It's hardly a socialist system. In any reasonable socialist system you wouldn't have to work whilst going to university. Society balking at a small short-term cost in order to make someone a much more productive member of society (and more than pay back the cost of being educated) is insanity.
Anyway, if you're so poor, why aren't you eligible for one of these special flats?
Perhaps she was picking up the champage for someone else, or perhaps she was picking up the food for someone else?
Similar, true situation: in the mid-90s pensioners in the UK got some free food from the EU surplus (don't ask...) and my mother was collecting my grandmother's allocation (who was ill) and she got some verbal abuse for it.
however, at the same time, there are a great number of swindlers and fraudsters that just leech off of the these handouts to pay for booze, cigarettes & drugs.
Issuing food (etc.) stamps is demeaning to the recipient. Humiliating the poorest in society is an excellent way to encourage crime, which is not at all acceptable compared to the tiny cost of fraud.
Your idea of issuing stamps for everything else is even worse. The individual can do a much better job of assessing their own needs than the state can. Regardless of the humiliation of not being able to manage their own affairs (see crime above), it is just not very efficient; individuals have no incentive to reduce their energy bills below that which is allocated to them in stamps for example.
In any case, I don't see that stamps can do much to reduce fraud. It would just result in a black market in stamps.
Which fucking genius modded this up? Actually my example is quite plausible. It's not hard to imagine; the donor might be 12 for example. There are many cases of people receiving organs from donors much younger than themselves.
Great! So a 108-year old with alcoholism who probably wouldn't survive the operation anyway (but does have piles of cash and is willing to risk it) takes precedence over a 10-year old girl who will otherwise die. Isn't capitalism wonderful?:)
id's standing on piracy It sucks. Next game's international launch won't lag behind US launch.
If id/Activision want to discourage copying, they're going the wrong way about it:
* The aforementioned staggered release dates (it doesn't matter if it takes longer to ship/manufacture in various countries; delay all copies till it's ready!)
* Making the official version less useable than cracked versions, by: - Requiring a registration key (and telling you to look in the wrong place for it) - Requiring the CD to be in the drive before playing - Refusing to install if a copy of cloneCD etc. is present (and giving an error message about "DVD emulation"??) - this really pissed me off; it's not id's business what else I have on my machine
* Etc.
And another thing that annoyed me was the installer trying to access the internet (blocked by my firewall) without asking (auto-registration? how rude...)
1) & 2) can compensate for each other to a large extent. (And what's "right" anyway?)
3) - what have seasons got to do with it?
4)...and so are the orbits of most of the other planets that we know about
5), 6), and 7)...so?
8) The Gulf stream has only existed for a small part of the history of the Earth, and well after life evolved. And what about the other parts of the planet anyway?
9) A reasonable point. This may well be true.
10) Life on Earth in general has survived many such catastrophes, indicating (if I understand your point) that survival is not a huge stroke of luck, but actually quite likely.
Isn't this is a four year old issue in which very little has happened recently? (Most articles I found about it were dated from 2000).
It was the recent phone call from a lawyer (whose lawyer exactly seems unclear; no one seems to want to claim her (understandably)) trying to intimidate Katie J into handing over her domain name. This was apparently a result of Katie J's complaints about Katie T's recent promotion of a new online service called Katie.com.
Edmund: You see, Baldrick, in order to prevent war in Europe, two superblocs developed: us, the French and the Russians on one side, and the Germans and Austro-Hungary on the other. The idea was to have two vast opposing armies, each acting as the other's deterrent. That way there could never be a war.
Baldrick: But this is a sort of a war, isn't it, sir?
Edmund: Yes, that's right. You see, there was a tiny flaw in the plan.
George: What was that, sir?
Edmund: It was bollocks.
Baldrick: So the poor old ostrich died for nothing.
When you're trying to hit a deadline, especially as a writer, it's a big deal to be able to type twice as fast
At 130 wpm you could write a short novel (40k words) in 5 or 6 hours... that's not how it works. I suppose it might be different if you were writing very systematic technical documentation, but generally the bottleneck is almost always thinking time. It doesn't make much difference if you're typing at 30 or 130 wpm.
Which is not to say touch-typing is not useful -- it's much more comfortable and means you don't have to look at the keyboard, as you say.
