Been there. Done that. "My name is Edd and I'm a gamer. um... well... I used to be." But boycotting them on Linux might mean not getting EA's console games or not buying "Medal of Honor: Allied Assault", but they would just use that as a statistic that Linux sucks.
Last night I was scanning EA's site trying to find a contact address of some sort so I could ask them to publicly address the message from the employee's spouce. I never found an address, but a lawsuit is more likely to get a serious response anyhow.
EA was one of the best companies that made games for the C64. However, as a gamer, I would have no problem boycotting them now, until they start treating their human resources like people. I would assume this sort of thing is how they destroyed Origin Systems. In any case, I don't need games developed in a sweat shop.
I have to admit that given recent articles on slashdot I looked at a wikipedia and ruled it out as a valid replacement for a real encyclopedias by looking at the entries for the candidates and former presidents. It's bad enough that intellectuals and idealists rewrite history as a regular slow process. I just seems it can happen a lot faster and wildly on wikipedia. Activists must love it.
Oddly enough, that my thinking too. My favorite example is a social studies teacher who use the absolute fact that infalible carbon dating had proven that a Catholic artifact (the shroud of Turin) could not have been old enough to be authentic. Thus, he proved, that Christians are all stupid, supersticious fools.
I figured I could buy it for Catholics. Hey I was kid and he was the teacher and he had hard facts, right? A decade later I saw a show on the Discovery channel covering the same story. It was interesting. Finally they got to the punchline...silly Catholic Church! Your records are wrong! hahahaha! SUCKERS! But wait! There's more! There was still 10 minutes left to the show. I figured they weren't going to hammer it that for that long. Surprise surprise! It turns out that the cold hard facts had changed over the years.
It turns out that scientists had an unrealated case where carbon dating was dating an artifact as being a lot younger than they knew was possible. After some analysis they discovered a coating on the artifact that can throw off the dating process. Going back to the samples they had from the Catholic artifact, they found there was enough of a coating on it to put the authenticity back into the realm of possiblity. (Nifty, sometimes scientists have enough faith in something to question the irrefutable scientific facts. Some of us are called nasty things for much the same thing.)
They couldn't prove it one way or they other at that point, but it turns out it was a bit premature to be calling all these silly Christians, well... silly. Also, I had to kick myself in the arse for being so willing to blow off Catholics because of a social studies teach with his irrefutable facts.
For the curious, I haven't cared enough to keep following the story, but they needed to find a way to clean a sample and they needed to beg the church for a new sample. Interesting enough the church hasn't been to keen on cooperating again. They seem to trust there records of were the artifact came from and where it had been taken over the centuries. All of the scientists' tests (with the exception of the carbon dating test) supported their records. (Various pollen traces, qualities of the cloth, etc.) Maybe I'll catch an update on the Discovery channel some day.
For now I need to go tear down the windmill in the back yard so I don't cause even more damage to the environment in the artic and at the equator.
Whoa... Stalin was an authoritarian communist. Probably the complete opposite of what is considered "conservative".
I second this. If folks mis-apropriate Stalin as an image of an 'evil conservative', it will ruin great wise-cracks like refering to Ted Kennedy as being 'a little to the left of Stalin.' No! You can't take the beat-stick of Stalin away!
You have my vote. You have my face. Based on the polling location and the likelyhood that I'm not voting often, you know the area in which I live. If you are in a position by the door, you can get the license plate of the car. (All of this for some mythical value of 'you' where you is the pollster.) I don't know if the pollster is an NBC employee, an employee for the big buisness that own the town, Big Brother making sure I'm not engaging in terrorist activities in the voting booth or just a shill who will go looting if their candidate loses.
By not telling you and creating the expectation that I should, I don't have to care who you are. (This is still for the value of 'you' mentioned above. I'm not accusing you of anything. You-you, that is, not mythical-you. Mythical-you is a shifty fellow. I'd keep any eye on him if I were you. You-you. You know.)
I would assume that the results are pretty much anonymous - that your personal information isn't collected, and that the people working for the polling organizations probably don't live anywhere near your voting district.
