Listen to Obama's speech; he clearly asked for bipartisan cooperation and collaboration. It's the Republicans who have been trying to kill the bill, not because they object to its content (although many of them do), but rather because the White House will count the passage of any bill as a political victory for the President, and the Republicans don't want to give him that victory.
...for most users I'd imagine. The number of people I've seen close Norton/McAfee messages that say "For Gods' sake man, you're trial-ware virus subscription have expired - your computer could literally be ass-raped any minute!" leads me to think most users won't give a shit about other browsers.
Yeah, those users are funny. If you ask them whether they have antivirus software installed, they'll say "Yes, I think I have Norton... but oh yeah, that reminds me, I get this popup every time I turn my computer on, and I have to close it. Do you know how to fix that?"
It's not so popular lately, but it used to be quite common to hear jokes about the Polish being bizarrely stupid. For example, I saw a coffee mug someone made that says "Made in Poland" on the bottom, and has the handle on the inside. I'd always assumed that the term RPN was mostly a joke, although Wikipedia tells me there is a legitimate Polish connection there.
Anyway, how about this one?
Heaven is a place where all the police are all British, the cooks are French, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian, and everything is organized by the Swiss. In Hell, the cooks are all British, the mechanics are French, the police are German, the lovers are Swiss, and everything is organized by the Italians.
I've seen a couple of variations floating around with a few additions: in Heaven the wives are Japanese and the houses are American; in Hell the wives are American and the houses are Japanese.
Corporate America: our mistakes are our customers' fault and they need to pay through the nose or else they'll never learn.
This only really happens when the marketplace isn't competitive, which usually happens when the government isn't doing its job. In the cell phone market, there are competing companies, but the barrier to switching is high enough that there's little incentive for any of them to try to make their customers happy, because they know their customers won't leave anyway. If we didn't have two-year contracts, that wouldn't be true.
Mod parent up - Michael Geist is the author of the article, and he made a math error. The page Slashdot links to hasn't corrected the error yet; the author's own site has the correction:
Update: An earlier version of this column noted that record label liability could exceed $60 billion in this case. A reader helpfully noted the math gremlin - the correct number is $6 billion ($20,000 per infringement X 300,000 songs).
Once again: either find another solution, or write it your damn self. If I've chosen to release my widget under the GPL, it's because I don't want you to use it in your BSD/MIT project. My code, my choice, take it or leave it - and if you leave it, I don't have a problem with that. Heck, if you can make a better widget, maybe I'll drop mine and start using yours instead.
Then maybe I'll make some improvements to yours, and release my improvements under the GPL. Don't like that idea? Then pick a license that doesn't let me.
The melody, with one slight adjustment, is in the public domain. The words are still under copyright.
If you replace "happy birthday to you" with the words "good morning to all" sung to the same tune, you'll notice that "good" is one note, while "happy" is two. The melody, with one longer note at the beginning of each line (for "good") instead of two shorter notes (for "happy"), is in the public domain. However, the same melody with two shorter notes (for "happy") is under copyright. I'd call this a legal gray area.
The lyrics are definitely copyrighted, though, so unless you're doing an instrumental-only performance, you're infringing if you don't have a license.
If you'd step outside your own borders once in awhile, you'd recognize this sentence structure as something that works in a foreign language, but has been translated into English by a non-native speaker. Constructive criticism is useful, but please don't be unkind.
I'm not saying he's not intelligent, and I'm not saying his product is terrible. I'm merely saying he appears to have plunged into writing a web server without fully understanding the specifications that dictate how a web server is supposed to operate. I don't care how good his code is, if he didn't look at the specs first, or at least take the time to understand how other implementations work, the end result is pretty much guaranteed to suck.
Oh geez. He's returning Error 404 when a script crashes? That means he can't be bothered to find the list of HTTP status codes, because if he did he'd see that 404 is clearly the wrong choice. It also means he can't be bothered to look at other implementations, because then he'd have noticed that popular servers such as Apache and IIS return Error 500 when scripts are broken.
From this we can conclude that he probably hasn't read the HTTP protocol specification (because it'd be hard to read the spec but miss the list of status codes), and he has no idea how current servers work (so instead of copying their good ideas, he'll be reinventing his own broken wheels).
