Enter vim, you rarely need to remove your fingers from the home row.;)
Except, you know, every three seconds, unless you have remapped your keyboard so that the most important command in vim is not assigned to the far top left corner of the keyboard.
Either you trust the government : no choice of provider (that much, history should prove) Or you trust business : you can choose (for a little more money probably, yes, deal with it) a better provider
...but you are trusting them to do different things.
I trust businesses to provide me with internet service. That's their job. The government isn't going to do it, nor should it.
I trust the government to regulate businesses to the extent necessary to make sure there is fair competition and the free market keeps on working. That's their job. If you believe the businesses will do it themselves -- will take actions specifically designed to ensure that new competitors can emerge and take customers away from them! -- then you are a fool.
I don't want the Internet to be regulated. It's a wonderful resource full of free speech and free information, and the government should keep its hands off it and not try to tell me which sites I can visit. But that's a different thing from wanting internet service to be regulated. I have absolutely no problem with the government telling Comcast to keep its hands off and not try to tell me which sites I can visit, either.
tl;dr: leave the web alone, but regulate the pipes.
It says something about the warped view people have on these issues that you have to swap it around male-female in order for anyone to even consider the matter sanely.
It's not entirely warped. Men face different consequences; for example, it's relatively rare for unwanted blowjobs to result in pregnancy.
After porn, it will be other harmful content, then wikileaks, then anyother site the government doesnt want you to get to.
The slippery slope fallacy seems strangely appealing to a certain class of Slashdotter.
Back in the real world, slippery slopes rarely go as far as the paranoid like to fantasise. For example, how exactly do you imagine a democratic government would go about blocking access to Wikileaks? That would mean declaring war on the mass media, which is not really a very promising tactic for any politician who wishes to be re-elected.
This is the same thing here on the Web with Anonymous, but even easier to manipulate and to fake as they operate under the cover of deeper level of anonymity. Same approach, same techniques, same motives.
Not so. The dynamic is totally different. A demonstration is basically a ruly mob, and can be subverted into an unruly mob; the thing is that its members are physically surrounded by other people, do not have time to think or easy access to relevant information, can only communicate with great difficulty and only with a handful of people, often literally cannot leave until the demonstration is over, and are going to be faced with physical responses that can cause them to experience fear or panic. None of this is true online, where participants can easily pause, think, research, discuss things with one another, and any one of them can directly challenge anyone they think is trying to subvert their activities.
In short, there is simply no realistic comparison between the situations, and online protests are much, much harder to manipulate.
Imagine if your electricity supplier charged a higher price if you plugged a PS3 in, or if your gas station charged more per gallon to fill up a Toyota.
Electricity is electricity. Gas is gas. Bits are bits. Service providers should provide the service and keep their damn noses out of what I choose to use it for. Charging based on the quantity I use is perfectly reasonable; charging based on the nature of that use is an unjustifiable violation of my privacy.
HTTPS would make these shenanigans significantly harder, because with HTTPS the data stream itself no longer contains the resource name in plain-text form.
And what's to stop them just charging extra for HTTPS packets? (Except maybe those going to major banks, who might pay the provider not to charge their customers.)
Yeah, there's no technical excuse for it, but the majority of Americans wouldn't know that.
Besides, you'd also have to go through a proxy to hide your true destination. That degrades your performance. They could also add something to the ToS banning the use of proxies. (Again, no technical excuse; again, they don't need one because they could easily convince the majority of their customers it made sense.)
That mantra is repeated over and over by OSS advocates almost like an incantation
I constantly see people claim that OSS advocates use this argument. I can't remember the last time I saw an actual OSS advocate actually using it.
Really you are fighting something of a straw man. Nobody with a clue has ever claimed that "many eyes" is some kind of magical guarantee of security. It is not news that high-profile OSS code can contain very serious flaws; just think of the Debian OpenSSL incident!
My only wish is that they make sure the world as a whole feels alive, like you are not the only person there
Oblivion actually made this worse by having NPCs discuss things the player had done; the overall effect was of a world where literally nothing happened apart from what the player did.
