And THIS is why I switched away from Ubuntu long ago.
Please, Ubuntu guys, learn the concept of a "showstopper". You should not release software with major known bugs. Is your release schedule really more important than your users' computers working properly?
ACT-UP and Stallman may have been needed at one point, but ultimately do more harm to their own cause then they realize.
Thank you for your concern.
Funny thing: there are huge numbers of people like you, who are always ready to tell anyone who stands up for a cause that they are doing it wrong and would be far better off just sitting back down again and not rocking the boat. There are far fewer people like Stallman who are actually ready to do the standing up. Which do you think has a more beneficial effect on society?
To put it another way: without Stallman, I would be typing this on a computer that was bound by restrictive EULAs that would prevent me from knowing how it worked or modifying it to suit my needs. He clearly knows a thing or two about software freedom. What have you accomplished that gives you the authority to claim you know better than him how to achieve his goals?
(Also, I find it bizarre that you equate issuing a press release you don't like with throwing blood at people. Really, you're going with that? Wow.)
This is British Airways we're talking about, not Southwest or Ryanair. BA does not charge hidden fees for everything. In-flight food and drink, a reasonable number of checked bags, etc. are all provided at no extra cost.
(The downside is that BA tickets are more expensive up-front. You pays your money and you takes your choice: put up with sleazy nickel-and-diming scumbags, or pay a premium to receive premium service?)
Partly this is the fault of our culture labelling all mental health issues under the broad brush of "s/he's crazy".
This. A thousand times this. This is totally correct.
Just look at language. Love it or hate it, political correctness is a fairly good way to track society's attitudes. And we can see that many people, nice people who would never dream of calling someone "nigger" or "fag" or "bitch" or "lame" or "fatty", have no problem with using words like "crazy" in polite company.
It's inconceivable that a politician who described his/her opponent as "insane" or "deluded" would face criticism from anyone apart from the most radical bloggers. Compare that to what happens if a politician uses a word that even sounds like a racial or sexual slur!
I'm not making any big judgement here. I call things "crazy" all the time myself. My point is simply this: the language we use proves that society as a whole does not think of mental illness as a thing that affects "people like us". It affects other people. Those crazy people who are insane and therefore not like us and our friends. Crackheads and people who were abused as kids and so on. People we can comfortably assume aren't present in the room when we're talking.
Is it any wonder that people will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid considering the possibility that they themselves might have mental health problems?
I know the white knights here who already despise the TSA will crucify me for saying it, but millions of people fly every fucking day. Yet this shit mostly seems to happen to self-important bloggers
Alternative possibility: thousands of people are being sexually assaulted every day, and most of them react in the way we already know most victims of sexual assault react -- by convincing themselves it was their own fault, or that it didn't really happen, or that they consented -- because they know that nobody will believe them if they speak out. And people like you would just accuse them of being self-important drama queens. And the last thing they need is people like you adding literal insult to the literal injury of the sexual assault someone just perpetrated on them.
Which of us is right? I don't know. Maybe these incidents are isolated. Maybe the victims are partly to blame. But what I do know is that there are altogether too many nasty stories about the TSA for me to be certain that there is no truth to any of them, and if TSA agents have left even one person feeling that they have been sexually violated, that is one person too many.
I spend a lot more time considering exactly what I am going to write than I do pushing buttons, so my neanderthal technique is irrelevant.
It's not quite that simple.
It's true that if your technique is accurate and does not require you to look at the keyboard, then the fact that it is not as fast as "proper" touch typing is largely irrelevant. On the other hand, if you were making lots of mistakes, or having to look for keys on the keyboard, then you would be distracting yourself and interrupting your train of thought, which would seriously harm your productivity.
The number of fingers you use to type is not very important, but the amount of your conscious brainpower you are wasting on the process certainly is.
A bug in a library function shows how a language is poorly designed?
No, but releasing an update without even running the existing unit tests shows how amateurish the whole PHP project is. The terrible design of the language is also a reflection of its amateurish nature.
