it's been suspended in the UK for a long time, ever since the introduction of fixed penaltys for certain offences that can just be handed out by police officers, or general busy boddies employed by councils.
one example would be a man who was handed a £60 fine for littering when he threw a used match stick out of his car window.
I agree that £60 for a single matchstick may seem rather excessive, though this is a type of story that generally grow more outrageous with every retelling (and are often based on hypothetical situations that never actually happened, but some guy down the pub misheard a conversation and assumed it really had happened, and told all his mates, who...)
But all that aside, even if it did happen, I'm rather failing to see exactly how this was a violation of Habeas Corpus, which is a law that protects you against being detained without due process.
Why is this post being modded up? It's a lovely example of the straw-man fallacy, but that hardly deserves Insightful moderations.
This chatbot has won the Turing test for a segment -- perhaps a gullible/dumb segment -- of the human population.
No it hasn't. It has convinced a gullible/dumb and unsuspecting segment of the human population that it is a human, which is not unimpressive in its own right, but that isn't the same as passing the Turing test, which requires that the examiner be conversing with a human and a computer at the same time, to be fully conscious of this fact, and to be deliberately trying to determine which is which.
Now we have chatbot that can fool some people some of the time, so the bar has been raised on "true AI" to say that computers can't fool expert suspicious Turing test judges. This too will fall.
Um, no. Nobody with a clue has ever claimed that a chatbot that is capable of convincing any human being whatsoever that it is a human represents true AI. The bar has always been set at fooling Turing-test judges, and the Turing test has been fixed in its current form for decades.
Indeed, it's easy to show that fooling some people some of the time doesn't require anything even approaching AI. Consider a bot that simply repeats a set of ten sentences in a fixed order: if those sentences were chosen well enough, then some people might easily believe that they were having a real conversation. But I really don't think you'd argue that a bot that simply repeated a set of ten sentences in a fixed order displays any sort of intelligence, no matter how many unsuspecting people happen, by random chance, to feed it lines that cause its responses to look relevant.
Why is this odd or worrying? Oh, don't get me wrong, it's certainly concerning that China appears to be using anticompetitive tactics against Google -- but that's got nothing to do with Firefox. The purpose of Firefox is to give people all over the world a great free web browser, not to prop up a specific American business. The only people who should care whether Firefox provides Google as the default search engine are Google employees.
if you do a google search on a random subject, what's always in the top 3 results? A Wikipedia page.
Let's try it!
The first subject that came into my head (influenced rather by this article) was "register". Hmm, Wikipedia doesn't appear on the first two pages of results - the first Wikipedia result is number 25.
Okay, maybe a fluke. Next I tried "Jimbo". There are no Wikipedia results in the top 3 -- Jimbo's user page does however come in at number 6.
There you go -- not just one but two counterexamples, neatly disproving your false assertion.
Small snippets are not always the issue. One of the TeX manuals contains the entire source code to TeX.
Indeed, but literate programming is a rather different issue: with a literate program, the code and documentation are normally written at the same time in the same place by the same people, so it's not a case of one person including another person's code in their own work.
If you wanted to take someone else's program and turn it into a literate program like TeX, or to take someone else's document and add a code implementation to it, then naturally you'd have to respect the existing license on the other person's work. Naturally you couldn't take a GPL program, add in your own CC-licensed comments, and distribute the whole thing under your CC license. (But you could, I believe, add your own comments and distribute the whole thing under the GPL with an additional note granting users permission to extract your comments and use them under the terms of a CC license.)
"Releasing newly written code with equivalent functionality or even rewriting GPL code and keeping the product closed source is considered enough to cure a license violation." That is so wrong I don't even know where to begin. How about you come up with some citations for that asinine bit of trash? I feel dumber for having read that.
Insulting people does not make you sound more authoritative. If you can't be polite, perhaps you should refrain from posting at all.
As it happens he is slightly incorrect, but his basic point -- that it is possible to resolve a GPL violation without releasing code -- is valid.