I don't make those assumptions. Just because someone does ask an identifying question does not mean they can't get identifing information. Besides, this would allow for shills to keep walking into and out of the polling places to skew the poll results to try to discorgage late voter for even coming to the polls, like the news networks did in the Florida pan handle in 2000. (Let me guess we now believe they the poll result will be withheld until after the polls close. I might believe it if it happens. Just don't tell the bloggers or political parties.) Ultimately, I don't know who the pollsters are.
And participation is of course voluntary, but my point is that why would you not participate when exit polls provide the ONLY independent means to verify voting results.
Because they are far from bullet proof too. Given that reasoning, I go back to my previous state. Dump anonymous ballots. It's 100% verifiable. Why not do that and you can devise ballots that let you go back and verify for yourself that your votes were count correctly. Sure you have all of the problems of people holding you voting record and political beliefs against you, but if you tell some guy off the street who you voted for, you can't claim you were voting secretly anyhow.
And I never suggested that exit polls override actual vote tallies. Just that vast and unusual discrepancies between exit polls and vote tallies are a red flag that an area deserves closer inspection for voter fraud.
So rig the ballot boxes and the exit poll. Got it.
Exit polls, bitching aside, are probably the most important way we have of validating actual voter result numbers county-by-county and precinct-by-precinct.
I take exception to that. That is because I for one would not answer any exit poll. Or rather if I did, I would give the most bizarre answer I could. (Frank Zappa baby!) The reason? Pinciple. There is a reason there is a curtain on the voting booth. As soon as exit polls become the metric we use to determine if results are valid, we have discarded the protection of the anonymous ballet. At that point we might as well all just post who we voted for with our name by it. At least you will have 100% verifiable results.
Discounting election results just because they don't match exit polls sound very dangerous to me.
Kyoto treaty restricts level of pollution on all countries that sign it. In what way does your example in any way compare to that?
Silly me. I keep hearing all this hubbub about countries like India and China not being held to the same standard as others.
Perhaps if you don't like that my scenerio has them doing nothing, then we'll ammend it to say they have to clear the leaves off their side walk once a week. You and you neighbor still have to same restrictions as before. Are you game now? Your neighbor still is.
So wait, Kyoto doesn't go far enough. Therefore we shouldn't sign it. I mean, its a start, right?
OK. Hypothetical exercise. You live in a neighborhood that fairly dense with trees. In the autumn the leaves fall. Letting the leaves lay causes a number of problems. If they dry out, they are a fire hazard for the whole neighborhood. If they sit wet, they form a layer of mulch that's not really healthy to have laying everywhere. Plus, it's pretty unsightly after a few years.
The neighborhood agrees that something must be done and wish to pass an ordenance that says you and the neighber who lives next door to you must rake all the leaves in you yards and that no leaf is to sit in either of your two yards for more than a day. You have to pay to have them collected and disposed of. You may not burn them or push them into another's yard. Noone else in the neighborhood really is required to do anything except complain if you do not comply. Your next door neighbor who is also required to comply thinks this is a great plan. How about you?
Piracy is rapant. It's so bad that some of Hollywood's most influential people like Kichael Moore are encourging people to illegally download movies like "Fahrenheit 911", effectively pirating the movie.
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like the gentle breeze,
my Slashdot karma departs.
Polliana writes "For every great game there is for Linux, there are like what, at least 500 for Windows? It's sad, but it's a fact. This article proposes a solution, and it's for Linus Torvalds to port games. By the way, since the Windows uses the intel archetecure, it shouldn't be that difficult to port future Windows games to intel and amd based machines, both of which are 32-bit now. Would you buy Linux if you could play Counterstrike Source and Half-Life 2? What other games are missing from Linux?"
This ought to make drilling for oil in the region a little easier and less expensive. Might give us more room for off shore drill up there too. What with the situation in the middle east, burning oil rigs and all, we really could use this.
Wasn't there this whole Echlon thing? I think some people spelled it USA/UK, but I though Canada was in on it too. With the Patriot act, the US government gets to spy on it's people in ways it wasn't supposed to before, but I thought it was a given that the US snooped on everyone else. I even thought echlon was for nations to spy on other countries but the nations involved weren't supposed to spy on their own people. Instead they'd ask other echlon countries to tell them what's worth knowing.