Touch-typing is probably the most useful skill I taught myself before going to university. (I wasn't allowed to take "keyboard skills" at school previously - that was apparently for kids who couldn't cope with any other classes. I wonder if they think differently now).
I don't think that's true. Wormtongue is a nickname if I remember correctly, and he's more a pitiful character than evil. Gollum of course is pretty conflicted, as is Boromir and Denethor. Which of those are good or bad guys? The elves are suspicious, the dwarves greedy.
The only really evil characters are the orcs, and the only really good characters are Aragorn and the hobbits.
On the subject of appearances you may have a point, but I don't understand why it should impede your enjoyment of the story. It would be boring if every piece of fiction was written in that way, but pieces of work like LOTR, deliberately written in a classically fantastical style, can I think be forgiven.
Like you say, it's dated; many of his objections have been remedied (such as asserts) and others are being fixed in Java 1.5 (e.g. autoboxing).
As for the rest of his complaints, they seem to be a mixture of good points (e.g. not being able to override static methods properly), opinions (I like interfaces, but they're hard to get to grips with at first, and a common complaint to new users of the language), and things that are just wrong (like the typing comment).
I did a bit of poking to see if I could track down your article. The "Tiberius Gracchus" article was apparently once part of the "Gracchi" article before someone decided to redirect it, which is why yours isn't part of the history of the current page.
Your essay exists in the earliest history of that page (dated 2 Feb 2002): http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Gracchi &oldid=3278...but it is attributed to "conversion script" which I assume is a real script and not your username, so maybe it was an update from an earlier database or another redirect or something...
I can't believe you didn't make the obvious joke there. I mean, c'mon. Think about it. "Going down"..."my wife"...Jebus! It fairly slaps you in the face! And you call yourself a Slashdotter...
Well you couldn't even connect up the "slaps you in the face" double entendre... must be the apocalypse:(
I'm sure there's some joke in the story we're not getting. It can't be as bad as it appears - can it? Is Hemos really reposting Brin's verbal diarrhoea?
Well you don't know me, but I like spatial Nautilus. I almost always use the command line, but I when I do use the file manager it's because I want to drag and drop lots of differents files, which the new Nautilus setup seems well-designed for.
Have you actually used it or are you listening to the/. reaction?
Sveasoft is not charging $20 dollars for the binaries. The binaries are free.
Svaesoft is charging $20 dollars for access to the support forums. Nothing ilegal there. I paid $20 dollars and the support and I am more than happy with what I got.
Sveasoft are perfectly entitled to charge for support and/or binaries (as long as source code is also distributed).
1) Stable firmware is released for free in binary form, just as many Linux distributions are available for free. Yu can dwonload those right now from the Linksysinfo.org site. If you want the source code of the freely availabe stable releases you can buy it via a $50 dollar CD, if the $50 were really substantialy above the real cost of generating and shipping the CD, there would be a market of people who would profit from re-distributing that seme CD for less, as anyone can do that under the GPL terms. It happens all the time with all major Linux Distributions.
But on the other hand, why can't source code be provided via download? (It would be OK to limit this to subscribers only). Charging $50 for a CD when the GPL only allows a modest charge for the cost of the medium is probably a violation of the license.
Pre-release bianaries are shared only with forum suscribers (but still free). Forum suscribers are allowed access to the source code
Via download or CD?
(to re-distribute myself I terminate my support contract (not my rights and obligations to re-distribute according to the GPL terms)
This is impossible to enforce as there is no way in which it can be determined who has redistributed the code. All it does is piss people off and discourage code sharing, which is the whole point of the GPL.
Sveasoft wants to charge for binaries/source code: fine. Sveasfoft wants to charge for support: fine.
Sveasoft wants to discourage people from getting the source code: bad Sveasoft wants to discourage people from sharing code: bad
All the fuss is being generated by people who misunderstand the GPL
You are a patronizing idiot.
the GPL does not mean free (as in bear) support
Free as in "bear"??
No one in this discussion has suggested that it does.
Sveasoft understood better than most the GPL and how to create a support model that does not depend on charity and where slackers do not get an absolutely free ride.
Wtf is a "slacker"? I'm not an American, but I thought I knew what the term meant, and it doesn't seem to apply in this situation.
