you forgetthis?
Facebook just doesn't want to set a high-profile precedent that they have a duty to actually enforce some of their ToS when it's a child being victimized. But what can you expect from anti-social media?
The picture used was taken at school. This was how they were originally able to identify the perps.
This also ended up involving school staff not directly involved with the students in question, as the perps sent out invites to everyone they could.
We have courts and police for this stuff. Schools need to be focused on what happens on school grounds.
So the school should ignore that drug dealer hanging just outside the gates? Or students who complain about abuse in the home? Or kids who show up at school hungry or without winter clothing? Or kids who are being shaken down for their lunch money on the way to school by other students?
Linus has routinely p!$$ed off his free help and discouraged many perspective people from helping him in the process... The Linux Kernel project has suffered as a result
There's no way to prove or disprove that kernel development to date has suffered as a result. If you want, you can certainly test your thesis by forking the kernel and inviting people to contribute to project with a "nicer, politer, more human-centric development process." If your theories are correct, you should be able to advance at a faster pace than mainline.
What's interesting to me is that big, audacious ideas that succeed are so often led by people with borderline, clearly flawed personalities. Napoleon, Edison, Disney, Hitchcock, Patton, Jobs, Gates, Balmer, the list goes on and on.
Git started out as a quick hack to respond to criticism of linux using BitKeeper. He fixed that "bug." Torvald's goal in creating git was to get off BitKeeper, not to develop an SCM as his main project.
Since this is open-source, and you think the documentation is poor, why don't you fix it?
Or you could fork it and make something simpler to use.
For example, he could recognize when his anger is caused by not getting enough caring in childhood, and not think that events in the present caused his anger, when events in the present only made him aware of his anger.
Now you're talking like a useless git. Do you have ANY proof that he didn't get enough caring in childhood, or do you just go around slandering people's parents routinely? You might want to read this. Sounds like a pretty enriched environment to grow up in.
I'm writing a book about how people use their brains.
Everybody, everyday, is saying "fuck", but somehow, your society has decided it should not be uttered...
Not everyone. I decided to eliminate certain words from my speech because that's not who I want to be seen as, someone who is, even accidentally, foul-mouthed. It took me a week.
One of my sisters thinks it's stupid. She asked "So, do you tell people you're taking the dog out for a poo?" "No, I'm taking him out for a walk." "So you never swear?" "There's no need to." "Do you know how childish that makes you sound?" And yet she criticizes another sister for sounding like someone with Tourette's.
One good side effect is that on the rare occasions where I still am aggravated to the point where I want to swear, the habit of not swearing now acts like a "pause" button would act for sending emails that you later wish you hadn't sent. It forces me to look at my own reactions, and respond in (hopefully) a more helpful fashion.
People who have known me for a few years have remarked that they are impressed that, no matter the situation, I don't swear. They wish they could "keep their cool" the same way. Why not give it a try?
The school was involved because two students got together and said "Who do we hate them most" from among their classmates. The postings affected another classmate, the target of the posts. The to students invited all the other classmates, the teachers, etc., to be friends of the fake profile, which claimed that the libeled student was sexually promiscuous, racist, a druggie, and on medication for mental illnesses, all to hurt the target of their hate. In other words, this affected a lot of the school for an extended period (11 months).
If you read either the article or the judgment, Facebook refused when the girl's parents contacted them. They said that only the original creator of the account could delete it.
Another reason for friends not to encourage friends to use facebook. Just like the banks were "too big to fail", facebook is "too big to act responsibly."
Our phones and computers are the modern day equivalent of "papers and effects".
No, the modern day equivalent of "papers and effects" are... your papers and effects. If you want protection to be applied to technology that didn't exist in the Founding Father's time, then do the honest thing and press for e.g. a constitutional amendment. Trying to stretch the Founding Fathers' words of over two centuries ago to your pet cause in 2014 is a can of worms that no one should want to open.
"papers and effects"
Your personal effects include your smartphone. If the government wants to peek at it or seize it, they need to get a warrant.
Also, they want people to NOT use encryption at the same time that they're warning companies of the attacks by Chinese cyber-hackers. Someone needs to tell this guy "You can't have it both ways, dude."
It's not an either-or situation. We've had a generation of ever-more complex devices more effectively competing for our attention, and the damage, like getting hit on the head repeatedly, is cumulative.