You don't hear about open source projects using the DMCA to get whisteblowers to shut up, do you?
Well no. But the open source crowd claim to be better and more efficient at many things. Perhaps they are better at dealing the whistlebowers as well. Perhaps, with a little bit of investi$%@#+++carrier lost
I don't know, but your article loses all credibility when it includes this statement in the first paragraph. Most of the Groklaw readers aren't pro-IBM, they are anti-SCO.
In all fairness to the shill, impersonator of a journalist, PJ does seem to be a pretty big fan of Marriot. (One of IBM's laywers.) I haven't read the comments enought to tell if anybody else there cares. The author of the LinuxWorld article probably saw one of PJ comments about IBM's laywers' doing someting impressive and assumed that all of the Groklaw readship where equally in awe. At least that seems like the same quality of research that went into the rest of the article.
"As someone who is a fan of TV shows that lack a shiny veneer of stupid... I've wondered if hard science or technology programming will ever catch on with the general public. What do you think?"
Gee. Maybe if they get someone like you to bring the message to the people, they'd make inroads to the masses. I can hear it now.
"C'mon ya' dumb rocks. Watch something inteligent for a change!
The funny thing is that this question didn't come up when the site http://whitehouse.org/ opened or when http://bush2004.com (or.net or.org) opened. This just doesn't sound like an agrument on principle. I'm so used to seeing sites like this, that I've really stopped caring. It's the same as the X-sucks.com domains, but deceitfully subtle. This is just another case of the net not being the most reliable place to find information.
The real answer in the case of campaigns is to set up a campaign site at local, state and federal levels that serves as a (very) small site or forwarding service to the candidates' official site. It should be a service provided to anyone on the ballot in a race. (Put third party rants below.) If you go any where else, you could get the candidate's site, a supporter's site, a basher site or even a beer company site.
They aren't every where. I've seen them in places with decent hills, like Tennesee. I doubt I've seen even 10 in Ohio, and I don't think I've seem any yet in Minnesota. In mountainous areas, they come in handy if a rig loses brakes while going downhill.
No, really? I know Slashdot decided to open a section dedicated to (primarily US) politics that is almost certainly a response to the upcoming US election. Fine. But I guess I thought the main page was for technical/geek/nerd related things. This story is just another story of he said she said among the political shills.
I imagine I'll get modded 'irrelevant', but does Slashdot need to turn into another soapbox for mainstream politic rhetoric? We already have that. There's more than enough places to find it. I watch the news. I get the paper and can access other press websites. I can even seek out opinions to back up any theory I want to believe. Being a reference to the New York Times, I highly doubt you could honestly say Slashdot has added anything to the story or it's relevance to the world. I'm sure we'll be plastered with it on CNN & FNC too.
Ok, so like there are these two guys who have no chance at being elected president in this race. They are going to debate each other.... and then offer commentary and analysis on the what the other two guys (the two who actually have a chance of winning) said in their debate.
Aren't all of the major news networks going to be staging the same thing? At least with the news, you'll be hearing it from the people who are going to be screwing up the earily exit polls on election day. Seems to me that their opinions will have a greater effect on the out come of the election than these two guys.
Thats why they are choosing the CPL; for the simple reason that it isn't the GPL.
Not that I don't think that MS would rather BSD code before releasing it under GPL, but (assuming this is the CPL that IBM put out) I think CPL is basicly GPL + viral Patent language. Companies like tying up that loose end in the GPL. It is not GPL compatible, but I think I heard that GPL3 actually wants to be compatible with this sort of thing.
In any case, I don't think it's any less viral (or evil in MS terms) than GPL. You can check out http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLI ncompatibleLicenses to see what RMS^H^H^Hthe FSF says about it.
This is a free software license but it is incompatible with the GPL.
The Common Public License is incompatible with the GPL because it has various specific requirements that are not in the GPL.
For example, it requires certain patent licenses be given that the GPL does not require. (We don't think those patent license requirements are inherently a bad idea, but nonetheless they are incompatible with the GNU GPL.)
