In fact, open source software is only possible in a state of welfare, and a luxury others can't afford.
There are lots of efficiencies that only become possible in a relatively wealthy society, including things as basic as economic specialization. Looking at these things as non-essential luxuries is backwards - the ones we have are necessary prerequisites to a modern society, and the ones that we're just adopting now may very well be necessary pre-requisites to tomorrow's modern societies.
Example: Most people in rich countries don't grow their own food. This isn't a non-essential luxury; it's a necessary pre-requisite to specialization. If everyone had to be a farmer, no-one could do anything else full time. That means that we couldn't have progressed to anywhere near where we are today. We certainly wouldn't have computers, for example.
Free software isn't anywhere near as basic as modern agriculture, but it may have some of the same properties. Any software project that is started today is a massive leap ahead of a project started in 1980, not just because of the basic theoretical advances in the field, but because of a quarter of a century of free software development since then. You don't need to grow your own food, food is generally available. And it costs $0, and you can turn apples into pears with 50 grams of protein that taste like mangos if you want to take a little bit of time, and the comparison breaks down.
"Never blame on malice that which can be explained by incompetence."
Government beurocracy is bad enough without involving conspiracy theories.
95% of the time these rules of thumb are great. Problem is, the 5% of the time they're dangerously naive. Sometimes people really are malicious, and sometimes malicious people work together.
Good point, but I have to point out that interest in Gnutella was massive, while fewer people are interested in the inconvenience, high latency, and very low bandwidth of this kind of darknet.
Absolutely true, as things are now.
But if the need for torrent secrecy and the level of generally available bandwidth both increase, this sort of thing will be exactly what people want.
If nobody's out there promoting it with a website and support and a download link, few people will participate and it will slowly die.
Just like Gnutella. The "offical" client was up for one day in 2000 before being taken down, and it's still one of the top (if not the top) peer to peer protocols today.
is how a significant chunk of Slashdot users masturbate mentally. I masturbate mentally by pointing out the masturbation. It's very meta.
If you don't see value in a discussion, you're not going to add to it by posting about how unimportant it seems to you. No-one wants to here about all the things that *don't* interest you.
Then stop spreading the same boring anti-Linux nonsense.
but for God's sake do we need 15 apps that do all the same thing?
Not your call, not my call, not anyone's call. Programmers are free to work on what they're interested in doing. Distributions tend to pick sane defaults, and there's no need to complain about having other options.
Can we please get rid of the nag message if you try to login as root?
Who cares? If you're really an expert and know better, turn the message off.
Linux has no chance on the desktop until the basic UI gets professionally done.
You'll keep complaining about it until... get this... you choose to stop.
There never ever is any reason to censor this content. Even if it is horrible and it violates laws such a list is still the wrong approach. Over 80% of all child pornography sites are hosted in Europe or the USA. They are clearly illegal there so the servers themselves can be taken offline, a list is not required.
How is physically taking down servers based only on the form of the content they host not censorship?
Allowing that material to be disseminated further victimizes that child.
What if driving the material underground prevents the police from seeing it allowing the *actual abuse* of the child to continue? It doesn't make any sense to be more concerned about stopping people from seeing some pictures than about preventing children from being abused.
Those descriptions are terrible. The people committing those crimes should be stopped. And that means that the evidence should get to the police as fast as possible rather than being forced underground while the criminals hurt more children.
The usual argument is that the production of child porn is harmful to the children depicted in it. That it is evidence of a crime and its distribution a furtherance of that crime by that it creates a market for more production, thus the abuse of more children.
Apply that same logic to pictures of, say, a murder. You wouldn't want to ban the pictures - they're evidence of a crime that might bring the perpetrator to justice.
Is that the standard being applied here? That child porn is harmful to adults?
Exactly. Just like gay porn, anyone who sees it immediately has their sexual preference permanently shifted to it. Apparently if shown multiple pictures, people automatically have their preferences shifted to whatever is most perverse. This is obviously absurd, but it keeps showing up as a legitimately-presented argument for the strict illegality of child pornography.
The best argument I've heard for banning child pornography pictures is lack of authorization. The child can't have agreed to have the pictures distributed, and any agreement by their parents was illegitimate. But this would make distribution of child porn logically a civil offense that wasn't worth pursuing beyond the first hop or so.