A few months ago, several individuals started complaining about GPL responsibilities and demanded the source-code to the work-in-progress be posted. This despite the fact the work-in-progress wasn't an actual release, but a testing copy.
They have this right. Any relase, whether "testing" or whatever has to be under the GPL. If binaries of GPL'd software are being distributed, the source code also has to be released on request. If Sveasoft don't like it, they shouldn't be using GPL software.
They never refused to release the source code
You just appeared to admit that they did.
They release the source code when they do an actual release of the firmware, when it's nice and stable and working.
According to the thread linked to, it is alleged that Sveasoft are charging $50 for a CD with source code. Not reasonable. And once again, there's no difference between testing and release versions under the GPL.
Sveasoft has said everybody can freely redistribute the release versions of their firmware and source code.
Well it's very nice of them considering we already have this right.
If one of my beta testers leaks my code to the internet, I'm certainly not going to be sympathetic if someone downloads it and has problems with it and calls my tech support for help. Why should Sveasoft?
You can't "leak" GPL'd code! If you distribute it, it's under the GPL and anyone is free to redistribute it. Sveasoft is not of course obliged to provide tech support, but then no one has suggested they are.
Horrible idea. None of the good desktop interfaces out there have *ever* required certification.
Arguably, there are no really good desktop interfaces out there.
Further, this will discriminate against those people that do not have money to pay certification fees, slow development of applications (as individual versions would have to each be certified)
The article doesn't suggest that it be made compulsory, or that fees should be paid for certification.
That's a bad idea. Really. I can live with apt or something similar, where at least some checking has been done by the distro producer. A large number of Windows security problems come from click-to-execute/install things in MSIE or Outlook.
How about if it was on a whitelist basis, like the Mozilla thingies?
Slashdot Mirror
The socialistic systems are flat out broken
It's hardly a socialist system. In any reasonable socialist system you wouldn't have to work whilst going to university. Society balking at a small short-term cost in order to make someone a much more productive member of society (and more than pay back the cost of being educated) is insanity.
Anyway, if you're so poor, why aren't you eligible for one of these special flats?
Perhaps she was picking up the champage for someone else, or perhaps she was picking up the food for someone else?
Similar, true situation: in the mid-90s pensioners in the UK got some free food from the EU surplus (don't ask...) and my mother was collecting my grandmother's allocation (who was ill) and she got some verbal abuse for it.
Moral: don't judge.
however, at the same time, there are a great number of swindlers and fraudsters that just leech off of the these handouts to pay for booze, cigarettes & drugs.
Issuing food (etc.) stamps is demeaning to the recipient. Humiliating the poorest in society is an excellent way to encourage crime, which is not at all acceptable compared to the tiny cost of fraud.
Your idea of issuing stamps for everything else is even worse. The individual can do a much better job of assessing their own needs than the state can. Regardless of the humiliation of not being able to manage their own affairs (see crime above), it is just not very efficient; individuals have no incentive to reduce their energy bills below that which is allocated to them in stamps for example.
In any case, I don't see that stamps can do much to reduce fraud. It would just result in a black market in stamps.
Which fucking genius modded this up? Actually my example is quite plausible. It's not hard to imagine; the donor might be 12 for example. There are many cases of people receiving organs from donors much younger than themselves.
Great! So a 108-year old with alcoholism who probably wouldn't survive the operation anyway (but does have piles of cash and is willing to risk it) takes precedence over a 10-year old girl who will otherwise die. Isn't capitalism wonderful? :)
id's standing on piracy
It sucks. Next game's international launch won't lag behind US launch.
If id/Activision want to discourage copying, they're going the wrong way about it:
* The aforementioned staggered release dates (it doesn't matter if it takes longer to ship/manufacture in various countries; delay all copies till it's ready!)
* Making the official version less useable than cracked versions, by:
- Requiring a registration key (and telling you to look in the wrong place for it)
- Requiring the CD to be in the drive before playing
- Refusing to install if a copy of cloneCD etc. is present (and giving an error message about "DVD emulation"??) - this really pissed me off; it's not id's business what else I have on my machine
* Etc.
And another thing that annoyed me was the installer trying to access the internet (blocked by my firewall) without asking (auto-registration? how rude...)