It's true that some websites manage to do wonderful things with PHP, but then it's also true that some artists manage to make wonderful sculptures out of manure. That doesn't mean it's a good choice for most people.
So... what you're saying is that you want 80% of your games to be reruns or shoestring-budget shovelware, and the handful of original AAA titles to be subsidized by 20 minutes of advertising in every hour? Because that's why cable TV costs what it does.
Me, I'll gladly pay $60 for even just 20 hours of original, advertising-free, high-budget content. Movies are the closest comparable thing, and they are almost invariably more expensive than games.
And you're being ridiculous. Anyone who types that is an idiot and deserves everything they get. The actual nice thing about "auto" is that you can type
auto it = container.begin();
instead of
std::unordered_map<std::string, std::vector<std::string>>::const_iterator it = container.begin()
without having to faff about with typedefs all over the place.
I think the problem is that GNOME/KDE decided to become the DEs for the rest of us
Not the rest of "us". That's the problem: GNOME (and, to a lesser extent, KDE) have decided, for some reason, to become desktop environments primarily targeted at the sort of person who isn't even remotely interested in using GNOME or KDE.
It's like the Pope turned round one day and said "okay, we're going to rewrite our doctrines to make them more appealing to atheists!"
Using public WiFi spots is a much more dangerous issue, since a lot of websites still don't employ SSL encryption of the traffic and your POP3/IMAP/HTTP credentials can be easily eavesdropped.
That's not a problem Google can solve.
Protecting my passwords from people who steal my phone is a problem Google can solve.
Please don't divert attention from an easily-solved issue just because you think some other thing is more important. Or I might just ask why the fuck you're wasting time on Slashdot instead of working night and day to eradicate hunger and disease, which are clearly far more pressing issues than people eavesdropping on you when you use public wifi.
Like it's mentioned earlier not storing passwords in an open or reverse encryptable form is not possible, since your Android device has to supply plain text password to many Internet servers.
Yes, it's totally impossible to protect data at rest. All those companies selling full-disk encryption to governments and businesses are clearly selling snake oil. Truecrypt is easy to break and Bruce Schneier is an idiot, right?
Or maybe it's actually trivial to encrypt data, and while many users might choose not to use it or might choose extremely weak passwords for the encryption, it would still be better than nothing.
If this was a multi-player game for example (I don't believe that it is), malicious players could supply their own hacked levels and upgrades using MITM methods potentially giving them an unfair advantage over other players that doing things properly.
Yes, that sounds totally plausible and not at all contrived. I can well imagine many people being so eager to cheat at games that they will happily commit a complex and technically-demanding federal crime in order to gain a slight edge.
Amazon should also have insisted that the game disable the device's screen and communicate with the player only by blinking morse code with the device's notification LED, like in Cryptonomicon, because there's a serious risk that malicious players might try to get an unfair advantage via Van Eck phreaking.
Roundabouts (please note, they are called roundabouts -- a "rotary" is a different type of circular road layout) work best as a replacement for all-way stops, not for signalized intersections. Note that all-way stops also lack any provision for pedestrians, and are generally more dangerous since drivers have more to worry about -- they must monitor traffic approaching from all directions, whereas with a roundabout the driver only has to watch in one direction.
In my state, roundabouts generally have crosswalks a little way away from each entrance. These crosswalks work like any other crosswalk. It's not rocket science.
people that lack fast Internet aren't necessarily screwed, since Apple is allowing anyone to use the Wi-Fi in their retail stores to download the OS.
Oh, that's OK then. It's not like most of the people who lack fast internet lack it because they live a long way from the big cities where Apple stores tend to be located, or anything. I'm sure they'll be very happy to pay 500 times the cost of mailing a DVD in gas just to get their OS upgrade.
Your options: 1. Download at work. 2. Download at friend's house. 3. Download at relative's house. 4. Move. 5. Raise hell with Hughesnet. 7. Raise hell with Apple. 8. Cry.
Good God, how can you be posting on Slashdot and yet forget the best option of all?
