i humbly ask that the editors check the mail headers of the reply and post the mailer (along with the answers to the questions). my "geek vote" isn't totally convinced by some thinkgeek shirts and a linux install disk.
the interpretation of "free speech" does not (nor has it ever, as far as i know) include making illegal plans, causing disasters (the "your freedom of speech does not allow you to shout 'fire' in a crowded theater" example), or plan violent overthrow of the govenrment (political asassinations included). my take on how most legal "rights" work is that they are meant to protect you without harming others.
you CAN plan peaceful coups, like putting together your own political party to lobby congress and run for public office. you CAN publish a website/newspaper criticising government officials and policies (yellowtimes.org is still around, isn't it). you CANNOT suggest that people go shoot a particular politician because you disagree with a proposed law.
in this case, he lost his right to do even that because of the type of "crime" (like kevin mitnick being unable to own or operate a computer for a while). felons lose other "rights" they have in america like owning firearms, travelling freely (at least while on parole), and voting.
that may be the funniest post i have ever seen on slashdot. if i had a medal for "mistar funney man" i would give it to you. it's too bad funny caps out at 5.
essentially, though, you're right. two things influence politicians: money (lobbyists and large corporate backers), and a large enough group of voters that believe in something strongly enough to threaten his or her re-election (despite large corporate backers).
courts, on the other hand, are less swayed by things like that because they're not elected (at least not the big decision makers like the supreme court). they have their political opinions and, in a sense, move with the general opinion on things (abortion? it's constitutional! no, it's unconstitutional! no, it's constitutional!) so if general opinion on games is that they're protected speech, the appointed (and elected lower court) judges will likely hold that opinion as well.
not so. microsoft declares universal standards every time they create a new file format, or protocol. this is probably already called Universal Postal Address Format. clearly all previous implementations were just broken.
i wonder, seriously, how likely it is that countries having a hard enough time with the mail system (like the third world), are to make use of this. Even relatively developed countries don't make use of zip codes. My friends in Ireland have addresses like "Western Road, Carrigfergus, Co. Clare, Ireland." Note even the lack of a street number.
wow, a claim from the creator of pop-ups. no wonder it's an AC post.
i say let this guy go patent away, scare everyone into abandoning pop-ups (for fear of lawsuits), then use a prior art claim to take the patent. unfortunately, doing that would mean admitting to inventing popups. still, the outcome would be good: fewer popups and the pr0n guy doesn't get to make undeserved money suing every website out there.
that's what i thought until i looked at the blog format. this may be just because it's new and, er, features-limited, but it seems that the blog entries go up without any identifier other than the entry's pgp signature (so not even a pseudonym).
while that could make some readability problems, since you can't just follow your favorite author (be it Ali Davis or Dave Barry), it lets you tell your one-off tale that you just HAVE to tell someone but can't afford to tell anyone that knows you. i see that as its purpose: rather than building yourself a blog fanbase, you're just telling something that just needs telling.
as far as accountability for posting fact over fiction, welcome to the internet. just because you read it on a website doesn't mean it's true, even if someone put a real name on it.
they also make less money off people who rent more. since netflix pays shipping for most, if not all, of the rental plans (i don't keep track), they'd probably rather have people pay them $20 to watch one movie a month than $20 to watch 3+ movies a week.
i'm one of the high-volume renters. i just offset the problem with a massive rental queue, so there's always SOMETHING available, even if i lose a "tie" for the latest sopranos or buffy the vampire slayer. i've suspected them of doing this for months and i just don't care --it's still a great service.
it's nice to know that i'm not insane and they really do "punish" frequent renters, but i'm not getting my bun in a knot over it. as it is i still wouldn't trade it for having to go to the video store.
i believe the BOFH has called that phenomenon "[l]users," hence his mantra that the perfect network is one without users (so it's every operator's job to eliminate as many users as possible). i mean, really; the system was working just fine BEFORE the users touched it --would i give people a broken system?
this says:
1) this guy does something with The System.
we don't know what, but that's what he
does. it's very accurate that way.
