I don't see that as a problem, rather as a worthwhile detail to note when understanding what they are measuring: not the quality of government, but simply what it's like to be a journalist there in general.
Universal Human rights? Is that anywhere in the Constitution? No.
Really? No universal rights in a nation's local constitution? Wow. Which constitution are you talking about, by the way?
This ranking system is flawed in that different countries have different rules for journalism
Umm, yes?. How is that a flaw with the ranking? Or more to the point: What other reason could there possibly be to have a ranking at all, than the fact that rules differ? The whole point is to compare what it's like to be a journalist in different places. Noone is trying to cover up that that they're pushing the journalists' agenda, and their own opinion on what their rights should be, but no matter what those are, of course it's fair to compare local practices.
Are they wanting reporters to be above the law or what?
No, they are wanting the local law to be friendly to journalism. This is the case to varying degrees in varying locales, and in many places varies over time.
Just because something is "law" does not make it right, and most certainly does not mean there is still freedom of the press. Some laws that curb journalism may be good and/or necessary (always arguably), but in many cases the restrictions actually (in the opinion of many) pose a greater threat to the well-being of the people and society than the dangers that those restrictions could realistically avert.
The only people this affects are people who were captured actively plotting or engaged in warfare against the United States, its armed forces and or its allies
Right. Also, why don't we just abandon the whole court system and let the cops just lock people up directly (after agood beating)? After all, this only applies to the criminals they catch. Why bother about their rights?
Some of us have more than two synapses, are familiar witht the concept of "checks and balances", and are able to see the problem with a "guilty by accusation" policy.
See, it's that sort of attitude that keeps it from improving. It is not the job of users to prove they have a right to not like products. The user can just leave without providing any reason at all, and he does. It is the job of developers to make sure the product satisfies the users. If you don't know what the problem is, find out. If people are leaving, you can be damn sure the problem is there somewhere. Even if it might not seem like a problem to you. If your map doesn't fit the terrain, it is by definition the map that is wrong. Anyone who has done any work with usability and interface design can tell you this, and a bunch of stories about co-developers who just don't get it, and blame users of being wrong about the uasability, as if that is even possible.
To wax philosophical: Value cannot exist in a vacuum, it requires someone who values. External user-oriented features of a product receive their value through being valued by the users, not by the developers. How much the developer values the current state of affairs is irrelevent. Just like it doesn't matter how much think my car is worth, only whgat the buyer is willing to pay, or like in public debate it doesn't matter what I meant to say, it is what people hear that determines the effect.
And the GIMP, while an impressive feat in many ways, shows clear evidence that the people who really knows the needs of professional graphics people (or amateurs, for that amtter), are not in charge.
Now, if you're mainly programming to satisfy your own needs or those of the rest of the developers, you are the user, and everything is hunky dory. Just don't be surprised that othe user groups, professional graphics people, might not share your view of the product.
Now if you were legally liable for the damages your system did, regardless of whether or not it was rooted, we'd see a major change in botnets,
You'd see a major change in government and the law swiftly gone is what you'd see. Well, in any democracy, anyway. This simply won't resonate with people's sense of justice; to most people it would seem like holding you responsible for what any maniac does with your stolen property. And I'm not even talking about stolen weapons here, but any stolen car, hammer or length of rope.
But there could be a kind middle ground: require ISPs to quarantine infected machines, and fine _them_ if tey don't. Just like regular quarantine: not punishment, just necessary protection until the threat is gone, even if the individual is not at fault. The hard part would be motivating the ISPs to follow the rules, i.e. the technical ability to check if they're doing it properly, having the capacity to perform those checks, and suitable readctions if they don't.
Of course, both these strategies have the gaping flaw that they only work within each legislastion, which the internet famously does not.
I think you're barking up the wron tree. IRC is convenient to use for admin because it is already there, and the peoelp writing this stuff are already well versed in it. If it was not there, rigging up some sort of dedicated infrastructure would not be particularly hard. For example some sort of p2p net between infected machines.
