>On one of the machines, using the 'self update' feature caused Firefox to crash in middle of the upgrade
When was this? Do you have DNS/network/firewall issues which could be causing this?
Call me old fashioned, but DNS/network/firewall issues should never cause a web browser to crash and enter into an unusable state.
Re:About getting back to their [Sun's] roots...
on
Sun-isms Debunked
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· Score: 1
It's not the "getting kicked in the ass" part that the previous poster suggests Sun should emulate, it's the "surviving despite that" part.
SGI may be a shadow of their former selves, but better a shadow than nothing at all. They still do some pretty nifty stuff, and I'm glad to see it. The same is true of Sun; it would be a shame to see them end up like DEC.
Considering that defamation in the form of libel/slander is defined as "issuance of a false statement about another person, which causes that person to suffer harm" I don't see how that could be the case.
That's not the only definition of libel. It can also be defined as "A malicious publication expressed either in print or in writing, or by pictures, effigies, or other signs, tending to expose another to public hatred, contempt, or ridicule." (from dictionary.com)
My understanding is that in some legal jurisdictions, truthfulness alone is not enough to exempt someone from charges of defamation/libel/slander; for example, some places might require that the statement(s) also be free of malice.
When I wrote my post, I was treating "libel" as a legal term that is defined and punished differently from place to place. The term you used, "defamation", is a better one for that use.
I think this is a trend that will accelerate: technology can improve personal productivity, and small groups of people are more efficient (less wasteful) than big groups of people, so smaller tech companies (even as small as 1 employee) will more and more be able to do what today is done by larger companies.
Is there any data out there about per-capita profitability of corporations?
If the model(s), photographer, and viewer are all consenting people of legal age, then, there's no abuse whatsoever.
That's a big if. It's a big internet, and I'm confident that the circumstances you describe are not always true.
In addition, there's more to it than that. Are the model(s) being paid a living wage? Are they doing this because desperate circumstances make it their only option? Despite being of legal age, are they all capable of making an informed decision? Did one party get bamboozled into signing an unfair contract? Does Vint Cerf believe that all pornography is unfair exploitation of the model(s) -- that pornography is actually more valuable than the going market rate?
NIMBY is reasonable, in moderation. There are lots of things that I want my society to have, but don't want to live next to: factories, airports, terrorist targets, garbage dumps, prisons, and more.
That doesn't mean that those things shouldn't exist. There may be reasons for them to not exist, but NIMBY isn't one of them.
True. But if you look up the phrase "to bear arms" in the Oxford English Dictionary, you will find that the definition current at the time of the writing of the Second Amendment (indeed, the only definition the phrase has ever had) is "to serve as a soldier, to fight."
I make no claim about the meaning of that clause, so using "but" is not necessary. (After rereading my post, I can see how someone could think it is, but that's not my intent.)
Here's a statement that shows similar sentence structure: "Since all clowns are purple, you must clean your room." The truthfulness of whether or not all clowns actually are purple doesn't affect whether or not you must clean your room.
You misparse the Second Amendment. What you call the first clause is actually a nominative absolute (NA). NAs are descended from the Latin ablative absolute, and serve to set the conditions of the sentence. An example NA is, "The weather being fair, we decided to have a picnic." The main sentence (the picnic decision) is embedded in the fact that the weather was nice. So the right to bear arms is colored by the the necessity of well-regulated militias.
In your sample NA, it is merely the speaker's opinion that the weather was nice. Maybe someone else thinks that the weather is actually far too cold to have a picnic, or maybe someone else thinks that fair weather is not sufficient motivation for a picnic; none of that changes the fact that the speaker decided to have a picnic.
Similarly, the question of whether or not the right to keep and bear arms (whatever that means) shall be infringed (whatever that means) is independent of whether or not the speaker's given reason is valid. It was clearly valid to him; whether or not it is valid to us is irrelevant (although if there is a consensus that it is not valid, we are free to make a new amendment overturning this one.)
My main point is that the second amendment is not an "if-then" conditional statement. It's more of a "since-then" statement, where we are free to disagree about the "since" without affecting whether or not we are bound to follow the "then". If enough people disagree with the "since", then we are free to pass a new amendment counteracting this one, but until then we are bound by its "then" clause.
I'm a EU-an, and don't know the US constitution by heart, but doesn't the second amendment also have something along the lines of 'by a militia' in there?
The way I always thought of it, that means that individual weapon ownership should be illegal, except if you are litterally part of a militia,/with all the duties which that entails/.
The exact wording is as follows:
"A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State,
the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed."
Different people obviously have different interpretations, but grammatically, the rule itself is found in the second clause. The first clause is provided as justification, with the implication that if the second clause is not held to, it will not be possible to have "a well-regulated Militia."
