As others have pointed out, minors do not have credit cards and thus cannot buy music online
Online music stores accept debit cards.[1] Minors can easily get debit cards by the simple expedient of opening a bank account.[2] Therefore, your claim is simply not true: minors can buy music online, because buying music on line does not require a credit card.
Hey, I think that popping sound was one more pathetic excuse for copyright infringement vanishing.
[1] Actually most of the online music stores I tried were so badly designed that it was impossible to find any information about what payment methods they accept. But iTunes certainly accepts debit cards. [2] At least, over-12s can, and they're the people most likely to be interested in downloading music. For under-12s there are a variety of other options: for example, Apple provide an allowance scheme which lets kids draw a fixed amount from their parents' credit card each month.
It is quite true that the right to free speech does not, and can not, include the right to an audience. But it's also true that the rules have to be different where people in high office are concerned.
For example, time and time again it is ruled that celebrities (those who have chosen to live their lives in the public view) have less of a right to privacy than ordinary citizens; and time and time again it is ruled that more details can be exposed about the private dealings of politicians (in whose private dealings the public has a compelling and legitimate interest) than about the private dealings of ordinary citizens. And I have never heard a good argument made against such rulings.
In the same way, the right to protest against a government must be considered more important than the right to protest against a private concern carrying out operations which the democratically elected government has made legal, and which have received the approval of the highest court in the land. Looked at that way, I don't think it's at all illogical to believe that the right to protest against politicians does go further than the right to protest against abortion clinics; indeed, I personally would argue that someone who wishes to protest against their president should have an absolute right for him to be requried to hear, consider, and answer their complaint. (Yes, he'd have a lot of work to do. But that's what being the leader of the free world is supposed to be about.)
In short, you are absolutely correct to say that the issue is not as simple as it is sometimes made out to be, and your argument is insightful and compelling. But I find the conclusion you seem to be moving towards - that it is reasonable to protect politicians from hearing the views of those who disagree with them - to be seriously worrying. Is that really your opinion, or am I extrapolating your argument further than you intended?
I dunno. I find myself to be rather productive, and I think the vast majority of the software I use came with either one simple license or one rather lengthy license.
They're talking about software you pay for, mate. If you paid for that stuff, you're either a philanthropist or a sucker.
There is little room for "shareware" or "freeware" on Linux.
Perhaps. But "little room" is infinitely more room than "no room".
What do they offer that open source software does not?
Freeware? Nothing. But shareware (like "regular" commercial software) offers something rather valuable: it offers you software that the author has a financial interest in improving and maintaining. The average free software package is not like that: you're at the mercy of the whims of the author and the community. But the shareware author knows he's got to fix those bugs if he's going to sell any more copies. The average free software package is written to scratch its author's itch, and many never progress beyond that point. But the shareware author knows she's got to scratch her customers' itches, because if they don't like her software, they're not going to pay for it.
Now, why can't that software be open source? Because, despite the popular groupthink here, it is impossible to sell open source software as such, and it is very, very difficult to sell support for it. The thing about open source is that it's free as in speech - so anyone can distribute it, and anyone can sell support for it, or even support it for free! If you write a popular open source program, and offer paid support, what do you think will happen? Why, Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, etc. will all package it up in their distro and support it themselves, and anyone who's interested in commercial support will have bought a commercial distro, and you won't have many customers, that's what!
As for why anyone would want shareware when there's competing free software... the answer is quite simply that people pick and choose the programs they like to use. I run Windows as my primary OS, and I use an awful lot of free software (Cygwin, OpenOffice.org, Firefox and Thunderbird, etc), because often free software is the best there is. But my text editor of choice is shareware, because I've tried the free alternatives and they all had flaws I wasn't able to put up with - some have a totally non-standard and unintuitive interface, some are based on toolkits that integrate too poorly with the Windows desktop, some don't support Japanese text.
Let's just say that the author of the text editor I do use is said to be considering a closed-source shareware Linux port - and that would be the one thing that would convince me to ditch Windows for good. Surely you're not saying that something that would convince a die-hard Windows user to switch to a free OS would be a bad thing!
a great deal of the crap (like dating games, text adventures where choices are confined to minimal conversation options,...
It's not clear from your punctuation whether that comma is supposed to be marking a subordinate clause or separating items in a list. If the former, then you reveal a level of ignorance on a par with describing Grand Theft Auto as an FPS. If the latter, then you merely fall into one of two common traps - asserting that anything you don't like is crap, or assuming that something you haven't tried is crap because the idea sounds odd.
Firstly, the genre thing. Whether you realise it or not, you have mentioned two distinct genres, generally referred to by Western fans as "dating sims" and "visual novels" respectively.