The situation is that a GPL violation is like any other copyright violation. It can be resolved in two ways: either the violator can obtain a license from the copyright holder, or the violator must cease and desist the violation and pay damages. In the case of GPL violations, what typically happens is that the copyright holder says "comply with the GPL and you will have a license to use this code", so the violator complies with the GPL and everyone's happy. But it is entirely plausible that a violation could be resolved by the violator withdrawing the product or rewriting code to remove the infringing sections. The only slight flaw in the GP's statement is that this in itself would not necessarily be the end of the story, because the copyright holders could still demand monetary damages to compensate them for the violation.
The Mac menu bar always sits at the top of the screen. Great for Fitt's Law compliance
And even that is looking increasingly dubious as technology marches on. Back when the Macintosh was state of the art with a 9" screen, it was reasonable to expect people to move to the top left of the display to access menus. But that was nearly a quarter of a century ago. If I'm working on a document that's at the lower right side of a 24" widescreen panel (as on a new iMac), that menu could be nearly two feet away from where I'm working!
It's shocking that Apple is selling computers with 24" screens with an OS that's still based on decisions about what would be optimal for a 9" screen. It's high time they (and anyone else who cares about UI) started looking for other solutions to the problem of hitting small targets with the mouse. (Menus in windows with edge resistance is one option that springs to mind, though it'd have to be done carefully to make it feel natural. Are there any Linux window managers that implement anything like this?)
It's the same typographic community that is charging the price for fonts that the free market will bear. If you don't want to pay the going rate, don't use the product. It works the same way for fonts as it works for DVDs or any other bundle of bytes that costs money to make. It's hardly a difficult concept to grasp.
Maybe you should make your own high quality fonts and sell them at a price you consider reasonable? If you're right that the current going rate is "ridiculous", you could undercut them massively and still make a tidy profit. Think of the market share you could grab! I mean, it's not like making fonts requires a massive time investment up-front with no guarantee of any returns whatsoever or anything, is it?
That's pretty much it: a typeface as such is not copyrightable in the USA (note that this is not the same everywhere in the world), but a modern TrueType or OpenType font file is effectively a computer program that generates the typeface, and computer programs usually are copyrightable.
Note further that when you buy a font, you enter into a contract with the seller where you almost certainly agree to many other restrictions on what you can do with it. These contracts are always available for viewing before you make the purchase, so they are not shrinkwrap or clickwrap EULAs of the sort that Slashdotters generally believe to be invalid.
There are plenty of freeware and even open source fonts available, as well as the range of high quality commercial fonts bundled with Windows and OS X -- and even Linux users can get part of the Windows bundle perfectly legally -- so there's really no excuse: anyone who doesn't want to pay for fonts should simply stick with fonts whose creators are happy not to be paid by them.
Naturally section 3 doesn't apply here so its either 1 or 2. 1 states that they need to make it available, 2 says that they need to offer it. Which brings me to the following point; can anyone of these users grab the source code from the Xandros website itself?
Apparently not, because Asus has allegedly modified the code, which would mean that the version on the Xandros website is different.
And even if Asus hasn't modified the code, there is still a problem. What if Xandros updates one component from version 1.0.0 to version 1.0.1, and Asus doesn't notice that the old version isn't available any more, but there's a subtle regression in the new version that means it doesn't work on the Asus hardware any more? Suddenly anyone who grabs the source code from the Xandros website has a version that doesn't work! Why the hell should they have to debug the problem and then hunt around for a version that works, when Asus has a legal responsibility to be providing it all along?
Note; we were talking about the spirit of the GPL right?
So you acknowledge that Asus is violating the GPL, right?
But if those same guys are Linux OSF zealots then beware if you're closely touching or perhaps violating the GPL or any other open source license they favor. Because then everything is different and you should be made to comply no matter what.
It is true that many people on Slashdot don't mind violating media companies' copyright on Youtube. It is also true that many people on Slashdot get angry when people violate the GPL. However, it does not follow that these two groups are the same, and basing an argument on such an assumption leaves your logic seriously flawed.
