your citizens are virtually defenseless against criminals wielding "weapons" that you'll never be able to take away unless you ban the consumption of meat. Congratulations.
We're also virtually defenceless against ICBM strikes, raptors, and armies of mutant zombie pirates. Oh noes! How will we ever defend ourselves!
Fact is, all the sensational stabbings the press have reported in the last year or so have had one thing in common: easy availability of guns would not have prevented them. It would just have meant that we'd have had a bunch of sensational shootings instead. I'm sure that would have been a real improvement.
Even Americans travel. Suppose his website's in Florida: he presumably wouldn't want Alaskans using it, because they're even further from being "local" than many foreigners. So any regional blocking would be at the state level, or possibly even the city level. And that means travellers wouldn't have to be abroad to be inconvenienced.
There are websites all over the internet [google.com] that allow you to do country-by-IP-range lookups.
You could also do;
ErrorDocument 403 "Sorry, this website is only available to people living in.
And then brace yourself, because you're going to get an earful from the next local person who tries to catch up with her friends back home while she's on holiday, only to be told that she's banned because she's "not local".
"UP. UP. UP. UP. DOWN." is a nightmare. "Play the most recent Colbert." is a dream.
No, it's a fantasy. We can't even do reliable voice transcription, and we can't parse natural-language commands even when they're input as text, so combining the two and trying to parse natural-language voice commands is pure science fiction at the moment.
And if we ever do build a computer that's capable of it, I doubt it'll be interested in playing the most recent Colbert. It'll probably be too busy enslaving us.
Consider a product for which 80% of units die after 1 year, and 20% last 10 years. The MTBF is 2.8 years. 80% of units will barely make it a third of the way!
First, performance isn't nearly the problem it used to be. We aren't using anymore the kind of hardware that needs the programmer to squeeze every last drop of performance out of it. In fact, we can afford to be massively wasteful by using languages like Perl and Python [...]
People keep saying this like it's somehow new and special. In reality, it has always been the case that interpreted languages were fast enough for many jobs.
Remember the 8-bit era? Most home computers had two options. If it needed to be fast, you wrote raw machine code. If it didn't need to be fast, you wrote interpreted BASIC.
Remember Smalltalk? LISP? Icon? SNOBOL? awk? Basically, people have been using interpreted languages for almost as long as compiled languages. They've always been fast enough for many things, and the things they've been too slow for (like implementing interpreters;) are still mostly done in C today.
Yeah, I believed that once, as well. Then (after the power failure and tedious system rebuild) I realised that filesystem integrity is probably a more important thing to be concerned about.
Point is, I could just as easily claim that SSDs last ten years, and since neither of us has provided a shred of evidence to support our assertions, neither of us has any credibility whatsoever.
Security 101 is that security needs to be designed in from the ground up. In fact, this is one of the main reasons why Linux is secure, and Windows never will be.
Oh, please. Linux wasn't designed from the ground up to be secure. It was started as a hobby and never intended to be widely used. In the wider sense of the various GNU/Linux-based operating systems such as RHEL and Ubuntu, it was hardly "designed" at all; most of these platforms are composed of a jumble of bits and pieces from all kinds of sources, many of which have turned out to contain serious security flaws over the years.
(And I'm not bashing Linux here. I'm typing this on a Linux box. Just being realistic.)
This is a common case for a certain type of author (particularly for authors working in SF, fantasy, and crime), but it's by no means universal. Consider John Grisham or Dick Francis, for example; both have managed to produce huge numbers of bestselling books while only occasionally reusing characters.
And there are entire major genres, such as light romance, where sequels themselves are generally unpopular. (The readers are after a story about a woman finding Mr Right; they don't care about what happens after the wedding.)
Conversely, there are plenty of cases where a long-running series is clearly the result of an author wanting to write a series, not of financial pressure. I don't think JK Rowling would have been in any danger of starving if she'd decided to stop after only 3 Harry Potter books.
Except that you're just wrong. If I open the gate to my yard for my friends to walk through, you still can't crash my party.
That's because it would be trespass: even if the gate is open, you are still entering clearly-demarked private property.
That does not bear the slightest relation to deep linking, which in this case involves linking to a page that is explicitly intended to be accessible to the general public.
The equivalent would be, for example, if you invited me to a party but insisted I tread on your doorstep on the way in, and then sued me when I stepped over it instead.
it's not quite as good as Photoshop, etc, but it comes very close...