Pure SIMs are a genre best exemplified by Konami's "Tokimeki Memorial" series, which (believe it or not) is about to be revamped in the form of an MMOG. The basic gameplay mechanic of the series is similar to any number of other stat-based simulations - it basically comes down to stat management, activity planning, and a large number of minigames. A lot more than "minimal conversational options".
Many Americans seem to jump to the misapprehension that a "dating sim" is supposed to be a kind of replacement for a real girlfriend. That's about as true as saying that a racing sim is supposed to be a replacement for owning a real car - in both cases, the games provide an altogether more stylised experience that covers events that are either implausible or impossible in real life (surviving a 120 MPH crash without a scratch on your car in Gran Turismo; fighting a series of epic magical battles with a gang leader to win his sister's love in Tokimeki Memorial 2).
As for the AVG genre ("visual novels") - the games you describe as "text adventures where choices are confined to minimal conversation options" - those are only "crap" if you take the line that computerised entertainment "must" be highly interactive. Works of this sort can be "good" in the same way that reading a book, or watching a movie, can be good; they can entertain by providing a deeper (and longer) storyline than a movie, plus the visual and aural stimulation that printed books lack, while still providing enough minimal interactivity to add the replay value that is expected of a game. YES, a lot of people find them boring, and take lines like "if I wanted to read a load of text, I'd get a book". NO, that doesn't make them automatically "crap". Like any other genre, there are good examples and there are bad examples, and there are people who like them and people who hate them.
(I haven't mentioned porn, and the omission is deliberate. As the recent "hot coffee" scandal shows, porn can damage the reputation of any genre. It is a fact that the majority of AVG games are pornographic. It is also a fact that most of the titles considered the best are either not pornographic at all, or come in versions with and without the pornographic elements.)
Play games for fun. Appreciate the innovative ones. Don't simply ignore a game because of where its developed.
I could say exactly the same thing to you - except that I would change the last sentence to "Don't assume that a game can only be entertaining if its theme and game system conform to your prejudices."
How is that any more offensive than "...when the brits..." or "...when the aussies..." exactly? Stop being so politically correct, it's just an abbreviation, not a sly insult like "yank" or "kraut".
Speaking as a Briton who does not appreciate people using the term "Brit", I would suggest that you would be well advised to accept that different people consider different things acceptable, and that when a large number of people consider a term offensive, it is polite to avoid it.
A useful tool for finding out which words are considered offensive by a large number of people is a dictionary. How do English dictionaries describe "Jap"?
American Heritage: "offensive slang" Collins: "often derogatory" Merriam-Webster: "usually disparaging"
Hmm, there seems to be a common theme here. I propose to you that it might just be the case that this word is, in fact, not one that's suitable for use in situations where you don't want people to assume that you're ignorant, boorish, or even racist.
Translation of the bible into local languages was a major issue pre-reformation; specifically John Wycliff translated the bible into English before Martin Luther was born.
And that was merely the continuation of a centuries-old tradition. Towards the end of the so-called "dark ages", the monk Aelfric translated much of the Pentateuch into Old English, hundreds of years before Wyclef was born; and we have even earlier texts of the Old English gospels, from before Aelfric was born (a particularly unlikely legend has it that John's gospel was translated by Bede on his deathbed). And pretty much our entire knowledge of the Gothic language comes from the Aryan bishop Ulfilas' biblical translations, hundreds of years before that.
In fact, translations of religious texts are one of our most valuable resources in the preservation of languages both ancient and modern. Much to the chagrin of the fundamentalist atheists who like to think that religion has never served any useful purpose.
Actually, during the middle ages, pulling out was considered THE biggest sin you could do. The punishment was even worse than the punishment for murder.
Actually, that's bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit.
Do you people actually believe any random nonsense you're told about the middle ages by people who know nothing about the period in question? And have you ever actually bothered to study any history or literature from that period? No? Then kindly refrain from spouting nonsense about it. People like you do more harm to human knowledge and understanding than any medieval churchman.
In passing, let's look at some real medieval laws, shall we?
Here, for example, you can find the full text (translated into modern English) of various Anglo-Saxon legal codes. These are from the so-called "dark ages". Observe that the only sexual practices which are forbidden are incest, adultery, and fornication with nuns, and the punishment for those is generally just a fine.
Here you can find an English translation of the 13th century treatise De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae. The section on homicide is long and interesting. Though this is a very detailed description of the English laws of the time (to the extent that it describes matters such as how to determine whether a hermaphrodite should be considered legally male or female), I can find nothing on the subject of sexual perversion, let alone punishments for it.
So, where is your source for this claim that extravaginal ejaculation was punished more harshly than murder? Do pray enlighten us.
Most people value their time too much to sit for hours on a transit bus.
And yet most people also seem quite happy to sit for hours in huge traffic queues instead!