In a relatively free society, quiet self-censorship can be worse than blatant government censorship because the government censorship would be quickly stopped by popular protest. The safest thing to do is to resist *any* attempt to constrain communication, but overhyped emotionally charged issues like child porn work very well to disrupt that reaction.
Some of these issues are real some of the time, but nearly all of your post just sounds like you're complaining that things aren't exactly the same as what you're used to.
The latest Ubuntu works beautifully for anyone who actually wants to get stuff done rather than complaining that the "open file" dialog doesn't automatically grow when you change your font size preference or whatever.
There hasn't been a coherent argument made about copyright on Slashdot ever. It boils down to greed on both sides, and people screaming why their greed is more important to satisfy. It's like a cosmic joke, only it's too stupid to be cosmic.
Bullshit. Like any interesting issue, there are excellent arguments on both sides. In this case, many of those arguments *have* been made in a coherent manner in Slashdot posts. If you can't understand the arguments, all that means is that you aren't in a position to have an informed opinion on the topic.
Medicare and social security actually do something. Social security even has it's own tax category to do it with. Calling military spending "defense spending" is a joke. Our international military deployments certainly aren't *helping* our national defense.
Now I'm not saying that I'm *for* social security or medicare, but at least there's a debate to be had on that topic. The same really can't be said for the military issue. Do you seriously think that the Air Force needs a permanent presence in Bulgaria, Equador, Germany, Greece, Greenland, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Kyrgyzstan, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, and the United Kingdom?
Then, of course, this is akin to a PHB throwing out buzzwords.
That's all it is anyway. "Conservative" and "liberal" have more emotional meaning than information content. They're teams, like baseball teams, and they act primarily to make you dismiss good ideas half the time - because "the other team" suggested them, and usually did so using "other team" propaganda phrasing that you emotionally reject.
Right... Cause its not like they would ever raise or sunset them?
They could do that anyway. Taxes aren't perfectly predictable, but people *do* make budgeting decisions based on their tax rates.
I'm not trying to argue that tax cuts are the ultimate plan for this stimulus package, just that you certainly can't generalize from one-time tax rebates to actual tax cuts.
The terms "left", "right", "liberal", "conservative", and the derived term "centrist" mostly just serve to confuse any attempt at useful political discussion. These terms lump all of politics into two piles of mostly unrelated positions on mostly irrelevant topics.
In the United States, the absolute biggest political issue at the federal level should be the reduction of military expenditures. We've been spending a third of our tax revenue bombing civilians and maintaining major bases in many different foreign countries. We've never been able to afford this foolishness, and we certainly can't afford it now.
But "left" and "right" doesn't help on that at all. The mainstream "left" and "right" both consistently raise our military spending. The "far left" and "far right" completely agree: this military spending needs to be cut.
Isn't it suspect that in our mainstream political discussion there isn't even a single *term* for a group that wants to reduce our military back down to a reasonable size? It's the "extremist crazies" who want that, called by the same terms as "skinheads" and "hippie terrorist sympathizers".
Im all for tax cuts but we tried handing everyone a check last year and it did little to prevent this.
Surprise rebates are drastically different from tax cuts. With a tax cut, you know you'll have X amount more money for years - you might buy a house or enter a business venture where you otherwise wouldn't. With a surprise rebate, you'll go out to dinner and maybe take the kids to six flags.
The still-incomprehensibly-huge amount has nothing to do with it.
10 billion dollars is on the order of $100 per household in the US. That's a good chunk of money, but I doubt it would fund FTTH for everyone. $1000/household, in contrast, very well might be enough to outright fund the infrastructure.
My guess is that there's absolutely no margin for CBS in trying to block proxy users. The only reason they block is due to the demands of advertisers and/or foreign licensees - if a user works around that block CBS wins an ad view.
If you're willing to pay (even a little bit) you have tons of apparently high quality options.
Re:I am afraid, there is lack of direction for Rub
on
Ruby 1.9.1 Released
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· Score: 1
And sys admins are to maintain all those those servers you are buying are equally cheap. How about the DBA's? etc etc. Everytime you overly complicate your architecture, you extend your cost.