Um, no. No, it really doesn't. It's very impressive, don't get me wrong; it looks like it might actually do everything the average person needs. But it does not even remotely begin to approach the same level as Photoshop or its serious competition.
And while it's a very impressive toy, I don't quite see the point. Why would I want to use a slow, poorly-integrated tool that's constrained to my browser window, when I could have a lightning-fast native program?
Exactly the same thing goes for web-based IDEs. What's the point, when I could just run normal software on a computer I carry round with me? It's not like I regularly find myself miles away from home, with the only IT available being an internet cafe, and suddenly think "OMG, I need to write some software and it absolutely cannot wait till I get back into the office!"
Once the malware's running locally, it can try local exploits to escalate to root access. But there's a lot fewer of those on Linux systems than on Windows, and they're a lot harder to exploit
Did you read the whole article? It details a way the malware could have a fair chance at root access on a typical home Ubuntu/Fedora-type box simply by taking advantage of documented Gnome features.
Basically it would just create local versions of the regular links to admin tools in the menu system, so the next time the user ran Synaptic (or whatever) it would actually launch the malware with root privileges.
I would be willing to completely give up my anonymity when wanting to make a secure transaction.
Indeed, don't we already do that? I have yet to find a site that will let me pay for goods or services without giving them my full name and billing address.
How many of the articles on Wikipedia that are missing from Citizendium are cruft like blow-by-blow retellings of individual episodes of children's cartoons, or two-line stubs on insignificant elementary schools, or bot-generated template "articles" on American locations that contain nothing more than a few statistics regurgitated from census data?
We need to remember that Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia. It is a repository of all the random facts and assertions that anyone was ever able to keep from being deleted. One could produce an encyclopedia by taking a subset of Wikipedia.
(Now wait for all the people who didn't bother to read this far to assume that I'm a Citizendium user. I'm not. I've never even visited Citizendium to the best of my knowledge, while I use Wikipedia almost daily.)
Intel graphics chips are fine for pretty much any Linux purpose -- Compiz runs fine, KDE4 runs fine.
They can't compete with NVidia or ATI for playing the latest 3D games, but that's unimportant, because 99.999% of the people who care about the latest 3D games are either playing them on a console or in Windows.
Like there's a good defense of endless copyright extension and patent trolling?
No, there's no good defence of that. But I don't quite see how two wrongs make a right.
Like there's a good defense of sweatshops in the third world?
No, but how the hell is that even vaguely relevant to anything?
Like there's a good defense for an illegal war in IRAQ?
What illegal war? And what relevance does Iraq (it's not an acronym, BTW) have to this?
Trying to act like a resource is scarce when it is not is part of the whole problem to begin with, once made, digital works are not scarce and can always fulfill supply.
This is a fallacy. Sure, each individual work of art is infinitely reproducible, but that doesn't mean there is no scarce resource! The scarce resource is the creative talent that produces the art in the first place. The key point here is that people don't just want a continuous supply of digital content; they want a continuous supply of new digital content. Yes, you can make as many copies of a given movie as you want -- but people don't just want to watch the same movie over and over again, they want to watch a different one every time. And the number of different movies available is limited, and the supply of new movies is very limited. The real resource is very scarce, and if it is not paid for, ultimately the quality and/or quantity will decrease.
It's called "The Pirate Bay". That is a clear expression of an intent to index material related to piracy.
Since most of the torrents on TPB have nothing to do with buccaneers, they are clearly using the word in the "copyright infringement" sense.
It is positively mind-boggling that you can take such a clear statement of intent to aid and abet copyright infringement, and somehow conclude that they had a noble goal of protecting freedom of speech or some such.
TPB is about piracy. It's nothing to do with avoiding censorship; the sole purpose of the site is to help people infringe copyright. There may well be a loophole in Swedish law that makes this activity legal there, but that's a separate question, and will shortly be answered by the court hearing this case.
placing an arbitrary price on traveling from one place to another is essentially restricting the right of travel. Our government should not be in the business of making it more expensive for me to go see my family 100 miles away.
Someone has to pay for roads. There are two ways it can be done: by tolls, or by taxation. Tolls are by definition fairer, since they mean that you don't pay for roads you don't use. Therefore, the government should be making more roads into toll roads, and cutting taxes by an equivalent amount.
Of course, if these tolls are just going to be another revenue stream and taxes aren't going to be reduced at all, then you have a point. You shouldn't have to pay for roads twice over.