This problem is now fed by sites that adapt their behavior to each individual to more effectively get and keep their attention. I didn't believe in internet addiction, but I'm now seeing so many people who can't even perform basic tasks like eating without constantly checking what's going on on facebook that I've had to change my mind.
The definition of "gamer" has never been limited to the subset of wargames.
And when I'm referring to modern economic warfare I'm not talking about the monopolistic practices of standard oil, but the much more recent war on the middle class over the last 40 years, where the middle class lost its economic clout, and hasn't had a real increase in income, despite productivity increasing over 100% during that time period.
But the goalpost for being exceptionally intelligent will also have moved.
"some who would have been considered exceptional will not be so much."
becasue more people will be exceptional; which is my point.
No, to the contrary - you'll have to be smarter than ever to be considered exceptional. If eventually we get to the point where half the population has what would be considered TODAY as an IQ of 180, that doesn't mean that half that population would be considered geniuses - they would be considered average.
Let's look at something else - height. The average height of people has changed by 4 inches. Further digging shows that this was pretty much all done between WW1 and today. Someone who was 5'10" less than 100 years ago would have been considered exceptional. Now, not. The curve changes as the population changes.
In a followup phone call with Germar, he clarified that the router was created from a stock board sourced from the Chinese supplier Gainstrong. But he says that the project’s developers requested Gainstrong add flash memory to the board to better accommodate Tor’s storage demands. Germar also says now that the case was supplied by Gainstrong and was not custom-designed by the Anonabox developers.
The larger amount of memory just means they switched from one existing design with smaller memory to another existing design with more memory. Gainstrong didn't have to even put in a custom order - just changed the part number.
Maybe slashdot can invite these guys to do an Ask Slashdot - like Florian Mueller:-)
Update 9:15am 10/15/2014: As the Anonabox Kickstarter campaign has exploded to half a million dollars in just over two days (despite its initial goal of only $7,500) some critics on Reddit have called attention to Germar’s misrepresentation of the “custom” hardware board and plastic case used for the device. They point to stock devices available on Alibaba from Chinese suppliers that appear to be nearly identical. This piece has been corrected from an earlier version that included his claims that both the board and case were custom-built for the project.
In a followup phone call with Germar, he clarified that the router was created from a stock board sourced from the Chinese supplier Gainstrong. But he says that the project’s developers requested Gainstrong add flash memory to the board to better accommodate Tor’s storage demands. Germar also says now that the case was supplied by Gainstrong and was not custom-designed by the Anonabox developers, a partial reversal of how he initially described it to WIRED.
This is only after their ridiculous claim that the chinese seemed to have copied "their" design was shown to be false.
People (both parents and kids) were spending (and fighting over) time on computers in the '90s. And not just for games - I saw one marriage destroyed by chat programs, who knows how many others it happened to.
Then again, the vcr also did a lot of damage. I remember seeing people who would rent 6 movies Friday night, watch them, then rent 7 movies Saturday night, and watch them as well. The whole family was glued to the tube the whole weekend.
So buy the good stuff. It's the same as hard drives - they will all eventually fail. Same as the flash memory in the Eggcyte.
But at least with an old laptop, the usb stick goes, you just buy another usb stick and you're back in business.
You can always buy good usb sticks on sale. I used a 16 gig kingston for a couple of years as primary storage on a laptop that would only boot from cd. So when I was much larger kingston usb sticks on sale, I bought one, and the laptop now boots off the usb stick directly.
Once you've been cohabiting for a year (may vary on jurisdiction) you're considered married in common law. If you've bought stuff as a couple such as a house or have children, splitting can be much the same as divorce. The opposite can also be true, if married but not owning anything substantial, with no kids, divorce can be pretty simple.
Nope. The best answer is "it varies."
Here there is zero recognition of common-law relationships. A couple were living together for two decades, they had 3 kids (court order prevents naming them because of the kids, but a LOT of people know who we're talking about, wink wink nudge nudge), they separated and she filed for support as his common-law wife. Her new boyfriend paid lawyers a million bucks to take it to the supreme court of canada - and the supremes ruled that divorce is strictly a provincial matter, so if the province (Quebec) doesn't recognize common-law relationships, just too damn bad.
Which is interesting because for the longest time courts in Quebec acted as if common-law relationships gave rise to the same rights - until this presumption was challenged. Now, forget it.