The same one sysadmin can handle four web servers instead of two, or eight instead of four. A slow interpreter doesn't make the database any slower, so the DBA bit is irrelevant. The application will probably be limited by something other than interpreter speed anyway; needing more servers at all is just absolute worst case.
Additionally, Ruby devs seem to think they have a 'MAGIC LANGUAGE' that allows them to develop so fast that all other languages are absolete. Got news for you... all languages have MVC frameworks, all languages can use patterns. These are not new concepts. Ruby is not fast for development.
You're making this assertion - that language doesn't matter to development speed - for the third time. It's blatantly wrong. Consider assembly language vs Python. The reason that Python is more productive is that it allows for more abstraction and less code. Ruby allows for more abstraction and less code than PHP does, and therefore will be faster to work in. Libraries and patterns don't change this - again, clearly demonstrated by considering Assembly (or C).
Slashdot Mirror
There are lots of efficiencies that only become possible in a relatively wealthy society, including things as basic as economic specialization. Looking at these things as non-essential luxuries is backwards - the ones we have are necessary prerequisites to a modern society, and the ones that we're just adopting now may very well be necessary pre-requisites to tomorrow's modern societies.
Example: Most people in rich countries don't grow their own food. This isn't a non-essential luxury; it's a necessary pre-requisite to specialization. If everyone had to be a farmer, no-one could do anything else full time. That means that we couldn't have progressed to anywhere near where we are today. We certainly wouldn't have computers, for example.
Free software isn't anywhere near as basic as modern agriculture, but it may have some of the same properties. Any software project that is started today is a massive leap ahead of a project started in 1980, not just because of the basic theoretical advances in the field, but because of a quarter of a century of free software development since then. You don't need to grow your own food, food is generally available. And it costs $0, and you can turn apples into pears with 50 grams of protein that taste like mangos if you want to take a little bit of time, and the comparison breaks down.
95% of the time these rules of thumb are great. Problem is, the 5% of the time they're dangerously naive. Sometimes people really are malicious, and sometimes malicious people work together.
Absolutely true, as things are now.
But if the need for torrent secrecy and the level of generally available bandwidth both increase, this sort of thing will be exactly what people want.
Just like Gnutella. The "offical" client was up for one day in 2000 before being taken down, and it's still one of the top (if not the top) peer to peer protocols today.
If you don't see value in a discussion, you're not going to add to it by posting about how unimportant it seems to you. No-one wants to here about all the things that *don't* interest you.
Then stop spreading the same boring anti-Linux nonsense.
Not your call, not my call, not anyone's call. Programmers are free to work on what they're interested in doing. Distributions tend to pick sane defaults, and there's no need to complain about having other options.
Who cares? If you're really an expert and know better, turn the message off.
You'll keep complaining about it until... get this... you choose to stop.
How is physically taking down servers based only on the form of the content they host not censorship?
What if driving the material underground prevents the police from seeing it allowing the *actual abuse* of the child to continue? It doesn't make any sense to be more concerned about stopping people from seeing some pictures than about preventing children from being abused.
Those descriptions are terrible. The people committing those crimes should be stopped. And that means that the evidence should get to the police as fast as possible rather than being forced underground while the criminals hurt more children.
Apply that same logic to pictures of, say, a murder. You wouldn't want to ban the pictures - they're evidence of a crime that might bring the perpetrator to justice.
Exactly. Just like gay porn, anyone who sees it immediately has their sexual preference permanently shifted to it. Apparently if shown multiple pictures, people automatically have their preferences shifted to whatever is most perverse. This is obviously absurd, but it keeps showing up as a legitimately-presented argument for the strict illegality of child pornography.
The best argument I've heard for banning child pornography pictures is lack of authorization. The child can't have agreed to have the pictures distributed, and any agreement by their parents was illegitimate. But this would make distribution of child porn logically a civil offense that wasn't worth pursuing beyond the first hop or so.
In a relatively free society, quiet self-censorship can be worse than blatant government censorship because the government censorship would be quickly stopped by popular protest. The safest thing to do is to resist *any* attempt to constrain communication, but overhyped emotionally charged issues like child porn work very well to disrupt that reaction.