In an ideal world, copyright would be a lot weaker, and everyone would have more rights to use and modify others' work. We don't live in that ideal world, so GPL users trick copyright law into creating copyleft, which allows us to grant others those rights in such a way that they are forced to pass those rights on in turn. This only works if we in turn respect others' copyright -- if GPL advocates were proven to regularly infringe others' copyrights on Youtube, then how could we ever expect anyone to respect the GPL?
It would be interesting to do a study of Slashdot comments and find out whether the same nicknames do pop up in both types of discussion, and if so, whether they do (as you claim) take opposite sides depending on who is breaking the law. But until someone does such a study...
Just act when there's a reason; like people who actually own such laptops and are trying to compile / change stuff but are unable to do so. THEN you'd have a strong case.
No. If you wait till someone finds that they are unable to exercise their rights, then it's already too late. The point is to ensure that everyone will always have that ability, whether they use it or not. That's what we call "freedom" -- the ability to exercise any right you like, without having to ask anyone for permission and without having to fight for it.
Need a missile-guidance system? Buy yourself a Sony PlayStation 2. Need more capability? Just upgrade to a PS3.
Because it's well known that all Sony consoles have missile-guidance software built in to their firmware!
Seriously, WTF? How does a Playstation have any benefits over other smaller, cheaper, lighter computer hardware for guiding missiles? How does cheap computer hardware have any benefits at all when you don't have the software to run on it? How would hardware and software have any benefits at all when you don't have any guided missiles in the first place, and if some rogue state (or the CIA, depending on whose side you're on) wanted to supply you with them, they could just supply you with guidance systems at the same time?!
Windows Me was a pile of crap that crashed every five minutes. Vista is merely slightly slower than XP. I use it for games, since Wine/Cedega aren't quite there yet for the latest titles. It runs just fine, everything works just fine, everything is perfectly fast enough -- do I really care whether things are theoretically a few percent slower if I can't tell the difference without actually benchmarking? (Hint: I don't.)
I really don't see where all the Vista hate is coming from. I wouldn't want to use it day-to-day, but that's the same as any version of Windows.
You can use GNOME if you want to. People who want more flexibility (and to be treated like adults) can use KDE.
I used to think this mattered, but in practice for any moderately advanced user there's very little difference between them; the desktop environment provides launch menus and virtual desktops, and that's about it, because you'll be doing most of your file management from a shell prompt or a dired buffer, and the rest is just applications.
And really, the only thing in GNOME that ever annoyed me was the brain-dead unconfigurable window placement in Metacity that kept thinking I wanted my new window to appear on my second monitor, and that's become irrelevant now that the infinitely-configurable compiz is mature.
How exactly does this apply to anime? I seriously doubt the Canadian recording industry pays a cent to the Japanese media companies whose intellectual property rights are being violated when you download a fansub.
Bzzt, wrong. Look at some of the early comics, and super-heroes were just that: unassailable gods with perfect morals.
Did you ever wonder why that only happened in early comics? Has the possibility crossed your mind that the reason modern comics feature almost exclusively complex, flawed heroes is that comics about flawed heroes are more popular than comics about unassailable gods with perfect morals?
But that's a limitation of video games, not a limitation of super-heroes. Literary or comic book characters can be as god-like as the author wants, and still be fun and popular.
Yes, there have been flawless godlike heroes aplenty, but how many of them have survived the test of time? Damn few. Compare them to flawed heroes like Achilles (wrath, heel), whose story has thrilled generation after generation for literally thousands of years. Or Oedipus (incest, patricide), or Agamemnon (filicide), or pretty much every other damn Greek hero.
And we find the same in heroes from all other traditions; Sigmund committed incest, Sampson fell for Delilah, Lancelot fell for Guinevere, etc.
We want to be told stories where one determined guy changes the world for the better, and nothing whatsoever can stay in his way. Not one where he fails in the first 15 minutes.
I beg to differ. Even if you eschew the highbrow and turn to Hollywood blockbusters, I think you'll find that having the good guy fail in the first half of the movie is part of the standard formula. We like our determined guys to change the world, but we don't want it to be a pushover! That's no fun.