"Of course, digitised books have advantages too, [...] but not very good for fiction. "
I disagree. If they offer good one-handed use, I'm signing up for one as soon as a the selection grows to anything convincing. I read most of my fiction while commuting on public transport. Turning the page in a regular paperback while balancing your takeout-coffee is clumsy, especially without the bookmark falling out. If If I find the current song on my pod needs to be rated down (I usually play in shuffle-mode on a rating-based playlist), that is also a hassle. Being able to just stuff it in my pocket when my stop arrives (always too suddenly) and still find the page next time would be a nice bonus too. I've kept hearing people say comuters can never replace books for years now, but very few of them seem to realise that most of the problem is the screen. The moment people have seen areal-life reflective screen with high enough resolution and contrast to rival paper, many will reconsider; it just bever occurred to them that such a thing could exist.
This raises an ethical concern for me. I think we should be asking ourselves "Is it really ok to subvert lifeforms like this for our own use?"
Yes, it's a slippery slope. If we allow this, before you know it they will be using higher life forms like plants or even animals to serve human needs.
- Is this just a selective set of planetary features? (I doubt it, since these are the most prominent ones on various planets, earth excluded)
-and excluding the face on mars, which is just a fairly typical martian mountain except that is shadow patterns look a bit weird when viewed from a specific angle in a specific light using really fuzzy photography.
The SE walkman phones have a pretty good player, and can run as player only with the phone off (*for plane use). The camera is still way behind dedicated ones, though.
God, that plot element annoyed the hell out of me. Such a glaring hole in an otherwise finely crafted scenario: Everyone knows humans and animals don't produce energy, we consume it (convert incoming usable chemical energy to waste heat). And the better solution is so close too: it would have been so much cooler if the machines rathe treated us as self-organising massively parallell computing power, and used it to implement themselves.
You don't need to predict it very well. The house marign isn't all that big in roulette. Random betting will bleed you dry only slowly (if you spread your money thinly enough to still be there for the lucky ones). Just skewing the odds a little means you can make instead of lose money over time.
No glass fiber will be able to divert a laser in the space of a chip, or even on a motherboard.
But you don't need to use fiber. The cool thing about fibers is that you can let them flop around any old way, almost like electrical cables, which is really practical compared to, say, a complex and fragile setup to let a beam travel in a finely calibrated and set pattern between fixed mirrors.
Bt on a chip things don't flop around. You can simply make mirrors, or even better, waveguides, that change the direction of a beam very directly indeed, without the constant bouncing around inside that makes an optical fibre work.
Anyone who is pissed about the outcome is just angry because everyone else didnt vote Bush out.
The problem with that kind of statement, though on the surface it seems so brazenly to "cut through the crap" etc. etc, is that it would work equally well even if the elections were in fact rigged, as if they were not. Hence, it contains exactly zero information about the claim undetr attack, and zero weight as argument.
This particular instance falls uncer the class of fallacies called "poisoning the well": attacking motives in stead of claims/arguments, event though the soundness of those claims are independent of motive. If the world's greatest villain repeats a truth, it does not cease to be true (nor can any speaker's virtue make a bad argument sound).
Jesus, what a grumpy and blind-to-everything-new aricle.
Javascript ships with all the major browsers. You can do line-by-line programming just fine for all those simple tasks, and use "alert" as your output. As you need more sphisticated output, you can learn document.write and then move on to manipulating the DOM, thus gaining an easy, early and intuitive understanding of simple object orientation.
Several of the languages he mentions (perl python) also allow perfectly well the line-by-line stuff he complains about, but they're not installed by default on a PC. BASIC closer to the metal? Sure, Basic is simpler to implement than Perl, but these kids aren't implementing languages. And the BASIC interpreter's primitiveness in no way translates to the programmer following what the machine does any better than, say, Javascript does. You assign to variables in both. To a novice it is of no account whatsoever how much exstra occurs behind the curtian when you do that.
I'm right handed, but like many had to switch mouse hands due to shoulder pains. It only took a week to lose the "hadicapped" feeling, and couple more to feel fluent in all but the most exacting tasks (i.e. 3D modeling etc. where a pixel or two counts took manybe 2 months).
I found it very helpful to switch mouse buttons at the same time. Feels much more similar to use the "same finger" than the same button. YMMV.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see that as a problem, rather as a worthwhile detail to note when understanding what they are measuring: not the quality of government, but simply what it's like to be a journalist there in general.
No, it only show that laws are not the only thing taken into account. Go take a logic course.
Universal Human rights? Is that anywhere in the Constitution? No.
Really? No universal rights in a nation's local constitution? Wow. Which constitution are you talking about, by the way?