Well I've occasionally (not habitually) tried to su to root on remote systems (over ssh!) simply by forgetting which terminal I was typing in.
Surely single attempts to gain access as root can't be considered as a deliberate attempt at intrusion. Does this not happen to anyone else?
England != UK
Yes! Someone must propose this. Justify it as some sort of weak acronym that seems so popular these days, such as:
...or some such crap. Who on /. has a kid in the right age range they don't mind using as a political tool?
Defending All Righteous Licenses
1) & 2) can compensate for each other to a large extent. (And what's "right" anyway?)
...and so are the orbits of most of the other planets that we know about
...so?
3) - what have seasons got to do with it?
4)
5), 6), and 7)
8) The Gulf stream has only existed for a small part of the history of the Earth, and well after life evolved. And what about the other parts of the planet anyway?
9) A reasonable point. This may well be true.
10) Life on Earth in general has survived many such catastrophes, indicating (if I understand your point) that survival is not a huge stroke of luck, but actually quite likely.
Isn't this is a four year old issue in which very little has happened recently? (Most articles I found about it were dated from 2000).
It was the recent phone call from a lawyer (whose lawyer exactly seems unclear; no one seems to want to claim her (understandably)) trying to intimidate Katie J into handing over her domain name. This was apparently a result of Katie J's complaints about Katie T's recent promotion of a new online service called Katie.com.
Did Slashdot force this sudden 180?
Apparently so.
Edmund: You see, Baldrick, in order to prevent war in Europe, two superblocs
developed: us, the French and the Russians on one side, and the
Germans and Austro-Hungary on the other. The idea was to have two
vast opposing armies, each acting as the other's deterrent. That way
there could never be a war.
Baldrick: But this is a sort of a war, isn't it, sir?
Edmund: Yes, that's right. You see, there was a tiny flaw in the plan.
George: What was that, sir?
Edmund: It was bollocks.
Baldrick: So the poor old ostrich died for nothing.
When you're trying to hit a deadline, especially as a writer, it's a big deal to be able to type twice as fast
At 130 wpm you could write a short novel (40k words) in 5 or 6 hours... that's not how it works. I suppose it might be different if you were writing very systematic technical documentation, but generally the bottleneck is almost always thinking time. It doesn't make much difference if you're typing at 30 or 130 wpm.
Which is not to say touch-typing is not useful -- it's much more comfortable and means you don't have to look at the keyboard, as you say.
Touch-typing is probably the most useful skill I taught myself before going to university. (I wasn't allowed to take "keyboard skills" at school previously - that was apparently for kids who couldn't cope with any other classes. I wonder if they think differently now).
I don't think that's true. Wormtongue is a nickname if I remember correctly, and he's more a pitiful character than evil. Gollum of course is pretty conflicted, as is Boromir and Denethor. Which of those are good or bad guys? The elves are suspicious, the dwarves greedy.
The only really evil characters are the orcs, and the only really good characters are Aragorn and the hobbits.
On the subject of appearances you may have a point, but I don't understand why it should impede your enjoyment of the story. It would be boring if every piece of fiction was written in that way, but pieces of work like LOTR, deliberately written in a classically fantastical style, can I think be forgiven.
Like you say, it's dated; many of his objections have been remedied (such as asserts) and others are being fixed in Java 1.5 (e.g. autoboxing).
As for the rest of his complaints, they seem to be a mixture of good points (e.g. not being able to override static methods properly), opinions (I like interfaces, but they're hard to get to grips with at first, and a common complaint to new users of the language), and things that are just wrong (like the typing comment).
Here's the explanation
I did a bit of poking to see if I could track down your article. The "Tiberius Gracchus" article was apparently once part of the "Gracchi" article before someone decided to redirect it, which is why yours isn't part of the history of the current page.
i &oldid=3278 ...but it is attributed to "conversion script" which I assume is a real script and not your username, so maybe it was an update from an earlier database or another redirect or something...
Your essay exists in the earliest history of that page (dated 2 Feb 2002):
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Gracch
I can't believe you didn't make the obvious joke there. I mean, c'mon. Think about it. "Going down"..."my wife"...Jebus! It fairly slaps you in the face! And you call yourself a Slashdotter...