If you value your time that much, doesn't it make more sense to use public transport? Given a suitable mobile or PDA, you can work on a bus or a train. It's pretty hard to answer your email while you're driving, though. The bus may add ten minutes to your journey time, but driving may take an hour out of your working time...
Sometimes I think that the time thing is an excuse people use to avoid thinking of the real reasons they hate buses, some of which might be the noise, the uncomfortable seats, the other passengers, the ten minute walk to and from the bus stop at each end, and the way they force you to fit your movements to the bus company's schedule instead of letting you choose what route to take and when. All of those are perfectly valid complaints - but they are easier to attack on the grounds of selfishness or laziness than "my time is too valuable".
If gas get to be too expensive, people will form car pools before they'll take public transit in these spread out communities.
Great. That would be a great step forward. And why wait for gas to get "too" expensive? Gas is already expensive, so doesn't it make sense to save money by car-pooling today?
The radical fringe sometimes gives a deceptive impression that the green message is "cars = bad, buses/trains = good". It's not. The green message is "four engines to move four people = bad, one engine to move four people = better". And "staying at home if you can work over the net = even better" is clearly an extension of that, whether your client is fat or thin.
That is a seriously impressive bit of work. As a demo of what modern browsers can do, I think it's probably the best I've seen.
However, as a word processor, it's rather lacking. I couldn't figure out how to do a mail merge, or how to print envelopes, or even how to set the paper size. I could only partly figure out how to control tables; the interface for adding and removing cells is nice and intuitive, but I'm blowed if I can work out how to merge them or resize individual rows and columns.
For all I know, all those features are there, but it's damn hard to discover features when the only way to do so is to mouse over 300 tiny identical icons waiting for tooltips to appear. Surely if they can implement all that functionality, a few menus wouldn't be out of the question?
Oh, and insert the obligatory "it doesn't work in Opera" whine here.;)
IE uses Ctrl-N for "New Window". Firefox uses Ctrl-N for "New Window" and Ctrl-T for "New Tab". When Opera uses Ctrl-N for "New Tab" and Ctrl-Alt-N for "New Window", people who are used to the way the other browsers do it are momentarily confused. That's all. Not a big deal, just a brief and minor annoyance.
Besides that, can't you just change the setting in Opera anyway?
Apparently you can, but after five minutes of scratching my head I still can't figure out how to use Opera's keyboard shortcut changing UI, which must go down as the least intuitive interface I've ever seen in my life. It seems to expect you to type in the shortcut you want to use (most programs just let you press the keys), and it seems not to have any automatic way of resolving or even detecting conflicts.
(Yes, it's still better than Firefox, which AFAIK doesn't have any way to change the shortcut keys except maybe with an extension. But seriously, this sort of shoddy UI is inexcusable - crap is crap, even when the competition doesn't even have crap.)
An example of where the usage of MD5 isn't broken are *nix passwords. Your password is hashed with MD5 (a salt is added to your password too, but that's not important here)
Actually, the salt is extremely important. A large proportion of unsalted MD5 passwords can be cracked trivially by looking them up in pregenerated databases. MD5 alone is broken for passwords - it's only the salt that makes MD5 passwords still "good enough" for use on low-security machines... for the time being.
Seriously, I think that the term Linux has been in use so long that it has become a fairly generic term. While protection of the name may be somewhat important, the fact that it is in use and fairly generic would prevent others from trademarking it, where it isn't trademarked (or should at least).
With due respect, you clearly don't have the faintest clue what "generic" means.
Generic is when you use something that might be a trademark to refer to anything vaguely similar. For example, in Britain it's common to use the word "hoover" to refer to a vacuum cleaner of any brand: you have Hoover hoovers and Dyson hoovers. What that means is that "hoover" is becoming generic, and soon it might get to the point where Dyson could actually describe what they were making as hoovers, and Hoover wouldn't be able to sue them for it.
Likewise, Xerox have had to go to tremendous efforts to protect their trademark: if you stopped talking about copiers and started talking about xeroxes (of any brand), then the Xerox mark would have become generic. But we don't, we talk about copiers: so Xerox is not generic these days.
Now, is Linux generic? Of course it isn't! When you talk about Linux, you are talking about an operating system based on the Linux kernel. You wouldn't say "Microsoft Windows is a popular linux", or talk about the "FreeBSD linux", or say "OS X is based on the Mach micro-linux", because the generic term is "operating system" or "kernel", and "Linux" is the unique name for a particular kernel used to power a particular set of operating systems.
Sorry, but the Australians called it wrong this time. There may well be valid arguments against a Linux trademark, but genericity ain't one of them.
Nope, it's just that Mozilla/Firefox has received a lot of publicity in these news outlets for it's (supposed) security advantages over IE. I'd say it's most appropriate for these same news outlets to follow up when those claims aren't upheld by reality.
