Indeed. I think I've nailed down the essence of geekdom, and it has nothing to do with fear of woman, with schoolgirls or J-Pop or Superman. Anime, computers, D&D... these signs and talismans of our tradition have taken on a life of their own, so that folks see admirable geeks, and take on their attributes, thinking that they're alike, when in reality, they're just pathetic. Playing Counterstrike for years on end, but never writing a line of code, doesn't make you a l33t hacker.
Geeks learn. When normal folk shrug, say 'who cares', and walk away, geeks say, 'tell me more'. That's why geeks like poking at systems so much, whether that system is BSD or linguistics or D&D strategy or even comics continuity.
These hikikomori and their ilk? They deserve our pity, perhaps, but they're not geeks. They're a corner case, something that we shoudn't be venerating or admiring.
"Follow not in the footsteps of the masters, but rather seek what they sought."
I don't think your remarks about HTML versus manpages are terribly apropos. For command-line utilities, the --help and man are good for a quick overview. What manpages are you referring to that contain "tens of pages of minute technical settings that are outdated"?
For GUI tools, I have high hopes for Wink-based documentation, though it's by necessity quite task-oriented. What would you consider a decent source-level documentation tool for developers, apart from Doxygen? As in, what's better?
Whoa, skippy. It was more a comment on the amount of attention paid to the man, the fact that his name is used as a synonym for 'child molester' now. Hadn't you ever heard a certain character intone, "You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, would it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe."?
And anyway, if I wanted to assuage my white guilt about all those dead Injuns, I'd remind myself that filthy white-man disease killed off more natives than all the swords and guns they could muster.
Have you considered cracking your version? A lot of people legitimately own games and such, but choose to crack them because the copyright protection schemes are such a pain in the ass.
An iPod full of unauthorized MP3s is not criminal copyright infringement. Trading those MP3s is. A shared eMule folder full of unauthorized MP3s is quite criminal.
But if you leeched those MP3s, or otherwise got them without trading, they're not criminal. And apparently (Slashdot search is down, alas), you actually have to be shown to have uploaded a file for it to be considered distributed.
It's not the having that's criminal; it's not the downloading. It's the sharing.
The cops arrest people for civil cases? I had no idea!
And if you're talking about criminal copyright infringement, well, when a mugging victim declares that a police officer should go and arrest someone for beating them with a pipe who do they think is paying the police officer? Isn't it absurd to think that the mugger should pay?
I think you have a basic misunderstanding of how these things work.
Now, now. Let's wait to pass judgment until, y'know, the trial's over. I, for one, hope he is guilty, because if he's innocent, he'll have gone through hell and a half for no reason other than being really, really weird. And that shouldn't be a crime in America.
Even if you make a couple of thousand a year, that's still 6k of debt. And depending on where you get the loan, the interest could mean you're paying it off for decades. How many parents can afford 8k per year? I know that slashdot is generally full of rich kids, but in the real world, many families are lucky to have 1k a year spare after living costs.
A commonly-bandied figure is that the average lifetime income increase from a college education is a million bucks or so. Paying back $8,000 over ten years at an average of 5% a year interest leads to a total of about $13,000, or $1,300 a year. The median income differential between having and not having a bachelor's degree is more than ten times that.
Unless one is a goddamned idjit, one will also take advantage of the subsidized Stafford loans offered by the feds, which currently have an interest rate of 3.37%, which isn't exactly extortionate.
I'm afraid I don't know about this community college thing. If it's as good as a normal university then why not stay the whole time at the community college? How much does it cost in comparison?
Learn. Community colleges only provide the first two years of education; they don't do all four years. And, indeed, many low-income students attend community college for the two years that they can. Community colleges are somewhat like extended high schools.
In comparison, community college costs about (random sample here) $100 a credit. Which is $300 a course, I would reckon, or about $1500 a semester. On the other hand, it looks like those particular guys waive tuition for in-state students.
Then why does anyone bother going to the private ones?
Beats me. I got a tuition waiver to state school---my state has a free-ride program for anyone graduating in the top five percent of their class with above a 1400 SAT score or something like that, so I just paid for fees, room and board. They also have programs where they'll pay half tuition for high school graduates in the top ten percent with scores above 1200 and so forth.
I suppose that's not particularly helpful for the other ninety percent of high school graduates, however.