This implication is obviously debatable (lots of countries restrict weapons ownership and still have well-regulated militias), but it doesn't matter, because the rule is found in the second clause. You could drop the first clause entirely and it wouldn't change the meaning of the sentence.
Here's a statement that shows similar sentence structure: "Since all clowns are purple, you must clean your room." The truthfulness of whether or not all clowns actually are purple doesn't affect whether or not you must clean your room.
If the first clause started with "if", then things would be very different.
1. Not patent encumbered (compare to H.264 and MPEG2/4 including "open source" codecs like XviD)
2. Next generation coding techniques (wavelets vs traditional DCT coding) (compare to Theora/MPEG 4)
Aren't wavelets heavily patented? Or is it that only some wavelet-using techniques for encoding video are patented, and this method doesn't use those?
Your post raises a very good point. Perhaps the lack of effective Federal action in the "computer security" field is a blessing in disguise, by allowing us to implement proper security for ourselves, unhindered.
Imagine if the Federal government did for computer security what it's doing for airline security. Everybody would be required to install Microsoft Service Packs (regardless of what operating system they're running.) Internet-connected computers would be nationalized and the government would assign a federal employee to secure yours. Typing "hacker" into an internet-connected computer would be the equivalent of saying "terrorist" in an airport: a half-dozen burly guys without high school diplomas would tackle you and drag you off. Later, a spokesman would say "we take threatening behavior very seriously."
Re:The miracle of deflation is due to big business
on
Amateur Revolution?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
That amateurs can contribute is, in large part, due to the steady price deflation of equipment, especially equipment based on semiconductors.
And this is due to massive multinational corporations spending billions on R&D and infrastructure.
How does that change anything, or diminish the point that the contributions of amateurs are increasing?
It does disprove the claim that multinational corporations are irrelevant, but no one is making that claim, so I don't see the need to disprove it.
Programming in Python takes me about 5 to 10 less time than programming the same functionality in C, and in the rare cases something is too slow even with Psyco, I use Pyrex for the inner loop, typically a single function or class.
Wow, what an awesome pair of projects. With a quick apt-get and two lines of additional code, Psyco cut my program's execution time in half.
Is this software as good as the ever-extensible Kwiki implementation?
You know, Microsoft has done an incredible number of crappy things, and they deserve most of the flak they get, but I don't understand why we can't just once acknowledge them for taking a positive step without making some cheap jab like this.
How is that a cheap jab? It seems like a very reasonable question to me: how does this new project compare to this other existing project?
"Nope. Copyrights should be good for the lifetime of the artist who creates the work, and requires a specific delcaration of assignment of rights to allow a corporation to make use of that copyright for the lifetime of the artist, or some shorter period of time, with the rights reverting to the artist."
Sorry, I have to respectfully disagree with this, if it is purely for the actual lifetime of the artist then there is no protection for the family / estate of the artist.
Why should the family / estate of the artist get protection above and beyond what the family / estate of the factory worker gets? If the artist wants her family / estate to have more money when she dies, then she should save money to pass on to them, just like everybody else has to.
A better solution would be to make copyrights uniform, and set them at a much lower level - say, 5 or 10 years. That way, an artist/corporation would actually have incentive to keep creating new artistic works, which is why people invented copyright in the first place.
"you get just a little more out of it than you put into extracting it."
What you are talking about is called a 'perpetuum mobile', and does not exist.
Not exactly. The previous poster is correct, because ethanol production receives energy not only from what people (the generic "you") put into it, but from the sun as well. The various values have these relationships:
energy-from-sun + energy-from-people > energy-extracted-via-ethanol (laws of thermodynamics preserved)
energy-extracted-via-ethanol > energy-from-people (the process may be advantageous to people)
Slashdot Mirror
Call me old fashioned, but DNS/network/firewall issues should never cause a web browser to crash and enter into an unusable state.
SGI may be a shadow of their former selves, but better a shadow than nothing at all. They still do some pretty nifty stuff, and I'm glad to see it. The same is true of Sun; it would be a shame to see them end up like DEC.
That's not the only definition of libel. It can also be defined as "A malicious publication expressed either in print or in writing, or by pictures, effigies, or other signs, tending to expose another to public hatred, contempt, or ridicule." (from dictionary.com)
My understanding is that in some legal jurisdictions, truthfulness alone is not enough to exempt someone from charges of defamation/libel/slander; for example, some places might require that the statement(s) also be free of malice.
When I wrote my post, I was treating "libel" as a legal term that is defined and punished differently from place to place. The term you used, "defamation", is a better one for that use.
Note that this is not true in all jurisdictions.