Not upheld by reality? Wait, you're saying that Firefox no longer has any security advantages over IE, because one high-profile exploit has been released, and that after the vulnerability it exploits has been patched?
When more people have had their computers owned as a result of using Firefox than as a result of using IE, then you can start saying that the claim that Firefox is more secure than IE has "not been upheld by reality". Here's a clue for you: there are several tens of millions of infections to go before you have anything to gloat about.
I never said the computer with WinMX got spyware from WinMX, just that it had spyware [that could have come from WinMX, since I don't know what else on the computer could have infected it].
They had Internet Explorer, right? Look, the kind of person who uses P2P software is also likely to be the kind of person who browses the dodgier side of the web, and if they didn't have the sense to use a secure browser, ownage is incredibly likely to ensue.
I can assure you that if WinMX ever contained spyware, then it was a form of spyware that Spybot never learned about. I can find no record on Google of anyone plausibly complaining about spyware in WinMX. In fact, apart from you and "Mustang Matt" a few posts up, I'm finding it jolly difficult to find anyone doing anything other than vociferously deny that it has ever contained spyware.
I am just expressing an opinion. . . . It's not a contest, it's not a jihad, it's not a playground argument. It's just some guy making a remark.
It's some guy making a remark about how he thinks Opera is better than Firefox, in an article about Firefox. This is accompanied by a patronising coda that attempts to portray users of Firefox as stupid, insecure, and unable to control their emotions.
We have a term for that here on Slashdot: it's "flamebait". It's not generally considered a nice thing to post, you know. In fact, some people think that people who post comments like that are what we call "trolls".
And yes, the same applies to the people who were ranting about open source in the "Opera is free" article. But good little boys know that just because someone else did something naughty doesn't mean it's okay for you to do it as well. I hope you're not a naughty little boy, are you, kahei?
At a guess, the English version doesn't have all those nasty spelling mistakes like "Fonts & Colors (sic)" which the careless American maintainers still haven't got round to fixing.
It's possible that it also replaces outlandish words like "cookies" with more familiar terms like "biscuits".
> the "compatibility mode" option for running programs occasionally
which is also available in Windows 2000 service packs 2 and above
Apparently it is. I didn't know that until you mentioned it just now; that's because Microsoft have hidden it as carefully as they could, to the extent that you have to run a cryptic command line to enable it. (If anyone else is interested, the details are here.)
Seriously, the only things that XP has above 2k are:
The onus is on Google, as a "do no evil" company, to not break the law, perhaps?
Google's stance, clearly stated, is that they are not breaking the law. The onus is on the Authors Guild, as the plaintiffs, to prove that they are. When that's all done, then we can start talking about whether Google should have done this in the first place or not.
(Note, incidentally, that "doing no evil" and "not breaking the law" are not always identical; in this case they probably are, because you can hardly compare this to any of the obvious examples of evil laws that a righteous person would have to break, but it's important to keep the distinction firmly in mind nonetheless.)
How long has it been since your family went your country from Europe and killed the natives?
Well, let's see, the alliance against the Picts, made between Hengest and Horsa of the Saxons and Wyrtgeorn (Vortigern) of the Britons, which led to the Saxons settling in Britain, was made in AD 449 if the Chronicle is to be trusted; the Saxons then turned on the Britons about six years later, in 455, and conquered Kent within a year; the conquest of the rest of England took several hundred more years, the subjugation of the remaining Celtic lands (Cornwall, Wales, Cumbria, Scotland) took another millenium, and I guess you could say that the conflict is still ongoing in Northern Ireland.
And of course everything changes if he's of Danish ancestry (invasions of the north-east didn't begin till the 9th century AD) or from a Norman family (1066 and all that).
OT: Still wondering what MountainMan101 meant by "old in Oxford means before 1600". Standards must be falling fast. When I was there, "old" meant pre-1300, i.e. dating back to the early days of the university, and that wasn't that long ago...
If I want to distribute an author's book I need to ask permission.
No, if you want to distribute new copies of an author's book you need to ask permission. You are perfectly free to buy a few thousand copies from the publisher and do whatever you like with them - resell them at any price you choose, or give them away free, or leave them in hotel bedrooms - without asking permission.
And this is an important distinction, given that most EULAs try to prevent you exercising this same right with software. How long will it be before books have EULAs too? If the eBook finally takes off, do you think you'll be able to sell those second-hand?
Slashdot Mirror
As others have pointed out, minors do not have credit cards and thus cannot buy music online
Online music stores accept debit cards.[1] Minors can easily get debit cards by the simple expedient of opening a bank account.[2] Therefore, your claim is simply not true: minors can buy music online, because buying music on line does not require a credit card.
Hey, I think that popping sound was one more pathetic excuse for copyright infringement vanishing.
