I now see the following on the Exherbo website:
Hi slashdot people. Yes, there's code. You not being able to find it is a basic entry test. Earlier they sounded like elitist goofballs, now they sound like elitist assholes!
Exherbo is not, at the moment, a user-targeted distribution. It supports packages that the people involved find interesting or useful; it probably does not support your favourite desktop environment or applications. That kind of thing will come later -- there are plenty of other options for users who want a distribution that does everything badly rather than a few things well. I think they already achieved that milestone. Why not call it Release 1.0 already? Or maybe Release Candidate 1.0 in keeping up with the fashion these days?
Now really, why do they need to fork (yeah, yeah! They say it's not a fork) Gentoo? I think I just figured it out. It's so obvious:
Newer and faster processors are catching up with the Gentoo way of doing things. I can't describe what is the Gentoo way of doing things but I can somewhat describe what is not. A package completing its install, before a new release, is not the Gentoo way. So we clearly need a new distribution to show those new processors who is the boss and to keep the level of pain^W Gentoo Experience (TM) that we masochists^W Gentoo users enjoy.
Since I have already spent so much of my precious time enlightening the Slashdot population about this new distribution, I think I will go ahead and summarize parts of the announcement too. In particular the "Why the Need?" section.
It's not that we think that Gentoo is bad.... yada yada
Aspects we find particularly problematic include: * Gentoo (packaging) sucks * Gentoo (management) sucks * Gentoo (developers) suck * Gentoo (users) suck * Gentoo (developers) suck * Why Am I Here? What's the purpose? TFA is a comedy gold!
PS: All the best to the developers. Can't wait to try it out! PPS: The PS was made in all sincerity and its spirit should not be confused with that of the rest of the post;-)
The pictures are sort of an anti-climax. The caption on Shivaji's picture (LODU) would translate to "dickhead" or "dick" probably. Amazing that this thing even caused rioting in Pune but then I suppose people from Maharashtra (ok maybe not all) seem to be as crazy about Shivaji as muslims are about their prophet!
Hah! If real Indians lived in that continent you wouldn't have been able to even come close. All we would have needed to do was to add a few more spices to our favorite curry and gas you all invaders.
PS: The British managed to stay that long in India because they very cleverly stole all our spices and exported them out of the country!
Apparently "being obscene" is a crime in India and the IT act takes it to the internet. So posting "obscene" stuff is punishable by an imprisonment of upto 5 years. So the crucial part was "obscene comment" not "targeted to Sonia Gandhi". Of course the person filing the complaint with the police was a member of the Congress Party (whose leader is Mrs. Gandhi).
India has many laws that are rooted in the prude thinking that is pretty much common there. This law is just an example that aims to turn "a behavior that maybe not be noble" into "a criminal act". The same law makes pornography illegal even though you can find pornography pretty easily.
I don't think the USA is calling Google Evil. It is just a reporter who doesn't represent the official stand of the US. Also, even though the majority of Slashdotters might be from USA (I have no idea), it has a pretty international reader base.
The whole world and everything under the sun does not revolve around the US. Stop talking about US all the freaking time!!
I suppose the focus of the story should have been "Rights in India" as opposed to "Google is Evil". Anyway, no harm still focusing on India and leaving US out of something that doesn't involve it.
The summary mixes up two different stories. The first (techcrunch.com) link points to a story involving a guy posting "obscene" comments about Sonia Gandhi and Mahatma Gandhi, while the later link (techgoss.com) points to the story that appears in the summary (involving Shivaji). Sonia Gandhi is an Italian born Indian politician and the leader of the ruling Congress Party. Shivaji was a ruler of Maratha Empire.
Also, the Shivaji story involves a goof up by the telecom provider Airtel that provided the details of the wrong person (not using the IP in question) whereas in the other story the ISP provided the details of the actual person involved. In both stories Google revealed the IP used by the "culprit".
They are SO paranoid that a japanese cop will believe the japanese pickpocket than you when you goto complain. Right there is your problem. GOTO always lands you in trouble, not only in Japan.
You forgot to give the reason:
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened. And hence the news.