Yes, James Bond always blows up the villain and gets the girl, but you know damn well he's going to fall for the wrong girl, get captured, and face torture and "certain" death first.
And to counter those of your examples that I'm also familiar with:
Almost every single major character in [the Discworld series] has some kind of super-power that makes him completely invincible and unstoppable, even by the whole freakin' army of China (or the DW equivalent of it.)
But they sure aren't godlike beings with perfect morals. How is Rincewind, one of fantasy literature's all-time great cowards, a "perfect hero"? How is Granny Weatherwax, whose arrogance nearly gets her killed in pretty much every book, perfect? The books are fun to read precisely because, while you know the right people are going to triumph in the end, you can't imagine how they possibly can. They can't simple wander up to the chief villain and prod buttock like a Kryptonite-immune Superman.
Jedi in SW movies are just about gods that can only kill each other. But they're way out of the league of mortal soldiers or drones, even when those are in brigade-sized formations and with AT-AT and air support.
Clearly you didn't watch the second and third prequels, in which 99% of all Jedi were wiped out in a matter of minutes by mortal soldiers and drones.
In short, what makes a hero interesting is the dramatic tension caused by the existence of character flaws or overwhelming odds. God mode is as boring in books or movies as it is in games. A great hero is one who wins even though he could easily have lost.
Times New Roman can type every single character on the character map
This is meaningless. The standard character map programs only display characters that the selected font contains, so by definition any font can type every single character on the character map.
Times New Roman meets only some needs. It's fine for setting standard English prose, provided you have no taste. However, it does not contain (for example) any Chinese characters, so it is useless for setting Chinese; if you want to set Chinese, you have to use a font that was designed for Chinese text. And it does not contain many advanced mathematical characters, so it is useless for setting advanced mathematics; if you want to set advanced mathematics, you have to use a font that was designed for advanced mathematical text... like STIX. Why is this so hard to understand?
Mod parent up dammit. Interesting AC posts need more love.
I think a better argument that supports his claim is that written language often conforms to certain standards. If this weren't the case, you wouldn't see people writing in Classical Latin in time periods when nobody spoke with case markers.
The Latin example is problematic, because it comes from a time before mass literacy and when writing materials were either inherently temporary (wax tablets) or extremely expensive (parchment). This means that the writing that has survived is inherently more likely to be in a formal register, since informal writing would not have been done on permanent materials, and since the writers -- aware that living languages had regional differences and were changing with time -- deliberately chose a classical form of the language that was the same everywhere and likely to remain the same forever.
Conversely, the reason people first chose to write in English was very deliberately to use the current language of the common people, and that has by and large continued to be a goal, so English writing has always been more likely to conform to the usage of the day than to any literary standard. Read any great author and you will, I strongly suspect, find that their writing is sprinkled with usages that grammar nazis deplore; there are whole books dedicated to pointing out "mistakes" made by great authors.
It is very important not to create a false dichotomy here, by the way. The fact that language is living and evolving does not mean that it does not have rules, and it does not mean that there's no such thing as a grammatical mistake. It merely means that the rules that were true 10 years ago may not be true today, and that the rules that grammar nazis hold dear (particularly regarding things like sentence-final prepositions, sentence-initial conjuncitons, split infinitives, and so forth) are likely to be arbitrary constructs that do not bear any relation to the language as spoken and written by real people.
So what you're saying is that Granny is limited to a single repository of software from which to choose what she wants to install. Whereas with the 'doze system, she can 'hunt the network to find the software she wants,' in other words there are multiple places to get software.
No, that's not true at all. What we're saying is that the operating system provides a standard, central, and above all trusted source of software, that contains properly tested and fully supported programs to do most of the things a user will ever need.
If the program you want isn't there, there are plenty of other places you can look for it. There are third-party repositories, which you can plug into your package manager to increase the range of software available. And some programs offer downloadable packages that will install on any distro (particularly popular for commercial products like Crossover Office). Authors of free programs generally don't bother with this, because it's easier for everyone, particularly users, if the software is just put in the distro-specific central repositories instead.