The other provinces recognize common law marriages, but the restrictions - and what you're going to get in a split - are not going to be the same as a legal marriage. However, it's only a matter of time until someone challenges the foundation of common-law marriages in the other provinces as being against the freedom of association clause of our constitution, and that will be that.
Monopoly was certainly a "gamer" game for its' time. Monopo;y -1933. The english version of Risk was released in 1959. Unlike "The Little Wars", both Monopoly and Risk continue to be mainstays of board games.
Monopoly is a game where you try to bankrupt your opponents. It presages modern economic warfare.
I guess you never heard about the international monopoly world championship, or the regional ones. And for years we had a weekly board game night that usually featured multiple rounds of Risk (if we could fit in more than one round - sometimes a single round took the whole evening) with participants from 16 to 60. Teams were usually divided along gender lines. And when we were kids we'd play monopoly pretty much all the time.
Too many parents are wasting more time on facebook and other "social media" sites. At least with TV, the parents could sit on the couch and have the kid on their lap, so there was some contact. Facebook and twitter are sowing the next generation of facebook and twitter users with low attention spans.
Slashdot Mirror
Please read the actual judgment. This goes far beyond name-calling. If this had been done by adults, they'd be facing criminal charges.
You conveniently leave out the first part of my comment - that git started out as a quick hack to move linux source control off Bitkeeper, which is proprietary., when people complained It achieved that goal. But that doesn't mean that Linus is now obligated to do the docs - it's a poor use of his time, and as such, simply not a rational option.
The intersection of good coders and good technical writers is not 1:1. That's reality, and no amount of whinging is going to change that. It's why for-profit companies have separate job functions for coding and documenting. So why should we expect the open-source world to apply a less efficient approach?
And really, if it's such a problem for you, why don't you fix it? Or if you don't have the skills, find ways to encourage others to? Even Stallman says there's nothing wrong in paying someone to fix something in open source.
After all, if you're complaining about how hard it is to use, it's because you're either using it, or tried to use it and gave up ... or you're just repeating something someone else said. If the latter, honestly, you have zero skin in the game. If the former, you might want to look here.
The kids continued to use the account right up until the day it was finally deleted, so they had the password. The parents were properly sued because they were negligent in not providing proper supervision of their children's conduct for months after being so informed. But I agree, Facebook has liability as well.
Facebook does exactly what they should. They won't delete a damned thing based on your word. Serve them a court order and you'll get a lot further.
Try reading their terms of service
section 3.6
You will not bully, intimidate, or harass any user.
and section 3.10
You will not use Facebook to do anything unlawful, misleading, malicious, or discriminatory.
and 4.1
You will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission.
and 4.7
You will keep your contact information accurate and up-to-date.
and 4.8 (the account was created by one student, then shared with another)
You will not share your password (or in the case of developers, your secret key), let anyone else access your account, or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account.
and 4.9 (see above)
You will not transfer your account (including any Page or application you administer) to anyone without first getting our written permission.
Facebook deletes accounts all the time without being required to be served a court order. Or did you forget this?
Facebook just doesn't want to set a high-profile precedent that they have a duty to actually enforce some of their ToS when it's a child being victimized. But what can you expect from anti-social media?
The picture used was taken at school. This was how they were originally able to identify the perps.
This also ended up involving school staff not directly involved with the students in question, as the perps sent out invites to everyone they could.
We have courts and police for this stuff. Schools need to be focused on what happens on school grounds.
So the school should ignore that drug dealer hanging just outside the gates? Or students who complain about abuse in the home? Or kids who show up at school hungry or without winter clothing? Or kids who are being shaken down for their lunch money on the way to school by other students?
Linus has routinely p!$$ed off his free help and discouraged many perspective people from helping him in the process... The Linux Kernel project has suffered as a result
There's no way to prove or disprove that kernel development to date has suffered as a result. If you want, you can certainly test your thesis by forking the kernel and inviting people to contribute to project with a "nicer, politer, more human-centric development process." If your theories are correct, you should be able to advance at a faster pace than mainline.
What's interesting to me is that big, audacious ideas that succeed are so often led by people with borderline, clearly flawed personalities. Napoleon, Edison, Disney, Hitchcock, Patton, Jobs, Gates, Balmer, the list goes on and on.
You had me until Balmer.