If they include this quiz, and only allow users who score 100%, then maybe the network can't be held responsible for copyright infringement, since they've screened for users who don't know what's off limits. I suppose this definitely makes sense, and would be a a much simpler explanation compared to psychological dissonance!:-)
I don't think the idea is to know the intent of the users. Like you humorously pointed out, that would make no sense. Upon trying to make sense of this policy, I could come up with the following possible explanation. Of course I might be mistake:-)
I suppose the motives (or rather hopes) are based on two ideas:
1) By making the system inconvenient (even mildly so), discourages the "casual" p2p users. I have no idea what fraction of users are "casual" though.
2) Cognitive dissonance. Probably the idea is that once the users are forced to repeat certain beliefs in their head (even when they disagree with them), many will actually feel a psychological dissonance simply because the reward is not too great. One way to get rid of it, would be to actually start believing whatever they replied in the questionnaire.
Of course cognitive dissonance does not seem to be the perfect phenomenon in use here, I wouldn't be surprised if something very similar was going on. Any psychologists in the house today?
Thanks for the karma but whoever modded that comment of mine as "interesting" needs to stop moderating while high on drugs! If you just want to waste your mod points why not pick a comment, no matter how banal, that aligns with your POV and mod it "insightful". At least your would be pushing your agenda.
Bah! For others who don't have a clue, I was just going for an obvious joke. Man! When I have to point out that I made a joke, I feel like a post-modern (wannabe) comedian or something.
PS: For those that don't know the Slashdot moderation system "funny" mods don't affect your karma.
PG: The Government is out to get me man! They have traps everywhere for me. OD: Wtf? Why would they spend millions or billions after you. You are just_another_dude! PG: Exactly! They are all a bunch of crazies I tell ya. Why would they do that otherwise? OD:...
I am not a citizen of US and I don't understand why the US needs to fix all the bugs in its system before people are even allowed to talk about problems they might see elsewhere? Sure the recent governments have done a lot to erode freedom and privacy to a great deal, but the almost absolute support for free speech in its system remains one of the best things about US. And I don't see why US citizens can't discuss (and even mock) other countries where some fuzzy notion of hate-speech is turned into a law.
Talking about how the system in US sucks when the topic at hand is about Canada makes me feel you are just karma-whoring for +5 Insightful.
I find it amazing that you believe that governments working for some moral goal is naive when everyone has at least some say in the functioning of government, yet you expect a for-profit company to bother about such things even though only few have a say in its functioning and even when most of those few are involved just for money. I believe the later is naive and not the former.
In any case, you still seem to misunderstand why I am using "desirable" for pure money making behavior of companies. Not because it aligns to my own moral values but more because this is the expected behavior in a game-theoretic sense and such an expected behavior lets you think of solutions that don't rely on a big group of people acting irrationally. Yes companies forgoing profit for morality when they can get away with dirty deeds is irrational. And you do need a more rational incentive for companies (and anyone actually) to stay away from such path.
You (and apparently the mods) misunderstood me. I am not in favor of letting companies do whatever they please. I just meant to say that expecting commercial entities to bother about morality is naivety at best and undesirable at worst. Let the firms bother about making money and have other public checks on their morality.
Now you might object to my hinting that it might even be undesirable where companies bothered about moral values when formulating their business policies. But IMHO, a company bothering about morality can easily get us in undesirable situations. Imagine a ISP filtering "hate speech". I can certainly understand (if not agree) if a society wants such speech filtered but for sure I don't want the ISP to bother about this moral part of the issue. I would prefer that law-enforcement took care of such issues.
Of course my example does not cover every possible scenario and like you pointed out, what about firms abusing cheap labor in other countries that have in general very bad working conditions? Even in this situation I am of the opinion that the firm should try to make a buck if they can and not bother about what qualifies as inhuman conditions. The eventual solution (and through a process that I would agree more) would be people noticing how these countries have very bad working conditions and governments working together to remedy that. Why I think this is a better way? Would you bother about bad working conditions in some south-east asian country if you never heard about it? Would you have heard about it if none of western companies went to these countries to get cheap labor? Would the work condition be better there if these companies never went there?
What exactly does one expect from any for-profit organization? As much as Google might claim to do no evil, their primary motive (and rightly so) is to make money and moral considerations are only secondary.
my conversions are long scale (followed in Germany among other countries). Check the table for short scale conversions that is followed in the US. Either way the summary is wrong.
I did not compare telemarketing to urinating. I compared it to urinating in public. An offense mostly because of the inconvenience it causes to others and not because of any real damage. Of course one can argue that telemarketers waste the time you could have spent doing something other than taking a call you didn't want to, calling for them to be denied the us of a telephone forever extreme in my opinion (and hence the insane comparison).