[1] Actually most of the online music stores I tried were so badly designed that it was impossible to find any information about what payment methods they accept. But iTunes certainly accepts debit cards.
[2] At least, over-12s can, and they're the people most likely to be interested in downloading music. For under-12s there are a variety of other options: for example, Apple provide an allowance scheme which lets kids draw a fixed amount from their parents' credit card each month.
> The RIAA is shooting itself in the foot.
Is this really something that should be discouraged?
Yes! Because the RIAA is also trampling all over our rights. Guess where the bullets are going to end up?
This post brought to you by Overstretched Metaphors, Inc.
It is quite true that the right to free speech does not, and can not, include the right to an audience. But it's also true that the rules have to be different where people in high office are concerned.
For example, time and time again it is ruled that celebrities (those who have chosen to live their lives in the public view) have less of a right to privacy than ordinary citizens; and time and time again it is ruled that more details can be exposed about the private dealings of politicians (in whose private dealings the public has a compelling and legitimate interest) than about the private dealings of ordinary citizens. And I have never heard a good argument made against such rulings.
In the same way, the right to protest against a government must be considered more important than the right to protest against a private concern carrying out operations which the democratically elected government has made legal, and which have received the approval of the highest court in the land. Looked at that way, I don't think it's at all illogical to believe that the right to protest against politicians does go further than the right to protest against abortion clinics; indeed, I personally would argue that someone who wishes to protest against their president should have an absolute right for him to be requried to hear, consider, and answer their complaint. (Yes, he'd have a lot of work to do. But that's what being the leader of the free world is supposed to be about.)
In short, you are absolutely correct to say that the issue is not as simple as it is sometimes made out to be, and your argument is insightful and compelling. But I find the conclusion you seem to be moving towards - that it is reasonable to protect politicians from hearing the views of those who disagree with them - to be seriously worrying. Is that really your opinion, or am I extrapolating your argument further than you intended?
I dunno. I find myself to be rather productive, and I think the vast majority of the software I use came with either one simple license or one rather lengthy license.
They're talking about software you pay for, mate. If you paid for that stuff, you're either a philanthropist or a sucker.
There is little room for "shareware" or "freeware" on Linux.
Perhaps. But "little room" is infinitely more room than "no room".
What do they offer that open source software does not?
Freeware? Nothing. But shareware (like "regular" commercial software) offers something rather valuable: it offers you software that the author has a financial interest in improving and maintaining. The average free software package is not like that: you're at the mercy of the whims of the author and the community. But the shareware author knows he's got to fix those bugs if he's going to sell any more copies. The average free software package is written to scratch its author's itch, and many never progress beyond that point. But the shareware author knows she's got to scratch her customers' itches, because if they don't like her software, they're not going to pay for it.
Now, why can't that software be open source? Because, despite the popular groupthink here, it is impossible to sell open source software as such, and it is very, very difficult to sell support for it. The thing about open source is that it's free as in speech - so anyone can distribute it, and anyone can sell support for it, or even support it for free! If you write a popular open source program, and offer paid support, what do you think will happen? Why, Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, etc. will all package it up in their distro and support it themselves, and anyone who's interested in commercial support will have bought a commercial distro, and you won't have many customers, that's what!
As for why anyone would want shareware when there's competing free software... the answer is quite simply that people pick and choose the programs they like to use. I run Windows as my primary OS, and I use an awful lot of free software (Cygwin, OpenOffice.org, Firefox and Thunderbird, etc), because often free software is the best there is. But my text editor of choice is shareware, because I've tried the free alternatives and they all had flaws I wasn't able to put up with - some have a totally non-standard and unintuitive interface, some are based on toolkits that integrate too poorly with the Windows desktop, some don't support Japanese text.
Let's just say that the author of the text editor I do use is said to be considering a closed-source shareware Linux port - and that would be the one thing that would convince me to ditch Windows for good. Surely you're not saying that something that would convince a die-hard Windows user to switch to a free OS would be a bad thing!
a great deal of the crap (like dating games, text adventures where choices are confined to minimal conversation options, ...
It's not clear from your punctuation whether that comma is supposed to be marking a subordinate clause or separating items in a list. If the former, then you reveal a level of ignorance on a par with describing Grand Theft Auto as an FPS. If the latter, then you merely fall into one of two common traps - asserting that anything you don't like is crap, or assuming that something you haven't tried is crap because the idea sounds odd.
Firstly, the genre thing. Whether you realise it or not, you have mentioned two distinct genres, generally referred to by Western fans as "dating sims" and "visual novels" respectively.
Pure SIMs are a genre best exemplified by Konami's "Tokimeki Memorial" series, which (believe it or not) is about to be revamped in the form of an MMOG. The basic gameplay mechanic of the series is similar to any number of other stat-based simulations - it basically comes down to stat management, activity planning, and a large number of minigames. A lot more than "minimal conversational options".