How many Windows users would be happy if there was only one place, say a site like Shareware.com, to download Windows apps from??
I doubt anyone would care. People don't want choice for choice's sake, they just want it to be easy to find the damn software.
I'm getting the overwhelming impression that you haven't made a serious attempt to use an open-source platform for at least five years, maybe ten, if ever. Your FUD is all painfully out of date.
Sure, you can get Ubuntu installs that are fairly painless, but what then? If you want a few pieces of little software for little things, then what? Granny doesn't want to compile her own apps.
Why the hell would Granny need to compile her own apps? She can just click on "Applications" and then "Add/remove...", choose her pieces of little software for little things from the clear and simple menu interface, then sit back and relax while Ubuntu installs them for her.
Far easier than on Windows, where instead of using a single trusted server she'd have to search the internet for software (praying that she'd correctly identified a genuine download site rather than one of the thousands that infect their downloads with viruses or spyware), and then instead of checking a simple box and clicking a single button she'd have to download a file, find the file she downloaded, double-click on the installer, and click through page after page of a setup wizard (praying that she was selecting the correct options).
Most open source software I've used has had a crappy interface that is unusable unless you know exactly what you're doing.
The same is true for most commercial software I've used. It's true for most software in general. Which is why distros like Ubuntu carefully sift through the dross and select the rare programs that do have simple and usable interfaces, or failing that the ones that have interfaces that closely copy the crappy interfaces that popular Windows and Mac equivalents use.
But that's the point; he only has anti-virus installed and DOESN'T use any of the tools that CAN detect other malware types, so he ISN'T actively looking for malware.
In the days before I weaned myself off Windows, I ran a fairly similar setup, except that I didn't bother with the antivirus software either. However, for safety's sake, once every 6 months or so I'd install antivirus and antispyware software, run a full scan once, and then uninstall it again. I never found anything, apart from the odd virus-bearing email buried somewhere in my spam bin, which was about as likely to infect my computer as the tigers at my local zoo were to eat me.
I think it's reasonable for me to assume that I was malware-free. And I would still have been malware-free if I had never run those scans, since they never found anything.
Of course, I can't claim to be a representative computer user by any means... which is kind of the real, fundamental point. Malware is a PEBKAC issue, but the problem isn't users not running security software, it's users doing stupid things in the first place, like connecting to the Internet without even a basic router-based firewall, like using Internet Explorer with all the security settings on minimum, like visiting warez sites or looking for "free" porn, like installing spyware-funded "free" utilities, like clicking on random links in spam or opening random email attachments. If you don't do any of that stupid stuff, you are relatively safe. You're certainly safer than people who surf recklessly and rely on Symantec to save them from their own wilful ignorance.
Hmmm was gonna pot up some different examples as well and check if MS Maps had the same thing for the above,
It does, yes; old photos, new map.
but I can't even get to the MS maps website. what the heck is the URL? I keep getting a page asking me what and where, then some crappy map comes up. IwWhere's the aerial pictures?
Presumably you're using a browser other than Internet Explorer or Firefox. Unlike Google, Microsoft doesn't bother to support Safari, Opera, etc.
Where else would such a clueless post be considered 'insightful.'
Anywhere else where people know what they're talking about.
Pick the browser of your choice and see how well maps.live.com works. The answer is 'flawlessly.'
Provided the browser of your choice is IE or Firefox, yes. Evidently it did not cross your mind that there are other browsers that people might choose. For example, for Mac users, the standard preferred browser is Safari. Microsoft Live Maps does not work in Safari.
Safari isn't the only modern standards-compliant browser that Microsoft does not care to support. Live Maps does not work in Opera. It does not work in Konqueror. Indeed, not only does it not work in these browsers, it doesn't even fail -- it merely redirects, silently, to a different search page, with no message, no explanation, nothing.
Google Maps works flawlessly in all of these and more. For all the virtues of Microsoft's offering, I will not be able to contemplate using it until it improves in this regard.