Slashdot Mirror
Now really, why do they need to fork (yeah, yeah! They say it's not a fork) Gentoo? I think I just figured it out. It's so obvious:
Newer and faster processors are catching up with the Gentoo way of doing things. I can't describe what is the Gentoo way of doing things but I can somewhat describe what is not. A package completing its install, before a new release, is not the Gentoo way. So we clearly need a new distribution to show those new processors who is the boss and to keep the level of pain^W Gentoo Experience (TM) that we masochists^W Gentoo users enjoy.
Since I have already spent so much of my precious time enlightening the Slashdot population about this new distribution, I think I will go ahead and summarize parts of the announcement too. In particular the "Why the Need?" section. It's not that we think that Gentoo is bad.
Aspects we find particularly problematic include:
* Gentoo (packaging) sucks
* Gentoo (management) sucks
* Gentoo (developers) suck
* Gentoo (users) suck
* Gentoo (developers) suck
* Why Am I Here? What's the purpose? TFA is a comedy gold!
PS: All the best to the developers. Can't wait to try it out!
PPS: The PS was made in all sincerity and its spirit should not be confused with that of the rest of the post
The word "secular" does not have the same meaning in India as in Europe or the USA.
Secular in EU/USA: Government will not bother about any religion.
Secular in India : Government will bother about all religions.
Google cache of the "offending" image
The pictures are sort of an anti-climax. The caption on Shivaji's picture (LODU) would translate to "dickhead" or "dick" probably. Amazing that this thing even caused rioting in Pune but then I suppose people from Maharashtra (ok maybe not all) seem to be as crazy about Shivaji as muslims are about their prophet!
Hah! If real Indians lived in that continent you wouldn't have been able to even come close. All we would have needed to do was to add a few more spices to our favorite curry and gas you all invaders.
PS: The British managed to stay that long in India because they very cleverly stole all our spices and exported them out of the country!
The guy in the Sonia Gandhi case was booked under Section 67 of the The Information Technology Act, 2000. (Check the section titled "Information Technology Act, 2000".
Apparently "being obscene" is a crime in India and the IT act takes it to the internet. So posting "obscene" stuff is punishable by an imprisonment of upto 5 years. So the crucial part was "obscene comment" not "targeted to Sonia Gandhi". Of course the person filing the complaint with the police was a member of the Congress Party (whose leader is Mrs. Gandhi).
India has many laws that are rooted in the prude thinking that is pretty much common there. This law is just an example that aims to turn "a behavior that maybe not be noble" into "a criminal act". The same law makes pornography illegal even though you can find pornography pretty easily.
And while meditating their IP is 127.0.0.1 for "Truth lies within".
I don't think the USA is calling Google Evil. It is just a reporter who doesn't represent the official stand of the US. Also, even though the majority of Slashdotters might be from USA (I have no idea), it has a pretty international reader base.
The whole world and everything under the sun does not revolve around the US. Stop talking about US all the freaking time!!
I suppose the focus of the story should have been "Rights in India" as opposed to "Google is Evil". Anyway, no harm still focusing on India and leaving US out of something that doesn't involve it.
PS: I am an Indian national.
The summary mixes up two different stories. The first (techcrunch.com) link points to a story involving a guy posting "obscene" comments about Sonia Gandhi and Mahatma Gandhi, while the later link (techgoss.com) points to the story that appears in the summary (involving Shivaji). Sonia Gandhi is an Italian born Indian politician and the leader of the ruling Congress Party. Shivaji was a ruler of Maratha Empire.
Also, the Shivaji story involves a goof up by the telecom provider Airtel that provided the details of the wrong person (not using the IP in question) whereas in the other story the ISP provided the details of the actual person involved. In both stories Google revealed the IP used by the "culprit".
and the website is already slashdotted so you can't blame me for not having RTFA (RTFF?).
Anyway, what's the point of just counting the number of posts?
There is another theory which states that this has already happened. And hence the news.
I don't think the idea is to know the intent of the users. Like you humorously pointed out, that would make no sense. Upon trying to make sense of this policy, I could come up with the following possible explanation. Of course I might be mistake :-)
I suppose the motives (or rather hopes) are based on two ideas:
1) By making the system inconvenient (even mildly so), discourages the "casual" p2p users. I have no idea what fraction of users are "casual" though.