Many Americans seem to jump to the misapprehension that a "dating sim" is supposed to be a kind of replacement for a real girlfriend. That's about as true as saying that a racing sim is supposed to be a replacement for owning a real car - in both cases, the games provide an altogether more stylised experience that covers events that are either implausible or impossible in real life (surviving a 120 MPH crash without a scratch on your car in Gran Turismo; fighting a series of epic magical battles with a gang leader to win his sister's love in Tokimeki Memorial 2).
As for the AVG genre ("visual novels") - the games you describe as "text adventures where choices are confined to minimal conversation options" - those are only "crap" if you take the line that computerised entertainment "must" be highly interactive. Works of this sort can be "good" in the same way that reading a book, or watching a movie, can be good; they can entertain by providing a deeper (and longer) storyline than a movie, plus the visual and aural stimulation that printed books lack, while still providing enough minimal interactivity to add the replay value that is expected of a game. YES, a lot of people find them boring, and take lines like "if I wanted to read a load of text, I'd get a book". NO, that doesn't make them automatically "crap". Like any other genre, there are good examples and there are bad examples, and there are people who like them and people who hate them.
(I haven't mentioned porn, and the omission is deliberate. As the recent "hot coffee" scandal shows, porn can damage the reputation of any genre. It is a fact that the majority of AVG games are pornographic. It is also a fact that most of the titles considered the best are either not pornographic at all, or come in versions with and without the pornographic elements.)
Play games for fun. Appreciate the innovative ones. Don't simply ignore a game because of where its developed.
I could say exactly the same thing to you - except that I would change the last sentence to "Don't assume that a game can only be entertaining if its theme and game system conform to your prejudices."
Stop being so politically correct, it's just an abbreviation, not a sly insult like "yank" or "kraut".
Speaking as a Briton who does not appreciate people using the term "Brit", I would suggest that you would be well advised to accept that different people consider different things acceptable, and that when a large number of people consider a term offensive, it is polite to avoid it.
A useful tool for finding out which words are considered offensive by a large number of people is a dictionary. How do English dictionaries describe "Jap"?
And what do the Japanese themselves think of it?
Hmm, there seems to be a common theme here. I propose to you that it might just be the case that this word is, in fact, not one that's suitable for use in situations where you don't want people to assume that you're ignorant, boorish, or even racist.
Hello, it's an MP3 player, not a Rolex Submariner.
Hello. How are you today?
What I want to know is, if Rolex can make watches that don't scratch, why can't Apple make MP3 players that don't scratch?
Goodbye.
Translation of the bible into local languages was a major issue pre-reformation; specifically John Wycliff translated the bible into English before Martin Luther was born.
And that was merely the continuation of a centuries-old tradition. Towards the end of the so-called "dark ages", the monk Aelfric translated much of the Pentateuch into Old English, hundreds of years before Wyclef was born; and we have even earlier texts of the Old English gospels, from before Aelfric was born (a particularly unlikely legend has it that John's gospel was translated by Bede on his deathbed). And pretty much our entire knowledge of the Gothic language comes from the Aryan bishop Ulfilas' biblical translations, hundreds of years before that.
In fact, translations of religious texts are one of our most valuable resources in the preservation of languages both ancient and modern. Much to the chagrin of the fundamentalist atheists who like to think that religion has never served any useful purpose.
Actually, during the middle ages, pulling out was considered THE biggest sin you could do. The punishment was even worse than the punishment for murder.
Actually, that's bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit.
Do you people actually believe any random nonsense you're told about the middle ages by people who know nothing about the period in question? And have you ever actually bothered to study any history or literature from that period? No? Then kindly refrain from spouting nonsense about it. People like you do more harm to human knowledge and understanding than any medieval churchman.
In passing, let's look at some real medieval laws, shall we?
Here, for example, you can find the full text (translated into modern English) of various Anglo-Saxon legal codes. These are from the so-called "dark ages". Observe that the only sexual practices which are forbidden are incest, adultery, and fornication with nuns, and the punishment for those is generally just a fine.
Here you can find an English translation of the 13th century treatise De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae. The section on homicide is long and interesting. Though this is a very detailed description of the English laws of the time (to the extent that it describes matters such as how to determine whether a hermaphrodite should be considered legally male or female), I can find nothing on the subject of sexual perversion, let alone punishments for it.
So, where is your source for this claim that extravaginal ejaculation was punished more harshly than murder? Do pray enlighten us.
Most people value their time too much to sit for hours on a transit bus.
And yet most people also seem quite happy to sit for hours in huge traffic queues instead!