This ranking system is flawed in that different countries have different rules for journalism
Umm, yes?. How is that a flaw with the ranking? Or more to the point: What other reason could there possibly be to have a ranking at all, than the fact that rules differ? The whole point is to compare what it's like to be a journalist in different places. Noone is trying to cover up that that they're pushing the journalists' agenda, and their own opinion on what their rights should be, but no matter what those are, of course it's fair to compare local practices.
Are they wanting reporters to be above the law or what?
No, they are wanting the local law to be friendly to journalism. This is the case to varying degrees in varying locales, and in many places varies over time.
Just because something is "law" does not make it right, and most certainly does not mean there is still freedom of the press. Some laws that curb journalism may be good and/or necessary (always arguably), but in many cases the restrictions actually (in the opinion of many) pose a greater threat to the well-being of the people and society than the dangers that those restrictions could realistically avert.
The only people this affects are people who were captured actively plotting or engaged in warfare against the United States, its armed forces and or its allies
Right. Also, why don't we just abandon the whole court system and let the cops just lock people up directly (after agood beating)? After all, this only applies to the criminals they catch. Why bother about their rights?
Some of us have more than two synapses, are familiar witht the concept of "checks and balances", and are able to see the problem with a "guilty by accusation" policy.
See, it's that sort of attitude that keeps it from improving. It is not the job of users to prove they have a right to not like products. The user can just leave without providing any reason at all, and he does. It is the job of developers to make sure the product satisfies the users. If you don't know what the problem is, find out. If people are leaving, you can be damn sure the problem is there somewhere. Even if it might not seem like a problem to you. If your map doesn't fit the terrain, it is by definition the map that is wrong. Anyone who has done any work with usability and interface design can tell you this, and a bunch of stories about co-developers who just don't get it, and blame users of being wrong about the uasability, as if that is even possible.
To wax philosophical: Value cannot exist in a vacuum, it requires someone who values. External user-oriented features of a product receive their value through being valued by the users, not by the developers. How much the developer values the current state of affairs is irrelevent. Just like it doesn't matter how much think my car is worth, only whgat the buyer is willing to pay, or like in public debate it doesn't matter what I meant to say, it is what people hear that determines the effect.
And the GIMP, while an impressive feat in many ways, shows clear evidence that the people who really knows the needs of professional graphics people (or amateurs, for that amtter), are not in charge.
Now, if you're mainly programming to satisfy your own needs or those of the rest of the developers, you are the user, and everything is hunky dory. Just don't be surprised that othe user groups, professional graphics people, might not share your view of the product.
Now if you were legally liable for the damages your system did, regardless of whether or not it was rooted, we'd see a major change in botnets,
You'd see a major change in government and the law swiftly gone is what you'd see. Well, in any democracy, anyway. This simply won't resonate with people's sense of justice; to most people it would seem like holding you responsible for what any maniac does with your stolen property. And I'm not even talking about stolen weapons here, but any stolen car, hammer or length of rope.
But there could be a kind middle ground: require ISPs to quarantine infected machines, and fine _them_ if tey don't. Just like regular quarantine: not punishment, just necessary protection until the threat is gone, even if the individual is not at fault. The hard part would be motivating the ISPs to follow the rules, i.e. the technical ability to check if they're doing it properly, having the capacity to perform those checks, and suitable readctions if they don't.
Of course, both these strategies have the gaping flaw that they only work within each legislastion, which the internet famously does not.
Sue the IRC networks first;
Or better yet, sue the internet.
I think you're barking up the wron tree. IRC is convenient to use for admin because it is already there, and the peoelp writing this stuff are already well versed in it. If it was not there, rigging up some sort of dedicated infrastructure would not be particularly hard. For example some sort of p2p net between infected machines.
"Of course, digitised books have advantages too, [...] but not very good for fiction. "
I disagree. If they offer good one-handed use, I'm signing up for one as soon as a the selection grows to anything convincing. I read most of my fiction while commuting on public transport. Turning the page in a regular paperback while balancing your takeout-coffee is clumsy, especially without the bookmark falling out. If If I find the current song on my pod needs to be rated down (I usually play in shuffle-mode on a rating-based playlist), that is also a hassle. Being able to just stuff it in my pocket when my stop arrives (always too suddenly) and still find the page next time would be a nice bonus too. I've kept hearing people say comuters can never replace books for years now, but very few of them seem to realise that most of the problem is the screen. The moment people have seen areal-life reflective screen with high enough resolution and contrast to rival paper, many will reconsider; it just bever occurred to them that such a thing could exist.