Slashdot Mirror
But all that aside, even if it did happen, I'm rather failing to see exactly how this was a violation of Habeas Corpus, which is a law that protects you against being detained without due process.
Indeed, it's easy to show that fooling some people some of the time doesn't require anything even approaching AI. Consider a bot that simply repeats a set of ten sentences in a fixed order: if those sentences were chosen well enough, then some people might easily believe that they were having a real conversation. But I really don't think you'd argue that a bot that simply repeated a set of ten sentences in a fixed order displays any sort of intelligence, no matter how many unsuspecting people happen, by random chance, to feed it lines that cause its responses to look relevant.
Why is this odd or worrying? Oh, don't get me wrong, it's certainly concerning that China appears to be using anticompetitive tactics against Google -- but that's got nothing to do with Firefox. The purpose of Firefox is to give people all over the world a great free web browser, not to prop up a specific American business. The only people who should care whether Firefox provides Google as the default search engine are Google employees.
The first subject that came into my head (influenced rather by this article) was "register". Hmm, Wikipedia doesn't appear on the first two pages of results - the first Wikipedia result is number 25.
Okay, maybe a fluke. Next I tried "Jimbo". There are no Wikipedia results in the top 3 -- Jimbo's user page does however come in at number 6.
There you go -- not just one but two counterexamples, neatly disproving your false assertion.
If you wanted to take someone else's program and turn it into a literate program like TeX, or to take someone else's document and add a code implementation to it, then naturally you'd have to respect the existing license on the other person's work. Naturally you couldn't take a GPL program, add in your own CC-licensed comments, and distribute the whole thing under your CC license. (But you could, I believe, add your own comments and distribute the whole thing under the GPL with an additional note granting users permission to extract your comments and use them under the terms of a CC license.)
As it happens he is slightly incorrect, but his basic point -- that it is possible to resolve a GPL violation without releasing code -- is valid.
The situation is that a GPL violation is like any other copyright violation. It can be resolved in two ways: either the violator can obtain a license from the copyright holder, or the violator must cease and desist the violation and pay damages. In the case of GPL violations, what typically happens is that the copyright holder says "comply with the GPL and you will have a license to use this code", so the violator complies with the GPL and everyone's happy. But it is entirely plausible that a violation could be resolved by the violator withdrawing the product or rewriting code to remove the infringing sections. The only slight flaw in the GP's statement is that this in itself would not necessarily be the end of the story, because the copyright holders could still demand monetary damages to compensate them for the violation.
It's shocking that Apple is selling computers with 24" screens with an OS that's still based on decisions about what would be optimal for a 9" screen. It's high time they (and anyone else who cares about UI) started looking for other solutions to the problem of hitting small targets with the mouse. (Menus in windows with edge resistance is one option that springs to mind, though it'd have to be done carefully to make it feel natural. Are there any Linux window managers that implement anything like this?)
It's the same typographic community that is charging the price for fonts that the free market will bear. If you don't want to pay the going rate, don't use the product. It works the same way for fonts as it works for DVDs or any other bundle of bytes that costs money to make. It's hardly a difficult concept to grasp.
Maybe you should make your own high quality fonts and sell them at a price you consider reasonable? If you're right that the current going rate is "ridiculous", you could undercut them massively and still make a tidy profit. Think of the market share you could grab! I mean, it's not like making fonts requires a massive time investment up-front with no guarantee of any returns whatsoever or anything, is it?
That's pretty much it: a typeface as such is not copyrightable in the USA (note that this is not the same everywhere in the world), but a modern TrueType or OpenType font file is effectively a computer program that generates the typeface, and computer programs usually are copyrightable.
Note further that when you buy a font, you enter into a contract with the seller where you almost certainly agree to many other restrictions on what you can do with it. These contracts are always available for viewing before you make the purchase, so they are not shrinkwrap or clickwrap EULAs of the sort that Slashdotters generally believe to be invalid.