But no, I can't give you a damned reason why anyone would choose to go to, say, Boston University ($29k/year not including room and board) instead of UMass Boston ($4k/year; I don't think they have dorms).
Well, that's also assuming that they don't get a job while they're at college, and that they have absolutely no means of paying for it themselves at the time whatsoever---no parents, no nothing. Remember, $8k is the entire cost of living. If you get a student labor job, it's possible to make about a thousand bucks a semester to put toward the cost of schooling.
And if the cost still offends you, the first two years can be done from home, at a local community college, at a fraction of the cost; plenty of folks transfer in from a two-year program.
Oh, and many state universities are just as well-renowned as their private counterparts. Remember that UC Berkeley is a state school, and, for instance, the University of Connecticut has one of the best civil engineering programs in the country.
Go ahead and do it---the only way to know for sure is to test it in court. If Fox ignores you, you're cool. If Fox sends you a C&D, you can either knuckle under or fight it. If you fight it and win your fair-use ruling, you'll be financially ruined, but hey, you'll know that you were in the right.
There are frequent complains that open source coders only do fun work, not boring-but-important work. It's one of the biggest weak spots in open source, isn't it? Every month or so, there's an editorial pointing out that good software requires gruntwork, and that since this stuff is written from the goodness of our hearts, it won't get done.
Whoever ends up administering the fund should use it to fund boring tasks that no one wants to do, but that will increase the overall quality of any free project.
Anyone remember what these tasks were, by the way?
What sort of patent can you buy the rights to for under $150,000? What sort of useful patent can you buy the rights to for under $150,000? Do you have any idea how much it would have cost to get the rights to LZW? Or how much it would cost now to get the rights to arithmetic coding? MP3?
And isn't raising artificial barriers to integration something that the other guys do? We're supposed to be all about interoperability, aren't we? Winning on merit, and all that?
Really? I went through the US university system, and graduated with about $4,000 in debt, having paid about $2,000 in while I was still there. (I was on scholarship; I only paid for room and board. I would be nearly debt-free if they hadn't killed the Pell Grant program.)
Even if I hadn't been on scholarship, the cost of going there and living on campus is somewhere around $8,000 a year.
What, you have something against going to a state university?
Fair use is complicated, and works on a case-by-case basis. But, hey, you're a private citizen (of the US, I assume, since you asked about fair use), and if a large multinational decides to sue you, you're pretty much fucked even if you have a case you'd be likely to win.
But in theory, fair use is based on four factors, which the law lists as:
the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
the nature of the copyrighted work;
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
If you take screenshots of a movie to illustrate a movie review you write, that's probably fair use. If you take screenshots of a movie and use them to illustrate a children's book you've just written, you'd be quite liable. (Well, your publisher would slap you first, but if you self-published, you'd be liable.)
So the answer to your question is "a bathtub filled with brightly colored machine tools".
Frickin' sweet! Now to throttle my P2P apps to never upload (or at least overprioritize things that people don't sue over so much, like PG books, Linux ISOs and German fisting porn), and go buck frickin' wild.
Yes, but they're merely a hosting provider. The people who actually create and distribute the porn are not paid; Livejournal simply provides a place to host discussions (they don't even provide free image hosting).
Let me explain again; maybe I was vague. If you go over to livejournal, score a free account (they have open signup now), and join the show_your_boobs community, or whatever, no money has changed or will change hands. The people making the porn do not get paid. The people receiving the porn do not pay for it.
How exactly does livejournal paying its hosting bills with donations have anything to do with the communities it hosts being, as you put it, "for-profit ventures", when they don't take in a single cent?
I think the point is that if we wanted to know about CPU sockets, we could have just gone and read CPU socket over at Wikipedia. This isn't news, this is a basic reference article, and not a terribly good one at that.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. I think I've nailed down the essence of geekdom, and it has nothing to do with fear of woman, with schoolgirls or J-Pop or Superman. Anime, computers, D&D... these signs and talismans of our tradition have taken on a life of their own, so that folks see admirable geeks, and take on their attributes, thinking that they're alike, when in reality, they're just pathetic. Playing Counterstrike for years on end, but never writing a line of code, doesn't make you a l33t hacker.
Geeks learn. When normal folk shrug, say 'who cares', and walk away, geeks say, 'tell me more'. That's why geeks like poking at systems so much, whether that system is BSD or linguistics or D&D strategy or even comics continuity.