Then they went and did the exact same thing in Fallout 3, where the only news in the wasteland is whatever the player did recently.
No, it does not make me feel like the special Chosen Savior Of The World, Bethesda. It breaks the immersion and makes me think the game's world is full of boring lazy people who don't deserve to be saved.
Daggerfall had 750000 NPCs, 15000 towns, 184000 square miles - Oblivion had 16 square miles.
No, Daggerfall had about 8 NPCs, one of which was then copied and pasted 749992 times; about 15 towns, each of which (again) was copied and pasted 1000 times; and basically no land at all, because there was absolutely no reason to set foot outside a town except to fast-travel to the entrance of another dungeon (which would also be identical to all the others, but with the same corridors and rooms arranged in a slightly different order) to do a quest (which would be one of the same three basic quests, with the same goals and the same twists, and just a few details tweaked at random).
Having lots of "content" is meaningless if it's all the same handful of places you've been before, populated by the same people you've talked to before, repeated over and over again by a pseudo-random number generator and occasionally given a slightly different texture or a palette swap.
Oblivion was too small, I will agree. But Daggerfall was even smaller in terms of actual variety.
And what natural law implies this? How about religious law? How about, oh, say, appealing to history and demonstrating that this is the norm for government/electorate relations?
If you appeal to history, you will quickly conclude that the normal state of humanity is barbarism, with petty crimes punished by gruesome public execution, no freedom of speech, no freedom of religion, slavery commonplace, and the majority of people barely allowed to own property.
If you want to base your dream society on historical observations, go right ahead. The rest of us will carry on believing in silly fantasies like "universal human rights" and the concept that the authority of government derives from the consent of the governed.
It's a good time for government transparency, whether intentional or not.
Except in all the countries that would really benefit from more transparency, like China.
Oh well, I guess all those oppressed people don't really matter -- let's keep on showing the dictatorships of the world exactly why they don't want to give their people free speech and a free press!
MS would be wise to revisit their patent pledges at this time and address their criticisms, it could score them some serious open source credibility in this environment.
MS will never have serious open source credibility. Their transparent, openly-acknowledged goal is to persuade people that use open source today that they should use proprietary Microsoft products tomorrow. The only reason they have made all these.NET-related patent promises is that they have judged that Mono is more likely to lead to businesses migrating from Linux to Windows than the other way round.
And don't you think that's likely? Most of the businesses that use UNIX or Unix-like servers today still use Windows on their desktop. If they switched from Java to C#, Microsoft would have a pretty good case to make that it would be sensible for them to standardise on a single platform for desktop and server. And the market share of open source platforms would plummet.
The.NET patent threat is overblown, yes. But that doesn't mean Mono isn't a trap.
Hopefully this will finally cause big companies to fight to get rid of software patents and patent troll companies as a whole.
Yeah, it's a sure-fire win, just like the War to End All Wars.
Oh, wait, we had to rename that one "World War I", didn't we? Maybe this whole "allow massive damage in order to show people the error of their ways" thing isn't quite so effective after all.
The ol'good Oblivion, heavily modded and with all the extensions. (also, ancient Morrowind obviously.)
You wouldn't think it was that way round these days. With all the work the community has put into Morrowind, it frankly looks better than Oblivion now, if you install the right mods. And it's bigger, too, now that Tamriel Rebuilt has delivered a decent chunk of land.
The US government is perpetrating quite a lot of the social injustices these days IMHO.
So people keep saying. And everyone was expecting these Wikileaks cables to prove it, after all the hype.
Then they get released, and it turns out the most embarrassing thing all the papers could find to lead with was basically "US Ambassador To Elbonia Says Elbonian President Has Muddy Boots".
The cables even disprove some of the things critics of US foreign policy have been accusing it of for years!