Come to that, exactly which part of western Europe is now socialist? Nationalising a couple of banks hardly constitutes a socialist revolution, particularly when it's being done by the same people who've spent the last ten years privatising everything they could.
I, too, live in western Europe. I've never seen a single knife-wielding maniac, and most of the young people I know are either employed or in full-time education. I do vaguely recognise the picture the GP painted; it's reminiscent of some of the more extreme fiction that's published in the bestselling British dystopian fantasy paper "The Daily Mail". But it doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to anything I'd call reality.
Slashdot Mirror
We're also virtually defenceless against ICBM strikes, raptors, and armies of mutant zombie pirates. Oh noes! How will we ever defend ourselves!
Fact is, all the sensational stabbings the press have reported in the last year or so have had one thing in common: easy availability of guns would not have prevented them. It would just have meant that we'd have had a bunch of sensational shootings instead. I'm sure that would have been a real improvement.
Even Americans travel. Suppose his website's in Florida: he presumably wouldn't want Alaskans using it, because they're even further from being "local" than many foreigners. So any regional blocking would be at the state level, or possibly even the city level. And that means travellers wouldn't have to be abroad to be inconvenienced.
And then brace yourself, because you're going to get an earful from the next local person who tries to catch up with her friends back home while she's on holiday, only to be told that she's banned because she's "not local".
No, it's a fantasy. We can't even do reliable voice transcription, and we can't parse natural-language commands even when they're input as text, so combining the two and trying to parse natural-language voice commands is pure science fiction at the moment.
And if we ever do build a computer that's capable of it, I doubt it'll be interested in playing the most recent Colbert. It'll probably be too busy enslaving us.
Really, you can sum it up like this:
Mall surveillance is not being published on a public website in real time.
No, since you ask.
Consider a product for which 80% of units die after 1 year, and 20% last 10 years. The MTBF is 2.8 years. 80% of units will barely make it a third of the way!
People keep saying this like it's somehow new and special. In reality, it has always been the case that interpreted languages were fast enough for many jobs.
Remember the 8-bit era? Most home computers had two options. If it needed to be fast, you wrote raw machine code. If it didn't need to be fast, you wrote interpreted BASIC.
Remember Smalltalk? LISP? Icon? SNOBOL? awk? Basically, people have been using interpreted languages for almost as long as compiled languages. They've always been fast enough for many things, and the things they've been too slow for (like implementing interpreters ;) are still mostly done in C today.
Yeah, I believed that once, as well. Then (after the power failure and tedious system rebuild) I realised that filesystem integrity is probably a more important thing to be concerned about.
Or using Java/Haskell/Ruby and/or Eclipse/VS.NET/Emacs (delete according to prejudice).
"Anecdotal evidence" is an oxymoron.
Point is, I could just as easily claim that SSDs last ten years, and since neither of us has provided a shred of evidence to support our assertions, neither of us has any credibility whatsoever.
Oh, please. Linux wasn't designed from the ground up to be secure. It was started as a hobby and never intended to be widely used. In the wider sense of the various GNU/Linux-based operating systems such as RHEL and Ubuntu, it was hardly "designed" at all; most of these platforms are composed of a jumble of bits and pieces from all kinds of sources, many of which have turned out to contain serious security flaws over the years.
(And I'm not bashing Linux here. I'm typing this on a Linux box. Just being realistic.)
Likewise, IIRC Henry VI part 1 was written as a prequel to Henry VI part 2, which had originally been the first of a two-part series.
This is a common case for a certain type of author (particularly for authors working in SF, fantasy, and crime), but it's by no means universal. Consider John Grisham or Dick Francis, for example; both have managed to produce huge numbers of bestselling books while only occasionally reusing characters.
And there are entire major genres, such as light romance, where sequels themselves are generally unpopular. (The readers are after a story about a woman finding Mr Right; they don't care about what happens after the wedding.)
Conversely, there are plenty of cases where a long-running series is clearly the result of an author wanting to write a series, not of financial pressure. I don't think JK Rowling would have been in any danger of starving if she'd decided to stop after only 3 Harry Potter books.
This article is about the language being ported to the Mac.
Remind me, when is the Mac port of WPF due out?
That's because it would be trespass: even if the gate is open, you are still entering clearly-demarked private property.
That does not bear the slightest relation to deep linking, which in this case involves linking to a page that is explicitly intended to be accessible to the general public.