It's good to see the important issues come out, even if it is only on slashdot. What's even more refreshing is that we can debate such important things like whether a candidate is true to his team, without the conversation getting clutter up with even a single post modated as 'Funny" and a rating over 2. Way to keep focused on the issues Slashdot!
Slashdot Mirror
Been there. Done that. "My name is Edd and I'm a gamer. um... well... I used to be." But boycotting them on Linux might mean not getting EA's console games or not buying "Medal of Honor: Allied Assault", but they would just use that as a statistic that Linux sucks.
Last night I was scanning EA's site trying to find a contact address of some sort so I could ask them to publicly address the message from the employee's spouce. I never found an address, but a lawsuit is more likely to get a serious response anyhow.
EA was one of the best companies that made games for the C64. However, as a gamer, I would have no problem boycotting them now, until they start treating their human resources like people. I would assume this sort of thing is how they destroyed Origin Systems. In any case, I don't need games developed in a sweat shop.
I have to admit that given recent articles on slashdot I looked at a wikipedia and ruled it out as a valid replacement for a real encyclopedias by looking at the entries for the candidates and former presidents. It's bad enough that intellectuals and idealists rewrite history as a regular slow process. I just seems it can happen a lot faster and wildly on wikipedia. Activists must love it.
Oddly enough, that my thinking too. My favorite example is a social studies teacher who use the absolute fact that infalible carbon dating had proven that a Catholic artifact (the shroud of Turin) could not have been old enough to be authentic. Thus, he proved, that Christians are all stupid, supersticious fools.
I figured I could buy it for Catholics. Hey I was kid and he was the teacher and he had hard facts, right? A decade later I saw a show on the Discovery channel covering the same story. It was interesting. Finally they got to the punchline...silly Catholic Church! Your records are wrong! hahahaha! SUCKERS! But wait! There's more! There was still 10 minutes left to the show. I figured they weren't going to hammer it that for that long. Surprise surprise! It turns out that the cold hard facts had changed over the years.
It turns out that scientists had an unrealated case where carbon dating was dating an artifact as being a lot younger than they knew was possible. After some analysis they discovered a coating on the artifact that can throw off the dating process. Going back to the samples they had from the Catholic artifact, they found there was enough of a coating on it to put the authenticity back into the realm of possiblity. (Nifty, sometimes scientists have enough faith in something to question the irrefutable scientific facts. Some of us are called nasty things for much the same thing.)
They couldn't prove it one way or they other at that point, but it turns out it was a bit premature to be calling all these silly Christians, well... silly. Also, I had to kick myself in the arse for being so willing to blow off Catholics because of a social studies teach with his irrefutable facts.
For the curious, I haven't cared enough to keep following the story, but they needed to find a way to clean a sample and they needed to beg the church for a new sample. Interesting enough the church hasn't been to keen on cooperating again. They seem to trust there records of were the artifact came from and where it had been taken over the centuries. All of the scientists' tests (with the exception of the carbon dating test) supported their records. (Various pollen traces, qualities of the cloth, etc.) Maybe I'll catch an update on the Discovery channel some day.
For now I need to go tear down the windmill in the back yard so I don't cause even more damage to the environment in the artic and at the equator.
Well, if they are more of a problem than the buildings, we can aleviate some of that by cutting down some more trees. Problem solved.
I second this. If folks mis-apropriate Stalin as an image of an 'evil conservative', it will ruin great wise-cracks like refering to Ted Kennedy as being 'a little to the left of Stalin.' No! You can't take the beat-stick of Stalin away!
You have my vote. You have my face. Based on the polling location and the likelyhood that I'm not voting often, you know the area in which I live. If you are in a position by the door, you can get the license plate of the car. (All of this for some mythical value of 'you' where you is the pollster.) I don't know if the pollster is an NBC employee, an employee for the big buisness that own the town, Big Brother making sure I'm not engaging in terrorist activities in the voting booth or just a shill who will go looting if their candidate loses.