2) Cognitive dissonance. Probably the idea is that once the users are forced to repeat certain beliefs in their head (even when they disagree with them), many will actually feel a psychological dissonance simply because the reward is not too great. One way to get rid of it, would be to actually start believing whatever they replied in the questionnaire.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#Induced_compliance_studies
Of course cognitive dissonance does not seem to be the perfect phenomenon in use here, I wouldn't be surprised if something very similar was going on. Any psychologists in the house today?
Thanks for the karma but whoever modded that comment of mine as "interesting" needs to stop moderating while high on drugs! If you just want to waste your mod points why not pick a comment, no matter how banal, that aligns with your POV and mod it "insightful". At least your would be pushing your agenda.
Bah! For others who don't have a clue, I was just going for an obvious joke. Man! When I have to point out that I made a joke, I feel like a post-modern (wannabe) comedian or something.
PS: For those that don't know the Slashdot moderation system "funny" mods don't affect your karma.
Paranoid Guy (PG), Other dude (OD):
...
PG: The Government is out to get me man! They have traps everywhere for me.
OD: Wtf? Why would they spend millions or billions after you. You are just_another_dude!
PG: Exactly! They are all a bunch of crazies I tell ya. Why would they do that otherwise?
OD:
And as some other poster already pointed out, the left arm is in jail.
I am not a citizen of US and I don't understand why the US needs to fix all the bugs in its system before people are even allowed to talk about problems they might see elsewhere? Sure the recent governments have done a lot to erode freedom and privacy to a great deal, but the almost absolute support for free speech in its system remains one of the best things about US. And I don't see why US citizens can't discuss (and even mock) other countries where some fuzzy notion of hate-speech is turned into a law.
Talking about how the system in US sucks when the topic at hand is about Canada makes me feel you are just karma-whoring for +5 Insightful.
I find it amazing that you believe that governments working for some moral goal is naive when everyone has at least some say in the functioning of government, yet you expect a for-profit company to bother about such things even though only few have a say in its functioning and even when most of those few are involved just for money. I believe the later is naive and not the former.
In any case, you still seem to misunderstand why I am using "desirable" for pure money making behavior of companies. Not because it aligns to my own moral values but more because this is the expected behavior in a game-theoretic sense and such an expected behavior lets you think of solutions that don't rely on a big group of people acting irrationally. Yes companies forgoing profit for morality when they can get away with dirty deeds is irrational. And you do need a more rational incentive for companies (and anyone actually) to stay away from such path.
You (and apparently the mods) misunderstood me. I am not in favor of letting companies do whatever they please. I just meant to say that expecting commercial entities to bother about morality is naivety at best and undesirable at worst. Let the firms bother about making money and have other public checks on their morality.
Now you might object to my hinting that it might even be undesirable where companies bothered about moral values when formulating their business policies. But IMHO, a company bothering about morality can easily get us in undesirable situations. Imagine a ISP filtering "hate speech". I can certainly understand (if not agree) if a society wants such speech filtered but for sure I don't want the ISP to bother about this moral part of the issue. I would prefer that law-enforcement took care of such issues.
Of course my example does not cover every possible scenario and like you pointed out, what about firms abusing cheap labor in other countries that have in general very bad working conditions? Even in this situation I am of the opinion that the firm should try to make a buck if they can and not bother about what qualifies as inhuman conditions. The eventual solution (and through a process that I would agree more) would be people noticing how these countries have very bad working conditions and governments working together to remedy that. Why I think this is a better way? Would you bother about bad working conditions in some south-east asian country if you never heard about it? Would you have heard about it if none of western companies went to these countries to get cheap labor? Would the work condition be better there if these companies never went there?
What exactly does one expect from any for-profit organization? As much as Google might claim to do no evil, their primary motive (and rightly so) is to make money and moral considerations are only secondary.
You must be from Amsterdam! ;-)
my conversions are long scale (followed in Germany among other countries). Check the table for short scale conversions that is followed in the US. Either way the summary is wrong.
umm.. wouldn't that be one zettabyte? If I am not off then one yottabyte would be a billion terabyte
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yotta
I did not compare telemarketing to urinating. I compared it to urinating in public. An offense mostly because of the inconvenience it causes to others and not because of any real damage. Of course one can argue that telemarketers waste the time you could have spent doing something other than taking a call you didn't want to, calling for them to be denied the us of a telephone forever extreme in my opinion (and hence the insane comparison).