And yet when I go back and play classic games, often in emulators -- games made at least 15 years ago, and in a few cases over 25 years ago! -- I sure feel like I'm enjoying them.
And it's not purely nostalgia; I have enjoyed games from that era that I did not play at the time.
Do you have a smartphone? You now have an ebook reader
I have a smartphone. It has a lovely high-resolution display that produces crisp and beautiful text.
It's also completely unreadable out of doors, painfully bright in low light conditions, has limited battery life, and can only display a very limited amount of information at a time. Sorry, but I have no interest in tackling a novel on it, let alone a technical work. Come back when large low-power reflective displays are widespread in cheap multi-purpose devices and then we might talk.
Seriously, I expect this will be modded into oblivion because Slashdot hates Sony and loves anyone who sticks it to the man (see also: Wikileaks, Anonymous, etc).
But they are criminals, and therefore I for one am glad that the FBI has had some little success in tracking them down, and look forward eagerly to the day when the ringleaders are forced to defend their actions in court.
The fact that they are committing crimes against someone you hate cannot justify those crimes. Indeed it must not, because turning a blind eye to crime just because you don't like the victim leads to mob rule. It is the antithesis of the rule of law on which our society is founded, which protects our rights as well as Sony's. That's one slope that history has proven time and time again to be very slippery indeed.
And, hey, maybe they'll put up such a good defence that the jury will refuse to convict them and the balance of power between corporations and common people will be shifted, and that would probably be good too. But it should be done in courts or congress, not by vigilante mobs deciding to lynch a corporation that offended them.
For those who don't live in a Monarchy, for loyalists, insulting the King is equivalent to insulting the country
In US terms, it is equivalent to insulting the Flag and the Constitution.
Note that while those things are protected today, there are plenty of politicians in office in America today who think it should still be made a crime to burn the US flag. All they really have to do is manage to get it classified as "obscene" and all those First Amendment protections will dissolve right away. Freedom is a rather fragile thing, not to be taken for granted.
Hell, even in the US there are people being held without trial, all for associating with someone who's major crime is embarassing the government
Really? Who? I am really having trouble working out what you are referring to here. (The only people I can think of who are being held without trial are the remaining inmates at Guantanamo Bay, but I would hardly describe the murder of thousands of Americans as merely "embarrasing the government". Were you thinking of Pfc Manning? Because he is being held pending trial, not without it, and the crime he is accused of is certainly not simply associating with Assange.)
A better American analogy would be the people who have been snatched off planes transiting US airports for the "crime" of running internet gambling sites overseas in countries where it is perfectly legal to run internet gambling sites.
Slashdot Mirror
And THIS is why I switched away from Ubuntu long ago.
Please, Ubuntu guys, learn the concept of a "showstopper". You should not release software with major known bugs. Is your release schedule really more important than your users' computers working properly?
Thank you for your concern.
Funny thing: there are huge numbers of people like you, who are always ready to tell anyone who stands up for a cause that they are doing it wrong and would be far better off just sitting back down again and not rocking the boat. There are far fewer people like Stallman who are actually ready to do the standing up. Which do you think has a more beneficial effect on society?
To put it another way: without Stallman, I would be typing this on a computer that was bound by restrictive EULAs that would prevent me from knowing how it worked or modifying it to suit my needs. He clearly knows a thing or two about software freedom. What have you accomplished that gives you the authority to claim you know better than him how to achieve his goals?
(Also, I find it bizarre that you equate issuing a press release you don't like with throwing blood at people. Really, you're going with that? Wow.)
This is British Airways we're talking about, not Southwest or Ryanair. BA does not charge hidden fees for everything. In-flight food and drink, a reasonable number of checked bags, etc. are all provided at no extra cost.
(The downside is that BA tickets are more expensive up-front. You pays your money and you takes your choice: put up with sleazy nickel-and-diming scumbags, or pay a premium to receive premium service?)
HP, for one, if HP are still selling laptops by then.
If you order your HP laptop with Windows you get a Windows logo. Order it with FreeDOS or Linux? No Windows logo. (And no Microsoft tax.)