This is mostly nonsense.
Some of these issues are real some of the time, but nearly all of your post just sounds like you're complaining that things aren't exactly the same as what you're used to.
The latest Ubuntu works beautifully for anyone who actually wants to get stuff done rather than complaining that the "open file" dialog doesn't automatically grow when you change your font size preference or whatever.
Bullshit. Like any interesting issue, there are excellent arguments on both sides. In this case, many of those arguments *have* been made in a coherent manner in Slashdot posts. If you can't understand the arguments, all that means is that you aren't in a position to have an informed opinion on the topic.
Medicare and social security actually do something. Social security even has it's own tax category to do it with. Calling military spending "defense spending" is a joke. Our international military deployments certainly aren't *helping* our national defense.
Now I'm not saying that I'm *for* social security or medicare, but at least there's a debate to be had on that topic. The same really can't be said for the military issue. Do you seriously think that the Air Force needs a permanent presence in Bulgaria, Equador, Germany, Greece, Greenland, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Kyrgyzstan, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, and the United Kingdom?
Dude. The Yukon.
That's all it is anyway. "Conservative" and "liberal" have more emotional meaning than information content. They're teams, like baseball teams, and they act primarily to make you dismiss good ideas half the time - because "the other team" suggested them, and usually did so using "other team" propaganda phrasing that you emotionally reject.
They could do that anyway. Taxes aren't perfectly predictable, but people *do* make budgeting decisions based on their tax rates.
I'm not trying to argue that tax cuts are the ultimate plan for this stimulus package, just that you certainly can't generalize from one-time tax rebates to actual tax cuts.
The terms "left", "right", "liberal", "conservative", and the derived term "centrist" mostly just serve to confuse any attempt at useful political discussion. These terms lump all of politics into two piles of mostly unrelated positions on mostly irrelevant topics.
In the United States, the absolute biggest political issue at the federal level should be the reduction of military expenditures. We've been spending a third of our tax revenue bombing civilians and maintaining major bases in many different foreign countries. We've never been able to afford this foolishness, and we certainly can't afford it now.
But "left" and "right" doesn't help on that at all. The mainstream "left" and "right" both consistently raise our military spending. The "far left" and "far right" completely agree: this military spending needs to be cut.
Isn't it suspect that in our mainstream political discussion there isn't even a single *term* for a group that wants to reduce our military back down to a reasonable size? It's the "extremist crazies" who want that, called by the same terms as "skinheads" and "hippie terrorist sympathizers".
Surprise rebates are drastically different from tax cuts. With a tax cut, you know you'll have X amount more money for years - you might buy a house or enter a business venture where you otherwise wouldn't. With a surprise rebate, you'll go out to dinner and maybe take the kids to six flags.
10 billion dollars is on the order of $100 per household in the US. That's a good chunk of money, but I doubt it would fund FTTH for everyone. $1000/household, in contrast, very well might be enough to outright fund the infrastructure.
I, in Lowell, Massachussetts, have the same DSL connection that I would have if I lived in Whitehorse, Yukon.
The population density argument is bullshit.
My guess is that there's absolutely no margin for CBS in trying to block proxy users. The only reason they block is due to the demands of advertisers and/or foreign licensees - if a user works around that block CBS wins an ad view.
It took me about 5 minutes to find these guys: https://www.megaproxy.com/learn/free_vs_advanced/
If you're willing to pay (even a little bit) you have tons of apparently high quality options.
The same one sysadmin can handle four web servers instead of two, or eight instead of four. A slow interpreter doesn't make the database any slower, so the DBA bit is irrelevant. The application will probably be limited by something other than interpreter speed anyway; needing more servers at all is just absolute worst case.
You're making this assertion - that language doesn't matter to development speed - for the third time. It's blatantly wrong. Consider assembly language vs Python. The reason that Python is more productive is that it allows for more abstraction and less code. Ruby allows for more abstraction and less code than PHP does, and therefore will be faster to work in. Libraries and patterns don't change this - again, clearly demonstrated by considering Assembly (or C).
Most users don't need CMYK support. Even some who think they need CMYK support, don't need CMYK support.
Given that, the GIMP is perfectly fine for the vast majority of people who need to edit raster graphics.