Not mine. I don't even remember the last time that I worked more than a 50 hour week.
Is there any data out there about per-capita profitability of corporations?
That's a big if. It's a big internet, and I'm confident that the circumstances you describe are not always true.
In addition, there's more to it than that. Are the model(s) being paid a living wage? Are they doing this because desperate circumstances make it their only option? Despite being of legal age, are they all capable of making an informed decision? Did one party get bamboozled into signing an unfair contract? Does Vint Cerf believe that all pornography is unfair exploitation of the model(s) -- that pornography is actually more valuable than the going market rate?
I do wonder why the Democrats (and the Republicans, for that matter) can't seem to come up with better candidates. Why are Bill Clintons so rare?
What issues do you suppose those are? I'm curious.
That doesn't mean that those things shouldn't exist. There may be reasons for them to not exist, but NIMBY isn't one of them.
Troll? What the heck?
Those sound like reasonable constraints to me.
I make no claim about the meaning of that clause, so using "but" is not necessary. (After rereading my post, I can see how someone could think it is, but that's not my intent.)
In your sample NA, it is merely the speaker's opinion that the weather was nice. Maybe someone else thinks that the weather is actually far too cold to have a picnic, or maybe someone else thinks that fair weather is not sufficient motivation for a picnic; none of that changes the fact that the speaker decided to have a picnic.
Similarly, the question of whether or not the right to keep and bear arms (whatever that means) shall be infringed (whatever that means) is independent of whether or not the speaker's given reason is valid. It was clearly valid to him; whether or not it is valid to us is irrelevant (although if there is a consensus that it is not valid, we are free to make a new amendment overturning this one.)
My main point is that the second amendment is not an "if-then" conditional statement. It's more of a "since-then" statement, where we are free to disagree about the "since" without affecting whether or not we are bound to follow the "then". If enough people disagree with the "since", then we are free to pass a new amendment counteracting this one, but until then we are bound by its "then" clause.
I was thinking the same thing. Was the constitution vetted by rules lawyers? Is it munchy?
The way I always thought of it, that means that individual weapon ownership should be illegal, except if you are litterally part of a militia,
The exact wording is as follows:
Different people obviously have different interpretations, but grammatically, the rule itself is found in the second clause. The first clause is provided as justification, with the implication that if the second clause is not held to, it will not be possible to have "a well-regulated Militia."
This implication is obviously debatable (lots of countries restrict weapons ownership and still have well-regulated militias), but it doesn't matter, because the rule is found in the second clause. You could drop the first clause entirely and it wouldn't change the meaning of the sentence.
Here's a statement that shows similar sentence structure: "Since all clowns are purple, you must clean your room." The truthfulness of whether or not all clowns actually are purple doesn't affect whether or not you must clean your room.
If the first clause started with "if", then things would be very different.
2. Next generation coding techniques (wavelets vs traditional DCT coding) (compare to Theora/MPEG 4)
Aren't wavelets heavily patented? Or is it that only some wavelet-using techniques for encoding video are patented, and this method doesn't use those?
This is an exciting time to be alive.
Imagine if the Federal government did for computer security what it's doing for airline security. Everybody would be required to install Microsoft Service Packs (regardless of what operating system they're running.) Internet-connected computers would be nationalized and the government would assign a federal employee to secure yours. Typing "hacker" into an internet-connected computer would be the equivalent of saying "terrorist" in an airport: a half-dozen burly guys without high school diplomas would tackle you and drag you off. Later, a spokesman would say "we take threatening behavior very seriously."
How does that change anything, or diminish the point that the contributions of amateurs are increasing?
It does disprove the claim that multinational corporations are irrelevant, but no one is making that claim, so I don't see the need to disprove it.
The webcam appears to be covered in ash.
Wow, what an awesome pair of projects. With a quick apt-get and two lines of additional code, Psyco cut my program's execution time in half.
Not any more, it's not.
How is that a cheap jab? It seems like a very reasonable question to me: how does this new project compare to this other existing project?
Why should the family / estate of the artist get protection above and beyond what the family / estate of the factory worker gets? If the artist wants her family / estate to have more money when she dies, then she should save money to pass on to them, just like everybody else has to.
A better solution would be to make copyrights uniform, and set them at a much lower level - say, 5 or 10 years. That way, an artist/corporation would actually have incentive to keep creating new artistic works, which is why people invented copyright in the first place.
Not exactly. The previous poster is correct, because ethanol production receives energy not only from what people (the generic "you") put into it, but from the sun as well. The various values have these relationships:
energy-from-sun + energy-from-people > energy-extracted-via-ethanol (laws of thermodynamics preserved)
energy-extracted-via-ethanol > energy-from-people (the process may be advantageous to people)