This. A thousand times this. This is totally correct.
Just look at language. Love it or hate it, political correctness is a fairly good way to track society's attitudes. And we can see that many people, nice people who would never dream of calling someone "nigger" or "fag" or "bitch" or "lame" or "fatty", have no problem with using words like "crazy" in polite company.
It's inconceivable that a politician who described his/her opponent as "insane" or "deluded" would face criticism from anyone apart from the most radical bloggers. Compare that to what happens if a politician uses a word that even sounds like a racial or sexual slur!
I'm not making any big judgement here. I call things "crazy" all the time myself. My point is simply this: the language we use proves that society as a whole does not think of mental illness as a thing that affects "people like us". It affects other people. Those crazy people who are insane and therefore not like us and our friends. Crackheads and people who were abused as kids and so on. People we can comfortably assume aren't present in the room when we're talking.
Is it any wonder that people will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid considering the possibility that they themselves might have mental health problems?
Alternative possibility: thousands of people are being sexually assaulted every day, and most of them react in the way we already know most victims of sexual assault react -- by convincing themselves it was their own fault, or that it didn't really happen, or that they consented -- because they know that nobody will believe them if they speak out. And people like you would just accuse them of being self-important drama queens. And the last thing they need is people like you adding literal insult to the literal injury of the sexual assault someone just perpetrated on them.
Which of us is right? I don't know. Maybe these incidents are isolated. Maybe the victims are partly to blame. But what I do know is that there are altogether too many nasty stories about the TSA for me to be certain that there is no truth to any of them, and if TSA agents have left even one person feeling that they have been sexually violated, that is one person too many.
It's not quite that simple.
It's true that if your technique is accurate and does not require you to look at the keyboard, then the fact that it is not as fast as "proper" touch typing is largely irrelevant. On the other hand, if you were making lots of mistakes, or having to look for keys on the keyboard, then you would be distracting yourself and interrupting your train of thought, which would seriously harm your productivity.
The number of fingers you use to type is not very important, but the amount of your conscious brainpower you are wasting on the process certainly is.
No, but releasing an update without even running the existing unit tests shows how amateurish the whole PHP project is. The terrible design of the language is also a reflection of its amateurish nature.
It's true that some websites manage to do wonderful things with PHP, but then it's also true that some artists manage to make wonderful sculptures out of manure. That doesn't mean it's a good choice for most people.
So ... what you're saying is that you want 80% of your games to be reruns or shoestring-budget shovelware, and the handful of original AAA titles to be subsidized by 20 minutes of advertising in every hour? Because that's why cable TV costs what it does.
Me, I'll gladly pay $60 for even just 20 hours of original, advertising-free, high-budget content. Movies are the closest comparable thing, and they are almost invariably more expensive than games.
I think you mean
in that first example.
And you're being ridiculous. Anyone who types that is an idiot and deserves everything they get. The actual nice thing about "auto" is that you can type
instead of
without having to faff about with typedefs all over the place.
Wait, I thought you said they treated non-cops differently?
So ... violent beatings are now considered "conversations"?
I guess next we'll see the police officer who committed the assault try to raise a first amendment defense against his criminal prosecution?
Wow, that's seriously impressive.
Not the rest of "us". That's the problem: GNOME (and, to a lesser extent, KDE) have decided, for some reason, to become desktop environments primarily targeted at the sort of person who isn't even remotely interested in using GNOME or KDE.
It's like the Pope turned round one day and said "okay, we're going to rewrite our doctrines to make them more appealing to atheists!"
That's not a problem Google can solve.
Protecting my passwords from people who steal my phone is a problem Google can solve.
Please don't divert attention from an easily-solved issue just because you think some other thing is more important. Or I might just ask why the fuck you're wasting time on Slashdot instead of working night and day to eradicate hunger and disease, which are clearly far more pressing issues than people eavesdropping on you when you use public wifi.
Yes, it's totally impossible to protect data at rest. All those companies selling full-disk encryption to governments and businesses are clearly selling snake oil. Truecrypt is easy to break and Bruce Schneier is an idiot, right?