And from THAT we can conclude that his browser is a steaming pile of crap. The reason it's not open source is probably because he's afraid that somebody would read his code and make fun of him for it.
Heh, check out the actual 404 error message - it's malformed HTML 2.0! If you're going to go to the trouble of including a DOCTYPE declaration, you ought to at least validate the code.
If you're not American I can understand, if you are American then you're either 12, have lived in a box for all your life, or have experienced so much censorship in your life that you've never heard of it before, which is equally as sad.
Never heard the phrase 'Porch Monkey' even?
I'm a 31-year-old white American male, and I have never heard the phrase "Porch Monkey" other than in reference to "Clerks II". When I saw the Obama chimp cartoon, I didn't recognize it as being racist until someone explained the racial connection to me.
I wouldn't say I live in a box, but I would say that racism is not a daily part of my life. It's just not something I'm exposed to. Of course I'm aware that it exists, and I try to be sensitive to it, but how can I be expected to know that comparing black people to monkeys is racist (while comparing white people to monkeys is not) if I never see people comparing black people to monkeys?
When are you all going to learn that government is inherently bad; that it is inherently corrupt. And while there are a couple of functions it should provide to maintain civilization, the smaller we keep it the better... for all of us.
You don't think we knew that when we elected Obama? Of course we did, we just thought McCain/Palin would be even worse. Were we wrong? Maybe, but there's no way to know for sure.
I know, I know, we could have taken the principled stand and voted for a third party candidate... but what would that have accomplished, really? We'd still have either Obama or McCain in the White House. The election was surprisingly close, and some of us felt that doing our part to tip the balance in favor of the less undesirable of the two possible victors was important.
Really Obamas inability to get things passed is due to his own party fighting each other.
I'm not even sure I'd call it an inability to get things done - more of an unwillingness to get things done. If Obama had said "here's how health care reform is going to work, here's the bill, make whatever amendments you need to make but I won't sign it unless the final bill meets these criteria" they'd be done by now. Instead he said "hey Congress, come up with some sort of health care thing" and after months of hugely successful fearmongering followed it up with "here's an idea I think would work, but I'm not set on it; go figure out some sort of health care thing that meets most of these criteria at least somewhat, and if it doesn't actually make things worse we'll call it a victory."
Is anyone really surprised that the Democrats in Congress have been bickering? There's no leadership.
The whole purpose of having a prison at Guantanamo Bay is to create a legal grey area, where it could be argued that US law does not apply because it's not technically on US soil. It's an attempt to create a loophole in the Constitution, a way to bypass the rights that would be guaranteed to prisoners detained within our own borders. This is reprehensible, and it must stop.
Unfortunately we have a problem: most of the detainees are likely dangerous criminals, and should not be released, but because of the previous administration's incompetent bungling, we may not have sufficient evidence to convict them in a court of law. Those we can't convict must be released, and doing so will cause huge political problems for whoever releases them (although why nobody seemed to mind when President Bush released some of the Gitmo detainees, without trial, who then went back to rejoin the fight against us, is beyond me).
Commercial vendors won't target Chrome OS / Linux, they will target the web browsers, and that won't have any impact on the "monoculture" problem of the desktop.
Au contraire - as long as they don't target Internet Explorer, it will have a huge impact.
There are tons of web apps out there, designed by people who know nothing about any non-Windows OS (but they've at least heard of Macs). If these people weren't writing web apps, they'd be writing desktop GUI apps. Because they're writing web apps, and because Firefox and Chrome have sufficient market share for the developers to pay attention to them, I have no trouble running these web apps on Mac OS X or Ubuntu. If Chrome OS becomes more popular, this trend will only continue in a positive direction.
Of course, it would be nice if they'd write nice desktop apps that run natively on multiple platforms, but that's not going to happen. At least this way, I can get by without Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Listen to Obama's speech; he clearly asked for bipartisan cooperation and collaboration. It's the Republicans who have been trying to kill the bill, not because they object to its content (although many of them do), but rather because the White House will count the passage of any bill as a political victory for the President, and the Republicans don't want to give him that victory.
...for most users I'd imagine. The number of people I've seen close Norton/McAfee messages that say "For Gods' sake man, you're trial-ware virus subscription have expired - your computer could literally be ass-raped any minute!" leads me to think most users won't give a shit about other browsers.