Yeah, Wikileaks is really sticking it to the man. This is some significant shit. This is totally, like, the Pentagon Papers all over again, dude. I can't imagine why Obama hasn't been chased out of the White House by a crowd with pitchforks and flaming torches yet, given all the evidence of US wrongdoing Wikileaks has produced.
But to resolve to sit quietly and just take it all out of fear isn't the solution.
It's better than handing them a reason to do it on a plate.
The solution would be for it to be self-evident to everyone that there was no need to crack doen on anything. Unfortunately that is snever going to be the case while the news is dominated by people whose thought processes can apparently be summed up as "Amazon hurt Hulk's friend. HULK SMASH AMAZON."
While PostgreSQL might be an okay alternative to just SQL Server or Oracle the database, they just don't deliver the whole range of tools and services.
And there's one thing in particular they don't deliver: cost.
Sure, if you switch to open source you might save your company a million dollars, but you can only do that once. Stick with Oracle and you can negotiate a million-dollar enterprise database contract every year! Much more impressive.
Thankfully in the console it is straightforward to set up an interface that suits you with trivial symlinks or aliases. No faffing around with endless abstraction layers, complex configuration GUIs, or overcomplicated and largely undocumented crap like GConf.
No, that is simply not true. My KDE menu gives me, under the Internet category:
BitTorrent Client (Transmission)
Web Browser (Firefox)
Feed Reader
A KDE Blogging Client
FTP Client
Download Manager
Mail Client
News Reader
Web Browser (Konqueror)
IRC Client
Instant Messenger
Can you guess how it's sorted? Yep, mostly by the application name. For example, in the middle there we have KFTPGrabber, KGet, KMail, and KNews -- but the menu "helpfully" doesn't display those names, so all the user sees is a jumble of programs in no obvious order at all.
Also, I have no idea why Transmission and Firefox are up at the top. I honestly cannot begin to guess. There is no obvious way to change the order or sort the entries differently.
Yay Linux. If I ever used the application menu I would hate this. Thankfully xterm provides me with a user-friendly front end; I basically only use KDE because its window manager and panel are good.
Why should I need to know whether Dolphin is a KDE app? If I like it, I should be able to use it seamlessly regardless of which DE I prefer. To the extent that I can't, the 'open desktop' has failed.
Why? Dolphin is also pretty tied into KDE. You don't normally expect to be able to use one environment's file manager in another environment.
Think of Gnome and KDE as different platforms built on different technologies. They are infinitely better than most at running each others' applications. You don't hear people saying things like "Microsoft and Apple have failed because I can't run Windows Explorer seamlessly on OS X".
The integration problems are programs like OpenOffice.org that never seem to work quite right in any environment. That is an impediment to the adoption of free operating systems on the desktop.
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Except, you know, every three seconds, unless you have remapped your keyboard so that the most important command in vim is not assigned to the far top left corner of the keyboard.
...but you are trusting them to do different things.
I trust businesses to provide me with internet service. That's their job. The government isn't going to do it, nor should it.
I trust the government to regulate businesses to the extent necessary to make sure there is fair competition and the free market keeps on working. That's their job. If you believe the businesses will do it themselves -- will take actions specifically designed to ensure that new competitors can emerge and take customers away from them! -- then you are a fool.
I don't want the Internet to be regulated. It's a wonderful resource full of free speech and free information, and the government should keep its hands off it and not try to tell me which sites I can visit. But that's a different thing from wanting internet service to be regulated. I have absolutely no problem with the government telling Comcast to keep its hands off and not try to tell me which sites I can visit, either.
tl;dr: leave the web alone, but regulate the pipes.
It's not entirely warped. Men face different consequences; for example, it's relatively rare for unwanted blowjobs to result in pregnancy.
The slippery slope fallacy seems strangely appealing to a certain class of Slashdotter.
Back in the real world, slippery slopes rarely go as far as the paranoid like to fantasise. For example, how exactly do you imagine a democratic government would go about blocking access to Wikileaks? That would mean declaring war on the mass media, which is not really a very promising tactic for any politician who wishes to be re-elected.