The equivalent would be, for example, if you invited me to a party but insisted I tread on your doorstep on the way in, and then sued me when I stepped over it instead.
Who cares about what kids think? Depending on who you ask, the average gamer today is aged something between 25 and 35.
Um, no. No, it really doesn't. It's very impressive, don't get me wrong; it looks like it might actually do everything the average person needs. But it does not even remotely begin to approach the same level as Photoshop or its serious competition.
And while it's a very impressive toy, I don't quite see the point. Why would I want to use a slow, poorly-integrated tool that's constrained to my browser window, when I could have a lightning-fast native program?
Exactly the same thing goes for web-based IDEs. What's the point, when I could just run normal software on a computer I carry round with me? It's not like I regularly find myself miles away from home, with the only IT available being an internet cafe, and suddenly think "OMG, I need to write some software and it absolutely cannot wait till I get back into the office!"
Did you read the whole article? It details a way the malware could have a fair chance at root access on a typical home Ubuntu/Fedora-type box simply by taking advantage of documented Gnome features.
Basically it would just create local versions of the regular links to admin tools in the menu system, so the next time the user ran Synaptic (or whatever) it would actually launch the malware with root privileges.
Indeed, don't we already do that? I have yet to find a site that will let me pay for goods or services without giving them my full name and billing address.
How many of the articles on Wikipedia that are missing from Citizendium are cruft like blow-by-blow retellings of individual episodes of children's cartoons, or two-line stubs on insignificant elementary schools, or bot-generated template "articles" on American locations that contain nothing more than a few statistics regurgitated from census data?
We need to remember that Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia. It is a repository of all the random facts and assertions that anyone was ever able to keep from being deleted. One could produce an encyclopedia by taking a subset of Wikipedia.
(Now wait for all the people who didn't bother to read this far to assume that I'm a Citizendium user. I'm not. I've never even visited Citizendium to the best of my knowledge, while I use Wikipedia almost daily.)
Intel graphics chips are fine for pretty much any Linux purpose -- Compiz runs fine, KDE4 runs fine.
They can't compete with NVidia or ATI for playing the latest 3D games, but that's unimportant, because 99.999% of the people who care about the latest 3D games are either playing them on a console or in Windows.
No, there's no good defence of that. But I don't quite see how two wrongs make a right.
No, but how the hell is that even vaguely relevant to anything?
What illegal war? And what relevance does Iraq (it's not an acronym, BTW) have to this?
This is a fallacy. Sure, each individual work of art is infinitely reproducible, but that doesn't mean there is no scarce resource! The scarce resource is the creative talent that produces the art in the first place. The key point here is that people don't just want a continuous supply of digital content; they want a continuous supply of new digital content. Yes, you can make as many copies of a given movie as you want -- but people don't just want to watch the same movie over and over again, they want to watch a different one every time. And the number of different movies available is limited, and the supply of new movies is very limited. The real resource is very scarce, and if it is not paid for, ultimately the quality and/or quantity will decrease.
It's called "The Pirate Bay". That is a clear expression of an intent to index material related to piracy.
Since most of the torrents on TPB have nothing to do with buccaneers, they are clearly using the word in the "copyright infringement" sense.
It is positively mind-boggling that you can take such a clear statement of intent to aid and abet copyright infringement, and somehow conclude that they had a noble goal of protecting freedom of speech or some such.
TPB is about piracy. It's nothing to do with avoiding censorship; the sole purpose of the site is to help people infringe copyright. There may well be a loophole in Swedish law that makes this activity legal there, but that's a separate question, and will shortly be answered by the court hearing this case.
Someone has to pay for roads. There are two ways it can be done: by tolls, or by taxation. Tolls are by definition fairer, since they mean that you don't pay for roads you don't use. Therefore, the government should be making more roads into toll roads, and cutting taxes by an equivalent amount.
Of course, if these tolls are just going to be another revenue stream and taxes aren't going to be reduced at all, then you have a point. You shouldn't have to pay for roads twice over.
Come to that, exactly which part of western Europe is now socialist? Nationalising a couple of banks hardly constitutes a socialist revolution, particularly when it's being done by the same people who've spent the last ten years privatising everything they could.
I, too, live in western Europe. I've never seen a single knife-wielding maniac, and most of the young people I know are either employed or in full-time education. I do vaguely recognise the picture the GP painted; it's reminiscent of some of the more extreme fiction that's published in the bestselling British dystopian fantasy paper "The Daily Mail". But it doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to anything I'd call reality.