If you value your time that much, doesn't it make more sense to use public transport? Given a suitable mobile or PDA, you can work on a bus or a train. It's pretty hard to answer your email while you're driving, though. The bus may add ten minutes to your journey time, but driving may take an hour out of your working time...
Sometimes I think that the time thing is an excuse people use to avoid thinking of the real reasons they hate buses, some of which might be the noise, the uncomfortable seats, the other passengers, the ten minute walk to and from the bus stop at each end, and the way they force you to fit your movements to the bus company's schedule instead of letting you choose what route to take and when. All of those are perfectly valid complaints - but they are easier to attack on the grounds of selfishness or laziness than "my time is too valuable".
If gas get to be too expensive, people will form car pools before they'll take public transit in these spread out communities.
Great. That would be a great step forward. And why wait for gas to get "too" expensive? Gas is already expensive, so doesn't it make sense to save money by car-pooling today?
The radical fringe sometimes gives a deceptive impression that the green message is "cars = bad, buses/trains = good". It's not. The green message is "four engines to move four people = bad, one engine to move four people = better". And "staying at home if you can work over the net = even better" is clearly an extension of that, whether your client is fat or thin.
That is a seriously impressive bit of work. As a demo of what modern browsers can do, I think it's probably the best I've seen.
;)
However, as a word processor, it's rather lacking. I couldn't figure out how to do a mail merge, or how to print envelopes, or even how to set the paper size. I could only partly figure out how to control tables; the interface for adding and removing cells is nice and intuitive, but I'm blowed if I can work out how to merge them or resize individual rows and columns.
For all I know, all those features are there, but it's damn hard to discover features when the only way to do so is to mouse over 300 tiny identical icons waiting for tooltips to appear. Surely if they can implement all that functionality, a few menus wouldn't be out of the question?
Oh, and insert the obligatory "it doesn't work in Opera" whine here.
What on earth is wrong with Ctrl-N for "New"?!
Nothing's "wrong" with it, it's just different.
IE uses Ctrl-N for "New Window". Firefox uses Ctrl-N for "New Window" and Ctrl-T for "New Tab". When Opera uses Ctrl-N for "New Tab" and Ctrl-Alt-N for "New Window", people who are used to the way the other browsers do it are momentarily confused. That's all. Not a big deal, just a brief and minor annoyance.
Besides that, can't you just change the setting in Opera anyway?
Apparently you can, but after five minutes of scratching my head I still can't figure out how to use Opera's keyboard shortcut changing UI, which must go down as the least intuitive interface I've ever seen in my life. It seems to expect you to type in the shortcut you want to use (most programs just let you press the keys), and it seems not to have any automatic way of resolving or even detecting conflicts.
(Yes, it's still better than Firefox, which AFAIK doesn't have any way to change the shortcut keys except maybe with an extension. But seriously, this sort of shoddy UI is inexcusable - crap is crap, even when the competition doesn't even have crap.)
Well, until the fair-use clause is overturned by law or by court that's going to be a hard arguement to make.
I don't think you understand.
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Two plus two is five.
Fair use is stealing.
The Party says it is so, so it must be so. Who are you to disagree, consumer?
An example of where the usage of MD5 isn't broken are *nix passwords. Your password is hashed with MD5 (a salt is added to your password too, but that's not important here)
Actually, the salt is extremely important. A large proportion of unsalted MD5 passwords can be cracked trivially by looking them up in pregenerated databases. MD5 alone is broken for passwords - it's only the salt that makes MD5 passwords still "good enough" for use on low-security machines... for the time being.
Seriously, I think that the term Linux has been in use so long that it has become a fairly generic term. While protection of the name may be somewhat important, the fact that it is in use and fairly generic would prevent others from trademarking it, where it isn't trademarked (or should at least).
With due respect, you clearly don't have the faintest clue what "generic" means.
Generic is when you use something that might be a trademark to refer to anything vaguely similar. For example, in Britain it's common to use the word "hoover" to refer to a vacuum cleaner of any brand: you have Hoover hoovers and Dyson hoovers. What that means is that "hoover" is becoming generic, and soon it might get to the point where Dyson could actually describe what they were making as hoovers, and Hoover wouldn't be able to sue them for it.
Likewise, Xerox have had to go to tremendous efforts to protect their trademark: if you stopped talking about copiers and started talking about xeroxes (of any brand), then the Xerox mark would have become generic. But we don't, we talk about copiers: so Xerox is not generic these days.
Now, is Linux generic? Of course it isn't! When you talk about Linux, you are talking about an operating system based on the Linux kernel. You wouldn't say "Microsoft Windows is a popular linux", or talk about the "FreeBSD linux", or say "OS X is based on the Mach micro-linux", because the generic term is "operating system" or "kernel", and "Linux" is the unique name for a particular kernel used to power a particular set of operating systems.