One can easily be heard and still be professional if he wants to.
True. For women, not so much.
Git started out as a quick hack to respond to criticism of linux using BitKeeper. He fixed that "bug." Torvald's goal in creating git was to get off BitKeeper, not to develop an SCM as his main project.
Since this is open-source, and you think the documentation is poor, why don't you fix it?
Or you could fork it and make something simpler to use.
For example, he could recognize when his anger is caused by not getting enough caring in childhood, and not think that events in the present caused his anger, when events in the present only made him aware of his anger.
Now you're talking like a useless git. Do you have ANY proof that he didn't get enough caring in childhood, or do you just go around slandering people's parents routinely? You might want to read this. Sounds like a pretty enriched environment to grow up in.
I'm writing a book about how people use their brains.
$DIETY help us.
Everybody, everyday, is saying "fuck", but somehow, your society has decided it should not be uttered...
Not everyone. I decided to eliminate certain words from my speech because that's not who I want to be seen as, someone who is, even accidentally, foul-mouthed. It took me a week.
One of my sisters thinks it's stupid. She asked "So, do you tell people you're taking the dog out for a poo?" "No, I'm taking him out for a walk." "So you never swear?" "There's no need to." "Do you know how childish that makes you sound?" And yet she criticizes another sister for sounding like someone with Tourette's.
One good side effect is that on the rare occasions where I still am aggravated to the point where I want to swear, the habit of not swearing now acts like a "pause" button would act for sending emails that you later wish you hadn't sent. It forces me to look at my own reactions, and respond in (hopefully) a more helpful fashion.
People who have known me for a few years have remarked that they are impressed that, no matter the situation, I don't swear. They wish they could "keep their cool" the same way. Why not give it a try?
The school was involved because two students got together and said "Who do we hate them most" from among their classmates. The postings affected another classmate, the target of the posts. The to students invited all the other classmates, the teachers, etc., to be friends of the fake profile, which claimed that the libeled student was sexually promiscuous, racist, a druggie, and on medication for mental illnesses, all to hurt the target of their hate. In other words, this affected a lot of the school for an extended period (11 months).
If you read either the article or the judgment, Facebook refused when the girl's parents contacted them. They said that only the original creator of the account could delete it.
Another reason for friends not to encourage friends to use facebook. Just like the banks were "too big to fail", facebook is "too big to act responsibly."
Our phones and computers are the modern day equivalent of "papers and effects".
No, the modern day equivalent of "papers and effects" are... your papers and effects. If you want protection to be applied to technology that didn't exist in the Founding Father's time, then do the honest thing and press for e.g. a constitutional amendment. Trying to stretch the Founding Fathers' words of over two centuries ago to your pet cause in 2014 is a can of worms that no one should want to open.
"papers and effects"
Your personal effects include your smartphone. If the government wants to peek at it or seize it, they need to get a warrant.
Also, they want people to NOT use encryption at the same time that they're warning companies of the attacks by Chinese cyber-hackers. Someone needs to tell this guy "You can't have it both ways, dude."
This problem is now fed by sites that adapt their behavior to each individual to more effectively get and keep their attention. I didn't believe in internet addiction, but I'm now seeing so many people who can't even perform basic tasks like eating without constantly checking what's going on on facebook that I've had to change my mind.
And when I'm referring to modern economic warfare I'm not talking about the monopolistic practices of standard oil, but the much more recent war on the middle class over the last 40 years, where the middle class lost its economic clout, and hasn't had a real increase in income, despite productivity increasing over 100% during that time period.
Id rather run straight linux.
As opposed to Lesbian Linux, Tinkerbell linux (derivative of Slutware Linux), Linux is Gay, myriad dual-booting scenarios (linux is Bi), and using linux to run Windows in a VM (Transgender linux).
"some who would have been considered exceptional will not be so much."
becasue more people will be exceptional; which is my point.
No, to the contrary - you'll have to be smarter than ever to be considered exceptional. If eventually we get to the point where half the population has what would be considered TODAY as an IQ of 180, that doesn't mean that half that population would be considered geniuses - they would be considered average.
Let's look at something else - height. The average height of people has changed by 4 inches. Further digging shows that this was pretty much all done between WW1 and today. Someone who was 5'10" less than 100 years ago would have been considered exceptional. Now, not. The curve changes as the population changes.