2) this guy is probably crazy. avoid him.
3) this guy will blame problems on spiritual
forces.
4) nothing new, but sounds cooler.
in the spirit of plugging other authors, what are some of your sci-fi favorites? i can't help but wonder what creative works entertain a creator in the genre.
as far as i know "eminent domain" in the US only applies to real property (not personal property, like your prototype). software is even more fuzzy, there, since the government does not physically take something from the creator (like his land, the classic use of eminient domain).
i'd be interested to hear if the government has ever used eminent domain on personal property, even though i don't think it applies to software.
yeah, yeah. guns don't kill people; people do. this doesn't make me want to own a gun or work for smith & wesson.
note i didn't say i'd feel CULPABLE for any damage people did with something i wrote, but that i wouldn't feel good about the result. most people can't just say "i made a neutral tool and have no connection with it."
phil zimmerman, while voicing strong support for and belief in pgp and crypto, still mentioned how bad he felt that the september 11 terrorsts may have used pgp.
my point isn't that people who write things that get used in unpleasant ways are responsible, but that they need to be aware --and prepared for-- that possibility before they start.
he can design his own open source license, if he so chooses.
i'd be vaguely disturbed if something i wrote went toward killing people, but how you deal with that as a developer would be your choice. ultimately you can't control how people use your code once you release it. after all, the government could choose to ignore his "CUL (civil use license)" and who could stop them? who's to say that windows xp doesn't contain half the linux kernel in it? theft is one advantage of having the closed end of a closed source program.
i guess not everyone made it to the last paragraph of the article, so i'll share:
Sun also will continue to offer its
traditional per-CPU pricing model for its
Sun ONE stack and Solaris, Schwartz said.
it sounds to me like the subscription program is going to be an option, like a sun support contract. it's my experience that serious sun shops (like telcos and intrenched blue-chippers) pay for sun support contracts anyway, so this would likely be a big convenience for them in managing licenses. if i read that last paragraph correctly, the little guys with a handful of servers will have the same options before about deciding to run solaris 2.5.1 until the server bursts into flames from excessive dust collection, or doing per-instance upgrades.
i regularly encounter perl "gurus" who are terrified of lower-level languages. i put "gurus" in quotes because their perl code sucks, too. i think most geeks have picked up on the strong tendency for exclusive scripters to be poor coders because they're just people who picked up a language's syntax rather than really learning how to program.
hence the heirarchy even among scripters; if you use a unix shell regularly, scripting in that shell is a cakewalk. you just type the commands you'd type at a prompt, but stick them in a file. if you put in some "if" or "while" statements you can congratulate yourself by writing comments and feeling like you have arrived somewhere.
as a result, i'm not impressed by "i know perl." i AM impressed by "i know C/C++, perl, shell, tcl, expect, python, ada, dibol, java, and pascal." while he's not likely to use pascal anywhere outside of a classroom (ok, maybe the odd legacy job), the fact that he has so many tools in his toolkit shows a broader understanding of how things work and more flexibility in how he'd go about a certain task. it also means he could probably pick up a new language more quickly than someone who just knows perl (and, thus, would be unlikely to understand things like pointers and dynamic memory allocation, CLEANING UP AFTER YOURSELF, and data structures like linked lists or binary trees).
i even see bias within scripters (e.g., perl scripters are higher up the ranks than bourne scripters).
in a lot of cases this bias is justified: shell scripts have more portability problems as, say, the location and vendor for awk differs from system to system, or the behavior of "echo -n" changes. this carries over to, say, C vs perl as well: in most cases a C program will run faster with a lighter footprint than a perl script, so when either of those are a big concern then how you solve the problem is as important as the fact that you solved it.
i'm afraid i share the bias for this reason. i think you should pick the right tool for the job, not just do everything in perl because you're a "perl guy" (or a "C++ guy," for that matter). sometimes that means spending weeks writing a program in C that you could do in a few days with perl.