Or more importantly, in a fight, who would win:
- Radiocative snails
- Sharks with frickin lasers on their heads
Mod "Interesting" for snails, "Informative" for sharks.I can't believe people still believe the "stuff made today is shit, while everything made in the past lasted forever" meme.
Well, who cares how long players last these days anyway, when noone makes any decent music anymore?
Personally, I iPods suck, and didn't buy one.
That's not the issue here. The question was "do enough people share your priorities to kill the ipod?"
This raises an ethical concern for me. I think we should be asking ourselves "Is it really ok to subvert lifeforms like this for our own use?"
Yes, it's a slippery slope. If we allow this, before you know it they will be using higher life forms like plants or even animals to serve human needs.
- Is this just a selective set of planetary features? (I doubt it, since these are the most prominent ones on various planets, earth excluded)
-and excluding the face on mars, which is just a fairly typical martian mountain except that is shadow patterns look a bit weird when viewed from a specific angle in a specific light using really fuzzy photography.
I think we need to introduce the term "unnatural language", just to cover perl and a few other behemoths.
It could help ordinary suicide bombers get more involved with urban demolition
Yup, those big landmark building with lots of people inside that make so juicy targets are reeeeeally hard to find without Goole Earth.
The SE walkman phones have a pretty good player, and can run as player only with the phone off (*for plane use). The camera is still way behind dedicated ones, though.
Good thing you look like a duracell.
God, that plot element annoyed the hell out of me. Such a glaring hole in an otherwise finely crafted scenario: Everyone knows humans and animals don't produce energy, we consume it (convert incoming usable chemical energy to waste heat). And the better solution is so close too: it would have been so much cooler if the machines rathe treated us as self-organising massively parallell computing power, and used it to implement themselves.
Does that count as nerdy enough?
-and why London Bridge keeps falling down.
You don't need to predict it very well. The house marign isn't all that big in roulette. Random betting will bleed you dry only slowly (if you spread your money thinly enough to still be there for the lucky ones). Just skewing the odds a little means you can make instead of lose money over time.
No glass fiber will be able to divert a laser in the space of a chip, or even on a motherboard.
But you don't need to use fiber. The cool thing about fibers is that you can let them flop around any old way, almost like electrical cables, which is really practical compared to, say, a complex and fragile setup to let a beam travel in a finely calibrated and set pattern between fixed mirrors.
Bt on a chip things don't flop around. You can simply make mirrors, or even better, waveguides, that change the direction of a beam very directly indeed, without the constant bouncing around inside that makes an optical fibre work.
Anyone who is pissed about the outcome is just angry because everyone else didnt vote Bush out.
The problem with that kind of statement, though on the surface it seems so brazenly to "cut through the crap" etc. etc, is that it would work equally well even if the elections were in fact rigged, as if they were not. Hence, it contains exactly zero information about the claim undetr attack, and zero weight as argument.
This particular instance falls uncer the class of fallacies called "poisoning the well": attacking motives in stead of claims/arguments, event though the soundness of those claims are independent of motive. If the world's greatest villain repeats a truth, it does not cease to be true (nor can any speaker's virtue make a bad argument sound).
Jesus, what a grumpy and blind-to-everything-new aricle.
Javascript ships with all the major browsers. You can do line-by-line programming just fine for all those simple tasks, and use "alert" as your output. As you need more sphisticated output, you can learn document.write and then move on to manipulating the DOM, thus gaining an easy, early and intuitive understanding of simple object orientation.
Several of the languages he mentions (perl python) also allow perfectly well the line-by-line stuff he complains about, but they're not installed by default on a PC. BASIC closer to the metal? Sure, Basic is simpler to implement than Perl, but these kids aren't implementing languages. And the BASIC interpreter's primitiveness in no way translates to the programmer following what the machine does any better than, say, Javascript does. You assign to variables in both. To a novice it is of no account whatsoever how much exstra occurs behind the curtian when you do that.
If everyone in China jumped off a 1-foot cliff, would you jump too?
I'm right handed, but like many had to switch mouse hands due to shoulder pains. It only took a week to lose the "hadicapped" feeling, and couple more to feel fluent in all but the most exacting tasks (i.e. 3D modeling etc. where a pixel or two counts took manybe 2 months).
I found it very helpful to switch mouse buttons at the same time. Feels much more similar to use the "same finger" than the same button. YMMV.