Or maybe it's actually trivial to encrypt data, and while many users might choose not to use it or might choose extremely weak passwords for the encryption, it would still be better than nothing.
Annoying? The main annoying thing about them was the load times. Gameplay-wise they were pretty fun.
Clearly TFA was written by a sensitive atheist who is offended by the very concept of supernatural beings having the power to punish humans.
Yes, that sounds totally plausible and not at all contrived. I can well imagine many people being so eager to cheat at games that they will happily commit a complex and technically-demanding federal crime in order to gain a slight edge.
Amazon should also have insisted that the game disable the device's screen and communicate with the player only by blinking morse code with the device's notification LED, like in Cryptonomicon, because there's a serious risk that malicious players might try to get an unfair advantage via Van Eck phreaking.
Roundabouts (please note, they are called roundabouts -- a "rotary" is a different type of circular road layout) work best as a replacement for all-way stops, not for signalized intersections. Note that all-way stops also lack any provision for pedestrians, and are generally more dangerous since drivers have more to worry about -- they must monitor traffic approaching from all directions, whereas with a roundabout the driver only has to watch in one direction.
In my state, roundabouts generally have crosswalks a little way away from each entrance. These crosswalks work like any other crosswalk. It's not rocket science.
Oh, that's OK then. It's not like most of the people who lack fast internet lack it because they live a long way from the big cities where Apple stores tend to be located, or anything. I'm sure they'll be very happy to pay 500 times the cost of mailing a DVD in gas just to get their OS upgrade.
Customer service. Reinvented.
Good God, how can you be posting on Slashdot and yet forget the best option of all?
9. Linux.
And yet when I go back and play classic games, often in emulators -- games made at least 15 years ago, and in a few cases over 25 years ago! -- I sure feel like I'm enjoying them.
And it's not purely nostalgia; I have enjoyed games from that era that I did not play at the time.
I have a smartphone. It has a lovely high-resolution display that produces crisp and beautiful text.
It's also completely unreadable out of doors, painfully bright in low light conditions, has limited battery life, and can only display a very limited amount of information at a time. Sorry, but I have no interest in tackling a novel on it, let alone a technical work. Come back when large low-power reflective displays are widespread in cheap multi-purpose devices and then we might talk.
Seriously, I expect this will be modded into oblivion because Slashdot hates Sony and loves anyone who sticks it to the man (see also: Wikileaks, Anonymous, etc).
But they are criminals, and therefore I for one am glad that the FBI has had some little success in tracking them down, and look forward eagerly to the day when the ringleaders are forced to defend their actions in court.
The fact that they are committing crimes against someone you hate cannot justify those crimes. Indeed it must not, because turning a blind eye to crime just because you don't like the victim leads to mob rule. It is the antithesis of the rule of law on which our society is founded, which protects our rights as well as Sony's. That's one slope that history has proven time and time again to be very slippery indeed.
And, hey, maybe they'll put up such a good defence that the jury will refuse to convict them and the balance of power between corporations and common people will be shifted, and that would probably be good too. But it should be done in courts or congress, not by vigilante mobs deciding to lynch a corporation that offended them.
In US terms, it is equivalent to insulting the Flag and the Constitution.
Note that while those things are protected today, there are plenty of politicians in office in America today who think it should still be made a crime to burn the US flag. All they really have to do is manage to get it classified as "obscene" and all those First Amendment protections will dissolve right away. Freedom is a rather fragile thing, not to be taken for granted.
Really? Who? I am really having trouble working out what you are referring to here. (The only people I can think of who are being held without trial are the remaining inmates at Guantanamo Bay, but I would hardly describe the murder of thousands of Americans as merely "embarrasing the government". Were you thinking of Pfc Manning? Because he is being held pending trial, not without it, and the crime he is accused of is certainly not simply associating with Assange.)
A better American analogy would be the people who have been snatched off planes transiting US airports for the "crime" of running internet gambling sites overseas in countries where it is perfectly legal to run internet gambling sites.