Re:Important note about the Japanese DVD set...
on
Giant Mecha News
·
· Score: 1
i'll agree there. while i, myself, hate watching dubs i know most people refuse to watch something with subtitles. when i show my parents things like princess mononoke and grave of the fireflies (you know, to explain why i "still" watch animated shows), they want to see the dub.
i think the only dubs i really object to are the butcher dubs, like that awful cardcaptors that came out of the beautiful and perfect cardcaptor sakura. while i should hate robotech for that reason, i just can't. too many fond memories.
i am an anime fan; please rape me
on
Giant Mecha News
·
· Score: 1
it's bad enough that anime dvds, themselves, tend to be more expensive than their live-action counterparts, but when publishers pull this kind of george lucas crap i just want to kick them in the head.
i understand why anime is more expensive: niche market, licensing and republishing (dubbing and subbing) costs, blah blah blah. i'm not really complaining about that so much as the ways publishers try to yank money directly from my rectum. evangelion is a very good example of that:
not every publisher does this, but it's really irritating when it happens with one of your favorite series. the worst part is that we put up with it because we really do want that show. how many people bought blue submarine 6 on four discs (each disc containing one thirty-minute episode)? no thanks, i'll put up with the bad translations on the all-in-one-disc import version.
i know this problem isn't exclusive to anime, but it seems a lot more common. the sad thing is that fan loyalty is to shows rather than publishing houses, so a "good" publisher won't necessarily make more money from fan loyalty. since voting with dollars doesn't work well, is there a better way for fans to reward and punish?
i once worked on a website that was behind a nat. basically all the web and mail servers lived in rfc1918 ip space so they could save money on ips. i'm not kidding. they had like 200 servers and 4 ip addresses.
they had other reasons for doing it, like they were able to pretend it made their site secure, but they were adamantly convinced that their architecture was the best way to run a site.
i can't think of why you'd care to count how many servers they had, and they were running mostly freebsd so this wouldn't have worked anyway, but there's no absolute rule for "everyone who uses nat uses it the way i do."
my experience has been opposite: mozilla has gotten slower and slower for me, while opera 5.x->6.x got faster. then again, i'm not using linux or windows, which i'm sure get the most attention for mozilla. it's still nice to have the choice.
i'm with the parent on paying for software. it's a way of voting. by paying them i say "yes this is good. please make more." it's also why i pay for music.
i'm on my second dead battery in a year and a half with my 600e. my year old ibook, though, which i use daily works beautifully.
i remember, when i was a kid, a lot of rechargeable batteries required you to run them down all the way before charging them up and i wondered if i was just charging it wrong. i write a power daemon to print the charge level and watched it run down: 100%, 98%, 95%, 90%, 85%, *shutdown*.
now i think i know why i couldn't figure out the right balance between use and charging --it didn't exist. i don't have these problems with my ibook, nor --thinking back-- did i with my toshiba satellite (what was it, a 1600? so hard to remember the 386 days).
a battery should last longer than six months. other than that, it's a nice laptop, almost no work at all installing freebsd on it. the battery bit's just a shame.
so, yes, even half-witted sysadmins know it's important to keep their stuff physically secure.
i also know it's important to have legal help should someone break in to the system, or just plain decide to sue the company. however, as a sysadmin, i'm not expected to take the lead in any lawsuits. when we're talking about physical and network security, we're talking about two different skillsets.
i can see the value of putting them in the same group, under some greater auspices of "Security," but if you're talking about making *one person* do both i just don't know. i can't say i'd want any of the sysadmins *i* know responsible for handling intruders. even things like evaluating badge systems and alarm systems are outside a sysadmin's real skillset. sure, i could pick an alarm system. so could the receptionist. we'd probably do about the same job picking one, too.
what makes you think you're not going to be buying books for class? you can find free copies of milton and shakespeare, but iowa's still subject to the copyright laws keeping free copies of joyce and morrison off the internet. those e-books aren't likely to be free.