There are plenty of freeware and even open source fonts available, as well as the range of high quality commercial fonts bundled with Windows and OS X -- and even Linux users can get part of the Windows bundle perfectly legally -- so there's really no excuse: anyone who doesn't want to pay for fonts should simply stick with fonts whose creators are happy not to be paid by them.
And even if Asus hasn't modified the code, there is still a problem. What if Xandros updates one component from version 1.0.0 to version 1.0.1, and Asus doesn't notice that the old version isn't available any more, but there's a subtle regression in the new version that means it doesn't work on the Asus hardware any more? Suddenly anyone who grabs the source code from the Xandros website has a version that doesn't work! Why the hell should they have to debug the problem and then hunt around for a version that works, when Asus has a legal responsibility to be providing it all along?So you acknowledge that Asus is violating the GPL, right?It is true that many people on Slashdot don't mind violating media companies' copyright on Youtube. It is also true that many people on Slashdot get angry when people violate the GPL. However, it does not follow that these two groups are the same, and basing an argument on such an assumption leaves your logic seriously flawed.
In an ideal world, copyright would be a lot weaker, and everyone would have more rights to use and modify others' work. We don't live in that ideal world, so GPL users trick copyright law into creating copyleft, which allows us to grant others those rights in such a way that they are forced to pass those rights on in turn. This only works if we in turn respect others' copyright -- if GPL advocates were proven to regularly infringe others' copyrights on Youtube, then how could we ever expect anyone to respect the GPL?
It would be interesting to do a study of Slashdot comments and find out whether the same nicknames do pop up in both types of discussion, and if so, whether they do (as you claim) take opposite sides depending on who is breaking the law. But until someone does such a study...No. If you wait till someone finds that they are unable to exercise their rights, then it's already too late. The point is to ensure that everyone will always have that ability, whether they use it or not. That's what we call "freedom" -- the ability to exercise any right you like, without having to ask anyone for permission and without having to fight for it.
Seriously, WTF? How does a Playstation have any benefits over other smaller, cheaper, lighter computer hardware for guiding missiles? How does cheap computer hardware have any benefits at all when you don't have the software to run on it? How would hardware and software have any benefits at all when you don't have any guided missiles in the first place, and if some rogue state (or the CIA, depending on whose side you're on) wanted to supply you with them, they could just supply you with guidance systems at the same time?!
Windows Me was a pile of crap that crashed every five minutes. Vista is merely slightly slower than XP. I use it for games, since Wine/Cedega aren't quite there yet for the latest titles. It runs just fine, everything works just fine, everything is perfectly fast enough -- do I really care whether things are theoretically a few percent slower if I can't tell the difference without actually benchmarking? (Hint: I don't.)
I really don't see where all the Vista hate is coming from. I wouldn't want to use it day-to-day, but that's the same as any version of Windows.
And really, the only thing in GNOME that ever annoyed me was the brain-dead unconfigurable window placement in Metacity that kept thinking I wanted my new window to appear on my second monitor, and that's become irrelevant now that the infinitely-configurable compiz is mature.
How exactly does this apply to anime? I seriously doubt the Canadian recording industry pays a cent to the Japanese media companies whose intellectual property rights are being violated when you download a fansub.
And we find the same in heroes from all other traditions; Sigmund committed incest, Sampson fell for Delilah, Lancelot fell for Guinevere, etc.I beg to differ. Even if you eschew the highbrow and turn to Hollywood blockbusters, I think you'll find that having the good guy fail in the first half of the movie is part of the standard formula. We like our determined guys to change the world, but we don't want it to be a pushover! That's no fun.
Yes, James Bond always blows up the villain and gets the girl, but you know damn well he's going to fall for the wrong girl, get captured, and face torture and "certain" death first.
And to counter those of your examples that I'm also familiar with:But they sure aren't godlike beings with perfect morals. How is Rincewind, one of fantasy literature's all-time great cowards, a "perfect hero"? How is Granny Weatherwax, whose arrogance nearly gets her killed in pretty much every book, perfect? The books are fun to read precisely because, while you know the right people are going to triumph in the end, you can't imagine how they possibly can. They can't simple wander up to the chief villain and prod buttock like a Kryptonite-immune Superman.Clearly you didn't watch the second and third prequels, in which 99% of all Jedi were wiped out in a matter of minutes by mortal soldiers and drones.