These hikikomori and their ilk? They deserve our pity, perhaps, but they're not geeks. They're a corner case, something that we shoudn't be venerating or admiring.
"Follow not in the footsteps of the masters, but rather seek what they sought."
--grendel drago
I don't think your remarks about HTML versus manpages are terribly apropos. For command-line utilities, the --help and man are good for a quick overview. What manpages are you referring to that contain "tens of pages of minute technical settings that are outdated"?
For GUI tools, I have high hopes for Wink-based documentation, though it's by necessity quite task-oriented. What would you consider a decent source-level documentation tool for developers, apart from Doxygen? As in, what's better?
--grendel drago
Whoa, skippy. It was more a comment on the amount of attention paid to the man, the fact that his name is used as a synonym for 'child molester' now. Hadn't you ever heard a certain character intone, "You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, would it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe."?
And anyway, if I wanted to assuage my white guilt about all those dead Injuns, I'd remind myself that filthy white-man disease killed off more natives than all the swords and guns they could muster.
--grendel drago
Have you considered cracking your version? A lot of people legitimately own games and such, but choose to crack them because the copyright protection schemes are such a pain in the ass.
--grendel drago
An iPod full of unauthorized MP3s is not criminal copyright infringement. Trading those MP3s is. A shared eMule folder full of unauthorized MP3s is quite criminal.
But if you leeched those MP3s, or otherwise got them without trading, they're not criminal. And apparently (Slashdot search is down, alas), you actually have to be shown to have uploaded a file for it to be considered distributed.
It's not the having that's criminal; it's not the downloading. It's the sharing.
--grendel drago
The cops arrest people for civil cases? I had no idea!
And if you're talking about criminal copyright infringement, well, when a mugging victim declares that a police officer should go and arrest someone for beating them with a pipe who do they think is paying the police officer? Isn't it absurd to think that the mugger should pay?
I think you have a basic misunderstanding of how these things work.
--grendel drago
It's better than lining the pockets of a pervert.
Now, now. Let's wait to pass judgment until, y'know, the trial's over. I, for one, hope he is guilty, because if he's innocent, he'll have gone through hell and a half for no reason other than being really, really weird. And that shouldn't be a crime in America.
--grendel drago
Even if you make a couple of thousand a year, that's still 6k of debt. And depending on where you get the loan, the interest could mean you're paying it off for decades. How many parents can afford 8k per year? I know that slashdot is generally full of rich kids, but in the real world, many families are lucky to have 1k a year spare after living costs.
A commonly-bandied figure is that the average lifetime income increase from a college education is a million bucks or so. Paying back $8,000 over ten years at an average of 5% a year interest leads to a total of about $13,000, or $1,300 a year. The median income differential between having and not having a bachelor's degree is more than ten times that.
Unless one is a goddamned idjit, one will also take advantage of the subsidized Stafford loans offered by the feds, which currently have an interest rate of 3.37%, which isn't exactly extortionate.
I'm afraid I don't know about this community college thing. If it's as good as a normal university then why not stay the whole time at the community college? How much does it cost in comparison?
Learn. Community colleges only provide the first two years of education; they don't do all four years. And, indeed, many low-income students attend community college for the two years that they can. Community colleges are somewhat like extended high schools.
In comparison, community college costs about (random sample here) $100 a credit. Which is $300 a course, I would reckon, or about $1500 a semester. On the other hand, it looks like those particular guys waive tuition for in-state students.
Then why does anyone bother going to the private ones?
Beats me. I got a tuition waiver to state school---my state has a free-ride program for anyone graduating in the top five percent of their class with above a 1400 SAT score or something like that, so I just paid for fees, room and board. They also have programs where they'll pay half tuition for high school graduates in the top ten percent with scores above 1200 and so forth.
I suppose that's not particularly helpful for the other ninety percent of high school graduates, however.
But no, I can't give you a damned reason why anyone would choose to go to, say, Boston University ($29k/year not including room and board) instead of UMass Boston ($4k/year; I don't think they have dorms).
--grendel drago
Well, that's also assuming that they don't get a job while they're at college, and that they have absolutely no means of paying for it themselves at the time whatsoever---no parents, no nothing. Remember, $8k is the entire cost of living. If you get a student labor job, it's possible to make about a thousand bucks a semester to put toward the cost of schooling.
And if the cost still offends you, the first two years can be done from home, at a local community college, at a fraction of the cost; plenty of folks transfer in from a two-year program.