Sorry, but the Australians called it wrong this time. There may well be valid arguments against a Linux trademark, but genericity ain't one of them.
Nope, it's just that Mozilla/Firefox has received a lot of publicity in these news outlets for it's (supposed) security advantages over IE.
I'd say it's most appropriate for these same news outlets to follow up when those claims aren't upheld by reality.
Not upheld by reality? Wait, you're saying that Firefox no longer has any security advantages over IE, because one high-profile exploit has been released, and that after the vulnerability it exploits has been patched?
When more people have had their computers owned as a result of using Firefox than as a result of using IE, then you can start saying that the claim that Firefox is more secure than IE has "not been upheld by reality". Here's a clue for you: there are several tens of millions of infections to go before you have anything to gloat about.
Try Googling for "laser eggs terrorism". The story in question is filling the top three hits right now.
I never said the computer with WinMX got spyware from WinMX, just that it had spyware [that could have come from WinMX, since I don't know what else on the computer could have infected it].
They had Internet Explorer, right? Look, the kind of person who uses P2P software is also likely to be the kind of person who browses the dodgier side of the web, and if they didn't have the sense to use a secure browser, ownage is incredibly likely to ensue.
I can assure you that if WinMX ever contained spyware, then it was a form of spyware that Spybot never learned about. I can find no record on Google of anyone plausibly complaining about spyware in WinMX. In fact, apart from you and "Mustang Matt" a few posts up, I'm finding it jolly difficult to find anyone doing anything other than vociferously deny that it has ever contained spyware.
I am just expressing an opinion. . . . It's not a contest, it's not a jihad, it's not a playground argument. It's just some guy making a remark.
It's some guy making a remark about how he thinks Opera is better than Firefox, in an article about Firefox. This is accompanied by a patronising coda that attempts to portray users of Firefox as stupid, insecure, and unable to control their emotions.
We have a term for that here on Slashdot: it's "flamebait". It's not generally considered a nice thing to post, you know. In fact, some people think that people who post comments like that are what we call "trolls".
And yes, the same applies to the people who were ranting about open source in the "Opera is free" article. But good little boys know that just because someone else did something naughty doesn't mean it's okay for you to do it as well. I hope you're not a naughty little boy, are you, kahei?
At a guess, the English version doesn't have all those nasty spelling mistakes like "Fonts & Colors (sic)" which the careless American maintainers still haven't got round to fixing.
It's possible that it also replaces outlandish words like "cookies" with more familiar terms like "biscuits".
which is also available in Windows 2000 service packs 2 and above
Apparently it is. I didn't know that until you mentioned it just now; that's because Microsoft have hidden it as carefully as they could, to the extent that you have to run a cryptic command line to enable it. (If anyone else is interested, the details are here.)
Seriously, the only things that XP has above 2k are:
Not that I've bothered to upgrade to it yet myself...
The onus is on Google, as a "do no evil" company, to not break the law, perhaps?
Google's stance, clearly stated, is that they are not breaking the law. The onus is on the Authors Guild, as the plaintiffs, to prove that they are. When that's all done, then we can start talking about whether Google should have done this in the first place or not.
(Note, incidentally, that "doing no evil" and "not breaking the law" are not always identical; in this case they probably are, because you can hardly compare this to any of the obvious examples of evil laws that a righteous person would have to break, but it's important to keep the distinction firmly in mind nonetheless.)
How long has it been since your family went your country from Europe and killed the natives?
Well, let's see, the alliance against the Picts, made between Hengest and Horsa of the Saxons and Wyrtgeorn (Vortigern) of the Britons, which led to the Saxons settling in Britain, was made in AD 449 if the Chronicle is to be trusted; the Saxons then turned on the Britons about six years later, in 455, and conquered Kent within a year; the conquest of the rest of England took several hundred more years, the subjugation of the remaining Celtic lands (Cornwall, Wales, Cumbria, Scotland) took another millenium, and I guess you could say that the conflict is still ongoing in Northern Ireland.
And of course everything changes if he's of Danish ancestry (invasions of the north-east didn't begin till the 9th century AD) or from a Norman family (1066 and all that).
OT: Still wondering what MountainMan101 meant by "old in Oxford means before 1600". Standards must be falling fast. When I was there, "old" meant pre-1300, i.e. dating back to the early days of the university, and that wasn't that long ago...
If I want to distribute an author's book I need to ask permission.
No, if you want to distribute new copies of an author's book you need to ask permission. You are perfectly free to buy a few thousand copies from the publisher and do whatever you like with them - resell them at any price you choose, or give them away free, or leave them in hotel bedrooms - without asking permission.
And this is an important distinction, given that most EULAs try to prevent you exercising this same right with software. How long will it be before books have EULAs too? If the eBook finally takes off, do you think you'll be able to sell those second-hand?