:(
Well you couldn't even connect up the "slaps you in the face" double entendre... must be the apocalypse
I'm sure there's some joke in the story we're not getting. It can't be as bad as it appears - can it? Is Hemos really reposting Brin's verbal diarrhoea?
Well you don't know me, but I like spatial Nautilus. I almost always use the command line, but I when I do use the file manager it's because I want to drag and drop lots of differents files, which the new Nautilus setup seems well-designed for.
/. reaction?
Have you actually used it or are you listening to the
Sveasoft is not charging $20 dollars for the binaries. The binaries are free.
Svaesoft is charging $20 dollars for access to the support forums. Nothing ilegal there. I paid $20 dollars and the support and I am more than happy with what I got.
Sveasoft are perfectly entitled to charge for support and/or binaries (as long as source code is also distributed).
1) Stable firmware is released for free in binary form, just as many Linux distributions are available for free. Yu can dwonload those right now from the Linksysinfo.org site. If you want the source code of the freely availabe stable releases you can buy it via a $50 dollar CD, if the $50 were really substantialy above the real cost of generating and shipping the CD, there would be a market of people who would profit from re-distributing that seme CD for less, as anyone can do that under the GPL terms. It happens all the time with all major Linux Distributions.
But on the other hand, why can't source code be provided via download? (It would be OK to limit this to subscribers only). Charging $50 for a CD when the GPL only allows a modest charge for the cost of the medium is probably a violation of the license.
Pre-release bianaries are shared only with forum suscribers (but still free). Forum suscribers are allowed access to the source code
Via download or CD?
(to re-distribute myself I terminate my support contract (not my rights and obligations to re-distribute according to the GPL terms)
This is impossible to enforce as there is no way in which it can be determined who has redistributed the code. All it does is piss people off and discourage code sharing, which is the whole point of the GPL.
Sveasoft wants to charge for binaries/source code: fine.
Sveasfoft wants to charge for support: fine.
Sveasoft wants to discourage people from getting the source code: bad
Sveasoft wants to discourage people from sharing code: bad
All the fuss is being generated by people who misunderstand the GPL
You are a patronizing idiot.
the GPL does not mean free (as in bear) support
Free as in "bear"??
No one in this discussion has suggested that it does.
Sveasoft understood better than most the GPL and how to create a support model that does not depend on charity and where slackers do not get an absolutely free ride.
Wtf is a "slacker"? I'm not an American, but I thought I knew what the term meant, and it doesn't seem to apply in this situation.
A few months ago, several individuals started complaining about GPL responsibilities and demanded the source-code to the work-in-progress be posted. This despite the fact the work-in-progress wasn't an actual release, but a testing copy.
They have this right. Any relase, whether "testing" or whatever has to be under the GPL. If binaries of GPL'd software are being distributed, the source code also has to be released on request. If Sveasoft don't like it, they shouldn't be using GPL software.
They never refused to release the source code
You just appeared to admit that they did.
They release the source code when they do an actual release of the firmware, when it's nice and stable and working.
According to the thread linked to, it is alleged that Sveasoft are charging $50 for a CD with source code. Not reasonable. And once again, there's no difference between testing and release versions under the GPL.
Sveasoft has said everybody can freely redistribute the release versions of their firmware and source code.
Well it's very nice of them considering we already have this right.
If one of my beta testers leaks my code to the internet, I'm certainly not going to be sympathetic if someone downloads it and has problems with it and calls my tech support for help. Why should Sveasoft?
You can't "leak" GPL'd code! If you distribute it, it's under the GPL and anyone is free to redistribute it. Sveasoft is not of course obliged to provide tech support, but then no one has suggested they are.
Horrible idea. None of the good desktop interfaces out there have *ever* required certification.
Arguably, there are no really good desktop interfaces out there.
Further, this will discriminate against those people that do not have money to pay certification fees, slow development of applications (as individual versions would have to each be certified)
The article doesn't suggest that it be made compulsory, or that fees should be paid for certification.
That's a bad idea. Really. I can live with apt or something similar, where at least some checking has been done by the distro producer. A large number of Windows security problems come from click-to-execute/install things in MSIE or Outlook.
How about if it was on a whitelist basis, like the Mozilla thingies?
there != their
Are you going to write a sequel now about loose != lose?
The English language called, it wants its apostrophes back.