Yeah, those users are funny. If you ask them whether they have antivirus software installed, they'll say "Yes, I think I have Norton... but oh yeah, that reminds me, I get this popup every time I turn my computer on, and I have to close it. Do you know how to fix that?"
Read, people! It's not that hard!
President Obama asked Congress to fix our health care system, too. Look how well that's working out.
Well, you don't hear many jokes about Poland,
It's not so popular lately, but it used to be quite common to hear jokes about the Polish being bizarrely stupid. For example, I saw a coffee mug someone made that says "Made in Poland" on the bottom, and has the handle on the inside. I'd always assumed that the term RPN was mostly a joke, although Wikipedia tells me there is a legitimate Polish connection there.
Anyway, how about this one?
Heaven is a place where all the police are all British, the cooks are French, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian, and everything is organized by the Swiss. In Hell, the cooks are all British, the mechanics are French, the police are German, the lovers are Swiss, and everything is organized by the Italians.
I've seen a couple of variations floating around with a few additions: in Heaven the wives are Japanese and the houses are American; in Hell the wives are American and the houses are Japanese.
Corporate America: our mistakes are our customers' fault and they need to pay through the nose or else they'll never learn.
This only really happens when the marketplace isn't competitive, which usually happens when the government isn't doing its job. In the cell phone market, there are competing companies, but the barrier to switching is high enough that there's little incentive for any of them to try to make their customers happy, because they know their customers won't leave anyway. If we didn't have two-year contracts, that wouldn't be true.
Mod parent up - Michael Geist is the author of the article, and he made a math error. The page Slashdot links to hasn't corrected the error yet; the author's own site has the correction:
Update: An earlier version of this column noted that record label liability could exceed $60 billion in this case. A reader helpfully noted the math gremlin - the correct number is $6 billion ($20,000 per infringement X 300,000 songs).
Once again: either find another solution, or write it your damn self. If I've chosen to release my widget under the GPL, it's because I don't want you to use it in your BSD/MIT project. My code, my choice, take it or leave it - and if you leave it, I don't have a problem with that. Heck, if you can make a better widget, maybe I'll drop mine and start using yours instead.
Then maybe I'll make some improvements to yours, and release my improvements under the GPL. Don't like that idea? Then pick a license that doesn't let me.
Yes, I was just noticing this recently too. Weird.
He used "hopefully" in the disjunct adverb form, which is correct.
Maybe you should go back to high school.
Though, I hear they aren't very tolerant of arrogant assholes like yourself.
Are you kidding? Last I checked, most high schools show favoritism toward arrogant assholes.
The melody, with one slight adjustment, is in the public domain. The words are still under copyright.
If you replace "happy birthday to you" with the words "good morning to all" sung to the same tune, you'll notice that "good" is one note, while "happy" is two. The melody, with one longer note at the beginning of each line (for "good") instead of two shorter notes (for "happy"), is in the public domain. However, the same melody with two shorter notes (for "happy") is under copyright. I'd call this a legal gray area.
The lyrics are definitely copyrighted, though, so unless you're doing an instrumental-only performance, you're infringing if you don't have a license.
The Internet is fun. :-)
If you'd step outside your own borders once in awhile, you'd recognize this sentence structure as something that works in a foreign language, but has been translated into English by a non-native speaker. Constructive criticism is useful, but please don't be unkind.
In case anyone missed the reference
Thank you! I was dimly aware of bits and pieces of this, but it's good to have it all laid out.
I'm not saying he's not intelligent, and I'm not saying his product is terrible. I'm merely saying he appears to have plunged into writing a web server without fully understanding the specifications that dictate how a web server is supposed to operate. I don't care how good his code is, if he didn't look at the specs first, or at least take the time to understand how other implementations work, the end result is pretty much guaranteed to suck.
Oh geez. He's returning Error 404 when a script crashes? That means he can't be bothered to find the list of HTTP status codes, because if he did he'd see that 404 is clearly the wrong choice. It also means he can't be bothered to look at other implementations, because then he'd have noticed that popular servers such as Apache and IIS return Error 500 when scripts are broken.
From this we can conclude that he probably hasn't read the HTTP protocol specification (because it'd be hard to read the spec but miss the list of status codes), and he has no idea how current servers work (so instead of copying their good ideas, he'll be reinventing his own broken wheels).