In a followup phone call with Germar, he clarified that the router was created from a stock board sourced from the Chinese supplier Gainstrong. But he says that the project’s developers requested Gainstrong add flash memory to the board to better accommodate Tor’s storage demands. Germar also says now that the case was supplied by Gainstrong and was not custom-designed by the Anonabox developers.
The larger amount of memory just means they switched from one existing design with smaller memory to another existing design with more memory. Gainstrong didn't have to even put in a custom order - just changed the part number.
Maybe slashdot can invite these guys to do an Ask Slashdot - like Florian Mueller :-)
Update 9:15am 10/15/2014: As the Anonabox Kickstarter campaign has exploded to half a million dollars in just over two days (despite its initial goal of only $7,500) some critics on Reddit have called attention to Germar’s misrepresentation of the “custom” hardware board and plastic case used for the device. They point to stock devices available on Alibaba from Chinese suppliers that appear to be nearly identical. This piece has been corrected from an earlier version that included his claims that both the board and case were custom-built for the project.
In a followup phone call with Germar, he clarified that the router was created from a stock board sourced from the Chinese supplier Gainstrong. But he says that the project’s developers requested Gainstrong add flash memory to the board to better accommodate Tor’s storage demands. Germar also says now that the case was supplied by Gainstrong and was not custom-designed by the Anonabox developers, a partial reversal of how he initially described it to WIRED.
This is only after their ridiculous claim that the chinese seemed to have copied "their" design was shown to be false.
Deceptive marketing? Definitely. Open-source hardware? Definitely not. Liars? Heck, yes. Scam? You betcha!
Is 15 IQ points really a meaningful difference "in the real world'?
Yes, over all there will be more geniuses.
Nope. All this will do is shift the curve - some who would have been considered exceptional will not be so much.
That's the problem with grading on the curve ...
Then again, the vcr also did a lot of damage. I remember seeing people who would rent 6 movies Friday night, watch them, then rent 7 movies Saturday night, and watch them as well. The whole family was glued to the tube the whole weekend.
Same with Atari 2600s and Nintendo.
Some people can't walk away from "oh shiny!"
So buy the good stuff. It's the same as hard drives - they will all eventually fail. Same as the flash memory in the Eggcyte.
But at least with an old laptop, the usb stick goes, you just buy another usb stick and you're back in business.
You can always buy good usb sticks on sale. I used a 16 gig kingston for a couple of years as primary storage on a laptop that would only boot from cd. So when I was much larger kingston usb sticks on sale, I bought one, and the laptop now boots off the usb stick directly.
Once you've been cohabiting for a year (may vary on jurisdiction) you're considered married in common law. If you've bought stuff as a couple such as a house or have children, splitting can be much the same as divorce. The opposite can also be true, if married but not owning anything substantial, with no kids, divorce can be pretty simple.
Nope. The best answer is "it varies."
Here there is zero recognition of common-law relationships. A couple were living together for two decades, they had 3 kids (court order prevents naming them because of the kids, but a LOT of people know who we're talking about, wink wink nudge nudge), they separated and she filed for support as his common-law wife. Her new boyfriend paid lawyers a million bucks to take it to the supreme court of canada - and the supremes ruled that divorce is strictly a provincial matter, so if the province (Quebec) doesn't recognize common-law relationships, just too damn bad.
Which is interesting because for the longest time courts in Quebec acted as if common-law relationships gave rise to the same rights - until this presumption was challenged. Now, forget it.
The other provinces recognize common law marriages, but the restrictions - and what you're going to get in a split - are not going to be the same as a legal marriage. However, it's only a matter of time until someone challenges the foundation of common-law marriages in the other provinces as being against the freedom of association clause of our constitution, and that will be that.
Monopoly is a game where you try to bankrupt your opponents. It presages modern economic warfare.
I guess you never heard about the international monopoly world championship, or the regional ones. And for years we had a weekly board game night that usually featured multiple rounds of Risk (if we could fit in more than one round - sometimes a single round took the whole evening) with participants from 16 to 60. Teams were usually divided along gender lines. And when we were kids we'd play monopoly pretty much all the time.
Too many parents are wasting more time on facebook and other "social media" sites. At least with TV, the parents could sit on the couch and have the kid on their lap, so there was some contact. Facebook and twitter are sowing the next generation of facebook and twitter users with low attention spans.