By not telling you and creating the expectation that I should, I don't have to care who you are. (This is still for the value of 'you' mentioned above. I'm not accusing you of anything. You-you, that is, not mythical-you. Mythical-you is a shifty fellow. I'd keep any eye on him if I were you. You-you. You know.)
I would assume that the results are pretty much anonymous - that your personal information isn't collected, and that the people working for the polling organizations probably don't live anywhere near your voting district.
I don't make those assumptions. Just because someone does ask an identifying question does not mean they can't get identifing information. Besides, this would allow for shills to keep walking into and out of the polling places to skew the poll results to try to discorgage late voter for even coming to the polls, like the news networks did in the Florida pan handle in 2000. (Let me guess we now believe they the poll result will be withheld until after the polls close. I might believe it if it happens. Just don't tell the bloggers or political parties.) Ultimately, I don't know who the pollsters are.
And participation is of course voluntary, but my point is that why would you not participate when exit polls provide the ONLY independent means to verify voting results.
Because they are far from bullet proof too. Given that reasoning, I go back to my previous state. Dump anonymous ballots. It's 100% verifiable. Why not do that and you can devise ballots that let you go back and verify for yourself that your votes were count correctly. Sure you have all of the problems of people holding you voting record and political beliefs against you, but if you tell some guy off the street who you voted for, you can't claim you were voting secretly anyhow.
And I never suggested that exit polls override actual vote tallies. Just that vast and unusual discrepancies between exit polls and vote tallies are a red flag that an area deserves closer inspection for voter fraud.
So rig the ballot boxes and the exit poll. Got it.
I take exception to that. That is because I for one would not answer any exit poll. Or rather if I did, I would give the most bizarre answer I could. (Frank Zappa baby!) The reason? Pinciple. There is a reason there is a curtain on the voting booth. As soon as exit polls become the metric we use to determine if results are valid, we have discarded the protection of the anonymous ballet. At that point we might as well all just post who we voted for with our name by it. At least you will have 100% verifiable results.
Discounting election results just because they don't match exit polls sound very dangerous to me.
Silly me. I keep hearing all this hubbub about countries like India and China not being held to the same standard as others.
Perhaps if you don't like that my scenerio has them doing nothing, then we'll ammend it to say they have to clear the leaves off their side walk once a week. You and you neighbor still have to same restrictions as before. Are you game now? Your neighbor still is.
OK. Hypothetical exercise. You live in a neighborhood that fairly dense with trees. In the autumn the leaves fall. Letting the leaves lay causes a number of problems. If they dry out, they are a fire hazard for the whole neighborhood. If they sit wet, they form a layer of mulch that's not really healthy to have laying everywhere. Plus, it's pretty unsightly after a few years.
The neighborhood agrees that something must be done and wish to pass an ordenance that says you and the neighber who lives next door to you must rake all the leaves in you yards and that no leaf is to sit in either of your two yards for more than a day. You have to pay to have them collected and disposed of. You may not burn them or push them into another's yard. Noone else in the neighborhood really is required to do anything except complain if you do not comply. Your next door neighbor who is also required to comply thinks this is a great plan. How about you?
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my Slashdot karma departs.
Polliana writes "For every great game there is for Linux, there are like what, at least 500 for Windows? It's sad, but it's a fact. This article proposes a solution, and it's for Linus Torvalds to port games. By the way, since the Windows uses the intel archetecure, it shouldn't be that difficult to port future Windows games to intel and amd based machines, both of which are 32-bit now. Would you buy Linux if you could play Counterstrike Source and Half-Life 2? What other games are missing from Linux?"
This ought to make drilling for oil in the region a little easier and less expensive. Might give us more room for off shore drill up there too. What with the situation in the middle east, burning oil rigs and all, we really could use this.
Wasn't there this whole Echlon thing? I think some people spelled it USA/UK, but I though Canada was in on it too. With the Patriot act, the US government gets to spy on it's people in ways it wasn't supposed to before, but I thought it was a given that the US snooped on everyone else. I even thought echlon was for nations to spy on other countries but the nations involved weren't supposed to spy on their own people. Instead they'd ask other echlon countries to tell them what's worth knowing.