Not so. The dynamic is totally different. A demonstration is basically a ruly mob, and can be subverted into an unruly mob; the thing is that its members are physically surrounded by other people, do not have time to think or easy access to relevant information, can only communicate with great difficulty and only with a handful of people, often literally cannot leave until the demonstration is over, and are going to be faced with physical responses that can cause them to experience fear or panic. None of this is true online, where participants can easily pause, think, research, discuss things with one another, and any one of them can directly challenge anyone they think is trying to subvert their activities.
In short, there is simply no realistic comparison between the situations, and online protests are much, much harder to manipulate.
Imagine if your electricity supplier charged a higher price if you plugged a PS3 in, or if your gas station charged more per gallon to fill up a Toyota.
Electricity is electricity. Gas is gas. Bits are bits. Service providers should provide the service and keep their damn noses out of what I choose to use it for. Charging based on the quantity I use is perfectly reasonable; charging based on the nature of that use is an unjustifiable violation of my privacy.
And what's to stop them just charging extra for HTTPS packets? (Except maybe those going to major banks, who might pay the provider not to charge their customers.)
Yeah, there's no technical excuse for it, but the majority of Americans wouldn't know that.
Besides, you'd also have to go through a proxy to hide your true destination. That degrades your performance. They could also add something to the ToS banning the use of proxies. (Again, no technical excuse; again, they don't need one because they could easily convince the majority of their customers it made sense.)
Much of which came from people who would not otherwise have even heard of their games, let alone considered buying them at any price at all.
This is called "pure profit". It's generally considered a good thing regardless of quantity.
59,174 people (and counting) have so far paid a total of $419,914.75 (and growing), even though they didn't have to.
Maybe we aren't all pirates after all.
I constantly see people claim that OSS advocates use this argument. I can't remember the last time I saw an actual OSS advocate actually using it.
Really you are fighting something of a straw man. Nobody with a clue has ever claimed that "many eyes" is some kind of magical guarantee of security. It is not news that high-profile OSS code can contain very serious flaws; just think of the Debian OpenSSL incident!
Oblivion actually made this worse by having NPCs discuss things the player had done; the overall effect was of a world where literally nothing happened apart from what the player did.
Then they went and did the exact same thing in Fallout 3, where the only news in the wasteland is whatever the player did recently.
No, it does not make me feel like the special Chosen Savior Of The World, Bethesda. It breaks the immersion and makes me think the game's world is full of boring lazy people who don't deserve to be saved.
No, Daggerfall had about 8 NPCs, one of which was then copied and pasted 749992 times; about 15 towns, each of which (again) was copied and pasted 1000 times; and basically no land at all, because there was absolutely no reason to set foot outside a town except to fast-travel to the entrance of another dungeon (which would also be identical to all the others, but with the same corridors and rooms arranged in a slightly different order) to do a quest (which would be one of the same three basic quests, with the same goals and the same twists, and just a few details tweaked at random).
Having lots of "content" is meaningless if it's all the same handful of places you've been before, populated by the same people you've talked to before, repeated over and over again by a pseudo-random number generator and occasionally given a slightly different texture or a palette swap.
Oblivion was too small, I will agree. But Daggerfall was even smaller in terms of actual variety.
If you appeal to history, you will quickly conclude that the normal state of humanity is barbarism, with petty crimes punished by gruesome public execution, no freedom of speech, no freedom of religion, slavery commonplace, and the majority of people barely allowed to own property.
If you want to base your dream society on historical observations, go right ahead. The rest of us will carry on believing in silly fantasies like "universal human rights" and the concept that the authority of government derives from the consent of the governed.
Except in all the countries that would really benefit from more transparency, like China.
Oh well, I guess all those oppressed people don't really matter -- let's keep on showing the dictatorships of the world exactly why they don't want to give their people free speech and a free press!
MS will never have serious open source credibility. Their transparent, openly-acknowledged goal is to persuade people that use open source today that they should use proprietary Microsoft products tomorrow. The only reason they have made all these .NET-related patent promises is that they have judged that Mono is more likely to lead to businesses migrating from Linux to Windows than the other way round.