Oh, and many state universities are just as well-renowned as their private counterparts. Remember that UC Berkeley is a state school, and, for instance, the University of Connecticut has one of the best civil engineering programs in the country.
--grendel drago
Just booted it on a laptop I have here. Anyone know why in the blue hell there's an 'xpdf' under the 'Lost and Found' menu?
It definitely has some beta feel to it. Things listed twice in the menus and so forth.
--grendel drago
Go ahead and do it---the only way to know for sure is to test it in court. If Fox ignores you, you're cool. If Fox sends you a C&D, you can either knuckle under or fight it. If you fight it and win your fair-use ruling, you'll be financially ruined, but hey, you'll know that you were in the right.
Yep, that's what we call a chilling effect.
--grendel drago
There are frequent complains that open source coders only do fun work, not boring-but-important work. It's one of the biggest weak spots in open source, isn't it? Every month or so, there's an editorial pointing out that good software requires gruntwork, and that since this stuff is written from the goodness of our hearts, it won't get done.
Whoever ends up administering the fund should use it to fund boring tasks that no one wants to do, but that will increase the overall quality of any free project.
Anyone remember what these tasks were, by the way?
--grendel drago
What sort of patent can you buy the rights to for under $150,000? What sort of useful patent can you buy the rights to for under $150,000? Do you have any idea how much it would have cost to get the rights to LZW? Or how much it would cost now to get the rights to arithmetic coding? MP3?
And isn't raising artificial barriers to integration something that the other guys do? We're supposed to be all about interoperability, aren't we? Winning on merit, and all that?
--grendel drago
Really? I went through the US university system, and graduated with about $4,000 in debt, having paid about $2,000 in while I was still there. (I was on scholarship; I only paid for room and board. I would be nearly debt-free if they hadn't killed the Pell Grant program.)
Even if I hadn't been on scholarship, the cost of going there and living on campus is somewhere around $8,000 a year.
What, you have something against going to a state university?
--grendel drago
Heck, you can do your gaming on Linux as well.
The SNES was the apex of good game design, anyway. After the SNES, everything had to include FMV and 3D everything. Pfeh.
Well, you probably want a console if you're not a curmudgeon like me.
--grendel drago
But in theory, fair use is based on four factors, which the law lists as:
If you take screenshots of a movie to illustrate a movie review you write, that's probably fair use. If you take screenshots of a movie and use them to illustrate a children's book you've just written, you'd be quite liable. (Well, your publisher would slap you first, but if you self-published, you'd be liable.)
So the answer to your question is "a bathtub filled with brightly colored machine tools".
--grendel drago
Frickin' sweet! Now to throttle my P2P apps to never upload (or at least overprioritize things that people don't sue over so much, like PG books, Linux ISOs and German fisting porn), and go buck frickin' wild.
--grendel drago
It's equation fifteen on this page.
Happy to help!
--grendel drago
Yes, but they're merely a hosting provider. The people who actually create and distribute the porn are not paid; Livejournal simply provides a place to host discussions (they don't even provide free image hosting).
Let me explain again; maybe I was vague. If you go over to livejournal, score a free account (they have open signup now), and join the show_your_boobs community, or whatever, no money has changed or will change hands. The people making the porn do not get paid. The people receiving the porn do not pay for it.
How exactly does livejournal paying its hosting bills with donations have anything to do with the communities it hosts being, as you put it, "for-profit ventures", when they don't take in a single cent?
--grendel drago
I think the point is that if we wanted to know about CPU sockets, we could have just gone and read CPU socket over at Wikipedia. This isn't news, this is a basic reference article, and not a terribly good one at that.
--grendel drago
log_2 12 = log 12 / log 2 = 3.58...
Man, this Google Calculator thing comes in handy.
--grendel drago
Holy shit, did you just get modded up for bitch-slapping yourself?
That's some impressive Slashdot-judo, it is.
--grendel drago
Ah, The Dark Room. Possibly the greatest use of Flash, ever.
I don't know why there's an IE version and an other version, but there you have it.
--grendel drago
Porn sites are ALL for-profit ventures.
Care to explain how, precisely, Livejournal is a for-profit venture? They take donations, but one can join plenty of porn communities for free.
--grendel drago
Nah---I've just been around for a long while, and I remember to hit 'post anonymously' when I decide to go a-trolling.
--grendel drago