Well no. But the open source crowd claim to be better and more efficient at many things. Perhaps they are better at dealing the whistlebowers as well. Perhaps, with a little bit of investi$%@#+++carrier lost
I don't know, but your article loses all credibility when it includes this statement in the first paragraph. Most of the Groklaw readers aren't pro-IBM, they are anti-SCO.
In all fairness to the shill, impersonator of a journalist, PJ does seem to be a pretty big fan of Marriot. (One of IBM's laywers.) I haven't read the comments enought to tell if anybody else there cares. The author of the LinuxWorld article probably saw one of PJ comments about IBM's laywers' doing someting impressive and assumed that all of the Groklaw readship where equally in awe. At least that seems like the same quality of research that went into the rest of the article.
Gee. Maybe if they get someone like you to bring the message to the people, they'd make inroads to the masses. I can hear it now.
"C'mon ya' dumb rocks. Watch something inteligent for a change!
The funny thing is that this question didn't come up when the site http://whitehouse.org/ opened or when http://bush2004.com (or .net or .org) opened. This just doesn't sound like an agrument on principle. I'm so used to seeing sites like this, that I've really stopped caring. It's the same as the X-sucks.com domains, but deceitfully subtle. This is just another case of the net not being the most reliable place to find information.
The real answer in the case of campaigns is to set up a campaign site at local, state and federal levels that serves as a (very) small site or forwarding service to the candidates' official site. It should be a service provided to anyone on the ballot in a race. (Put third party rants below.) If you go any where else, you could get the candidate's site, a supporter's site, a basher site or even a beer company site.
They aren't every where. I've seen them in places with decent hills, like Tennesee. I doubt I've seen even 10 in Ohio, and I don't think I've seem any yet in Minnesota. In mountainous areas, they come in handy if a rig loses brakes while going downhill.
So they are cheaper, but still 2-3 times over budget?
No, really? I know Slashdot decided to open a section dedicated to (primarily US) politics that is almost certainly a response to the upcoming US election. Fine. But I guess I thought the main page was for technical/geek/nerd related things. This story is just another story of he said she said among the political shills.
I imagine I'll get modded 'irrelevant', but does Slashdot need to turn into another soapbox for mainstream politic rhetoric? We already have that. There's more than enough places to find it. I watch the news. I get the paper and can access other press websites. I can even seek out opinions to back up any theory I want to believe. Being a reference to the New York Times, I highly doubt you could honestly say Slashdot has added anything to the story or it's relevance to the world. I'm sure we'll be plastered with it on CNN & FNC too.
I think I heard it was the temperature at which brain death begins.
Ok, so like there are these two guys who have no chance at being elected president in this race. They are going to debate each other .... and then offer commentary and analysis on the what the other two guys (the two who actually have a chance of winning) said in their debate.
Aren't all of the major news networks going to be staging the same thing? At least with the news, you'll be hearing it from the people who are going to be screwing up the earily exit polls on election day. Seems to me that their opinions will have a greater effect on the out come of the election than these two guys.
Not that I don't think that MS would rather BSD code before releasing it under GPL, but (assuming this is the CPL that IBM put out) I think CPL is basicly GPL + viral Patent language. Companies like tying up that loose end in the GPL. It is not GPL compatible, but I think I heard that GPL3 actually wants to be compatible with this sort of thing.
In any case, I don't think it's any less viral (or evil in MS terms) than GPL. You can check out http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLI ncompatibleLicenses to see what RMS^H^H^Hthe FSF says about it.
This is a free software license but it is incompatible with the GPL.
The Common Public License is incompatible with the GPL because it has various specific requirements that are not in the GPL.
For example, it requires certain patent licenses be given that the GPL does not require. (We don't think those patent license requirements are inherently a bad idea, but nonetheless they are incompatible with the GNU GPL.)
It's good to see the important issues come out, even if it is only on slashdot. What's even more refreshing is that we can debate such important things like whether a candidate is true to his team, without the conversation getting clutter up with even a single post modated as 'Funny" and a rating over 2. Way to keep focused on the issues Slashdot!
Oh, and Go Bucks!