In short, what makes a hero interesting is the dramatic tension caused by the existence of character flaws or overwhelming odds. God mode is as boring in books or movies as it is in games. A great hero is one who wins even though he could easily have lost.
Times New Roman meets only some needs. It's fine for setting standard English prose, provided you have no taste. However, it does not contain (for example) any Chinese characters, so it is useless for setting Chinese; if you want to set Chinese, you have to use a font that was designed for Chinese text. And it does not contain many advanced mathematical characters, so it is useless for setting advanced mathematics; if you want to set advanced mathematics, you have to use a font that was designed for advanced mathematical text... like STIX. Why is this so hard to understand?
Conversely, the reason people first chose to write in English was very deliberately to use the current language of the common people, and that has by and large continued to be a goal, so English writing has always been more likely to conform to the usage of the day than to any literary standard. Read any great author and you will, I strongly suspect, find that their writing is sprinkled with usages that grammar nazis deplore; there are whole books dedicated to pointing out "mistakes" made by great authors.
It is very important not to create a false dichotomy here, by the way. The fact that language is living and evolving does not mean that it does not have rules, and it does not mean that there's no such thing as a grammatical mistake. It merely means that the rules that were true 10 years ago may not be true today, and that the rules that grammar nazis hold dear (particularly regarding things like sentence-final prepositions, sentence-initial conjuncitons, split infinitives, and so forth) are likely to be arbitrary constructs that do not bear any relation to the language as spoken and written by real people.
On the bright side, it appears you are winning your War On Paragraphs.
If the program you want isn't there, there are plenty of other places you can look for it. There are third-party repositories, which you can plug into your package manager to increase the range of software available. And some programs offer downloadable packages that will install on any distro (particularly popular for commercial products like Crossover Office). Authors of free programs generally don't bother with this, because it's easier for everyone, particularly users, if the software is just put in the distro-specific central repositories instead.I doubt anyone would care. People don't want choice for choice's sake, they just want it to be easy to find the damn software.
Far easier than on Windows, where instead of using a single trusted server she'd have to search the internet for software (praying that she'd correctly identified a genuine download site rather than one of the thousands that infect their downloads with viruses or spyware), and then instead of checking a simple box and clicking a single button she'd have to download a file, find the file she downloaded, double-click on the installer, and click through page after page of a setup wizard (praying that she was selecting the correct options).The same is true for most commercial software I've used. It's true for most software in general. Which is why distros like Ubuntu carefully sift through the dross and select the rare programs that do have simple and usable interfaces, or failing that the ones that have interfaces that closely copy the crappy interfaces that popular Windows and Mac equivalents use.
I think it's reasonable for me to assume that I was malware-free. And I would still have been malware-free if I had never run those scans, since they never found anything.
Of course, I can't claim to be a representative computer user by any means... which is kind of the real, fundamental point. Malware is a PEBKAC issue, but the problem isn't users not running security software, it's users doing stupid things in the first place, like connecting to the Internet without even a basic router-based firewall, like using Internet Explorer with all the security settings on minimum, like visiting warez sites or looking for "free" porn, like installing spyware-funded "free" utilities, like clicking on random links in spam or opening random email attachments. If you don't do any of that stupid stuff, you are relatively safe. You're certainly safer than people who surf recklessly and rely on Symantec to save them from their own wilful ignorance.
Safari isn't the only modern standards-compliant browser that Microsoft does not care to support. Live Maps does not work in Opera. It does not work in Konqueror. Indeed, not only does it not work in these browsers, it doesn't even fail -- it merely redirects, silently, to a different search page, with no message, no explanation, nothing.
Google Maps works flawlessly in all of these and more. For all the virtues of Microsoft's offering, I will not be able to contemplate using it until it improves in this regard.