And don't you think that's likely? Most of the businesses that use UNIX or Unix-like servers today still use Windows on their desktop. If they switched from Java to C#, Microsoft would have a pretty good case to make that it would be sensible for them to standardise on a single platform for desktop and server. And the market share of open source platforms would plummet.
The .NET patent threat is overblown, yes. But that doesn't mean Mono isn't a trap.
Yeah, it's a sure-fire win, just like the War to End All Wars.
Oh, wait, we had to rename that one "World War I", didn't we? Maybe this whole "allow massive damage in order to show people the error of their ways" thing isn't quite so effective after all.
You wouldn't think it was that way round these days. With all the work the community has put into Morrowind, it frankly looks better than Oblivion now, if you install the right mods. And it's bigger, too, now that Tamriel Rebuilt has delivered a decent chunk of land.
Diablo isn't an RPG, it's a finger exercise. Click click click click click click click click monster died click click click click click click monster died click click click click click click click click click click palette-shifted monster died. Click.
The idea is that if you make it through Diablo, your clicking finger is strong enough to play Starcraft.
So people keep saying. And everyone was expecting these Wikileaks cables to prove it, after all the hype.
Then they get released, and it turns out the most embarrassing thing all the papers could find to lead with was basically "US Ambassador To Elbonia Says Elbonian President Has Muddy Boots".
The cables even disprove some of the things critics of US foreign policy have been accusing it of for years!
Yeah, Wikileaks is really sticking it to the man. This is some significant shit. This is totally, like, the Pentagon Papers all over again, dude. I can't imagine why Obama hasn't been chased out of the White House by a crowd with pitchforks and flaming torches yet, given all the evidence of US wrongdoing Wikileaks has produced.
It's better than handing them a reason to do it on a plate.
The solution would be for it to be self-evident to everyone that there was no need to crack doen on anything. Unfortunately that is snever going to be the case while the news is dominated by people whose thought processes can apparently be summed up as "Amazon hurt Hulk's friend. HULK SMASH AMAZON."
First they came for the leakers, and I did not speak out, because I was not a leaker.
Then they came for the script kiddies, and I did not speak out, because I was not a script kiddie.
Then they stopped, because nobody else was attacking them. And the world was a better place without all those script kiddies clogging up the tubes.
Sounds good to me. Let's do this!
And there's one thing in particular they don't deliver: cost.
Sure, if you switch to open source you might save your company a million dollars, but you can only do that once. Stick with Oracle and you can negotiate a million-dollar enterprise database contract every year! Much more impressive.
Sadly I am not entirely sure I'm joking.
Thankfully in the console it is straightforward to set up an interface that suits you with trivial symlinks or aliases. No faffing around with endless abstraction layers, complex configuration GUIs, or overcomplicated and largely undocumented crap like GConf.
No, that is simply not true. My KDE menu gives me, under the Internet category:
Can you guess how it's sorted? Yep, mostly by the application name. For example, in the middle there we have KFTPGrabber, KGet, KMail, and KNews -- but the menu "helpfully" doesn't display those names, so all the user sees is a jumble of programs in no obvious order at all.
Also, I have no idea why Transmission and Firefox are up at the top. I honestly cannot begin to guess. There is no obvious way to change the order or sort the entries differently.
Yay Linux. If I ever used the application menu I would hate this. Thankfully xterm provides me with a user-friendly front end; I basically only use KDE because its window manager and panel are good.
Why? Dolphin is also pretty tied into KDE. You don't normally expect to be able to use one environment's file manager in another environment.
Think of Gnome and KDE as different platforms built on different technologies. They are infinitely better than most at running each others' applications. You don't hear people saying things like "Microsoft and Apple have failed because I can't run Windows Explorer seamlessly on OS X".
The integration problems are programs like OpenOffice.org that never seem to work quite right in any environment. That is an impediment to the adoption of free operating systems on the desktop.