And from THAT we can conclude that his browser is a steaming pile of crap. The reason it's not open source is probably because he's afraid that somebody would read his code and make fun of him for it.
Heh, check out the actual 404 error message - it's malformed HTML 2.0! If you're going to go to the trouble of including a DOCTYPE declaration, you ought to at least validate the code.
Michelle Obama is not a politician. Attacking family members of a politician is a No-no.
Sorry, but to say the First Lady of the United States is not a politician is pretty ridiculous.
If you're not American I can understand, if you are American then you're either 12, have lived in a box for all your life, or have experienced so much censorship in your life that you've never heard of it before, which is equally as sad.
Never heard the phrase 'Porch Monkey' even?
I'm a 31-year-old white American male, and I have never heard the phrase "Porch Monkey" other than in reference to "Clerks II". When I saw the Obama chimp cartoon, I didn't recognize it as being racist until someone explained the racial connection to me.
I wouldn't say I live in a box, but I would say that racism is not a daily part of my life. It's just not something I'm exposed to. Of course I'm aware that it exists, and I try to be sensitive to it, but how can I be expected to know that comparing black people to monkeys is racist (while comparing white people to monkeys is not) if I never see people comparing black people to monkeys?
Yes, and it alternated between two sound clips, of Oscar singing "Oh I love trash" and "I love it because it's trash".
I wish there were a Mac OS X version.
When are you all going to learn that government is inherently bad; that it is inherently corrupt. And while there are a couple of functions it should provide to maintain civilization, the smaller we keep it the better... for all of us.
You don't think we knew that when we elected Obama? Of course we did, we just thought McCain/Palin would be even worse. Were we wrong? Maybe, but there's no way to know for sure.
I know, I know, we could have taken the principled stand and voted for a third party candidate... but what would that have accomplished, really? We'd still have either Obama or McCain in the White House. The election was surprisingly close, and some of us felt that doing our part to tip the balance in favor of the less undesirable of the two possible victors was important.
Besides, I hate Libertarians.
Really Obamas inability to get things passed is due to his own party fighting each other.
I'm not even sure I'd call it an inability to get things done - more of an unwillingness to get things done. If Obama had said "here's how health care reform is going to work, here's the bill, make whatever amendments you need to make but I won't sign it unless the final bill meets these criteria" they'd be done by now. Instead he said "hey Congress, come up with some sort of health care thing" and after months of hugely successful fearmongering followed it up with "here's an idea I think would work, but I'm not set on it; go figure out some sort of health care thing that meets most of these criteria at least somewhat, and if it doesn't actually make things worse we'll call it a victory."
Is anyone really surprised that the Democrats in Congress have been bickering? There's no leadership.
The whole purpose of having a prison at Guantanamo Bay is to create a legal grey area, where it could be argued that US law does not apply because it's not technically on US soil. It's an attempt to create a loophole in the Constitution, a way to bypass the rights that would be guaranteed to prisoners detained within our own borders. This is reprehensible, and it must stop.
Unfortunately we have a problem: most of the detainees are likely dangerous criminals, and should not be released, but because of the previous administration's incompetent bungling, we may not have sufficient evidence to convict them in a court of law. Those we can't convict must be released, and doing so will cause huge political problems for whoever releases them (although why nobody seemed to mind when President Bush released some of the Gitmo detainees, without trial, who then went back to rejoin the fight against us, is beyond me).
Commercial vendors won't target Chrome OS / Linux, they will target the web browsers, and that won't have any impact on the "monoculture" problem of the desktop.
Au contraire - as long as they don't target Internet Explorer, it will have a huge impact.
There are tons of web apps out there, designed by people who know nothing about any non-Windows OS (but they've at least heard of Macs). If these people weren't writing web apps, they'd be writing desktop GUI apps. Because they're writing web apps, and because Firefox and Chrome have sufficient market share for the developers to pay attention to them, I have no trouble running these web apps on Mac OS X or Ubuntu. If Chrome OS becomes more popular, this trend will only continue in a positive direction.
Of course, it would be nice if they'd write nice desktop apps that run natively on multiple platforms, but that's not going to happen. At least this way, I can get by without Windows.
MMM, BBQ.
But hey, that's a view that's not rabidly anti-Microsoft...
You must be new here! ;-)