"no library?" i'm sorry, but there are way too many books that just don't exist on the internet. depending on what you're studying, the quality of a library is that it has books that are out of print that you couldn't buy if you wanted to (without a book agent and a the cash to spend on one). for one paper i did in college, one of my sources was someone's doctoral dissertation. those generally have about five copies in existence (one for the author, one for his college, so on). do you think you'd find THAT as an e-book?
basially you'll be trading in superior textbooks (i still have my _A Book on C_ from college) and reading material for a laptop and whatever second- and third-rate materials are avaliable in electronic form (i still use the book from time to time, but i can't say i ever touch the i386 laptop i had then).
i feel sorry for most students in a program like this.
Slashdot Mirror
i humbly ask that the editors check the mail headers of the reply and post the mailer (along with the answers to the questions). my "geek vote" isn't totally convinced by some thinkgeek shirts and a linux install disk.
(no, i'm not a lawyer or poli sci teacher)
the interpretation of "free speech" does not (nor has it ever, as far as i know) include making illegal plans, causing disasters (the "your freedom of speech does not allow you to shout 'fire' in a crowded theater" example), or plan violent overthrow of the govenrment (political asassinations included). my take on how most legal "rights" work is that they are meant to protect you without harming others.
you CAN plan peaceful coups, like putting together your own political party to lobby congress and run for public office. you CAN publish a website/newspaper criticising government officials and policies (yellowtimes.org is still around, isn't it). you CANNOT suggest that people go shoot a particular politician because you disagree with a proposed law.
in this case, he lost his right to do even that because of the type of "crime" (like kevin mitnick being unable to own or operate a computer for a while). felons lose other "rights" they have in america like owning firearms, travelling freely (at least while on parole), and voting.
Right. Someone's going to have a patent on this, so anyone who wants to use it will have to pay (either at the provider or user end --and maybe both).
I agree it's a cool idea; unfortunately it's too cool not to have someone grab it for cash and come out suing.
that may be the funniest post i have ever seen on slashdot. if i had a medal for "mistar funney man" i would give it to you. it's too bad funny caps out at 5.
essentially, though, you're right. two things influence politicians: money (lobbyists and large corporate backers), and a large enough group of voters that believe in something strongly enough to threaten his or her re-election (despite large corporate backers).
courts, on the other hand, are less swayed by things like that because they're not elected (at least not the big decision makers like the supreme court). they have their political opinions and, in a sense, move with the general opinion on things (abortion? it's constitutional! no, it's unconstitutional! no, it's constitutional!) so if general opinion on games is that they're protected speech, the appointed (and elected lower court) judges will likely hold that opinion as well.
exactly. that underground sewing community is dangerous.
"Whole generation's going to hell in a handbasket."
a handbasket filled with BOBBINS AND GRAY-MARKET PATTERNS! what is the world coming to? it's just not safe for young men to walk the streets at night.
not so. microsoft declares universal standards every time they create a new file format, or protocol. this is probably already called Universal Postal Address Format. clearly all previous implementations were just broken.
i wonder, seriously, how likely it is that countries having a hard enough time with the mail system (like the third world), are to make use of this. Even relatively developed countries don't make use of zip codes. My friends in Ireland have addresses like "Western Road, Carrigfergus, Co. Clare, Ireland." Note even the lack of a street number.
(yes i know that address is totally bogus)
wow, a claim from the creator of pop-ups. no wonder it's an AC post.
i say let this guy go patent away, scare everyone into abandoning pop-ups (for fear of lawsuits), then use a prior art claim to take the patent. unfortunately, doing that would mean admitting to inventing popups. still, the outcome would be good: fewer popups and the pr0n guy doesn't get to make undeserved money suing every website out there.
that's what i thought until i looked at the blog format. this may be just because it's new and, er, features-limited, but it seems that the blog entries go up without any identifier other than the entry's pgp signature (so not even a pseudonym).
while that could make some readability problems, since you can't just follow your favorite author (be it Ali Davis or Dave Barry), it lets you tell your one-off tale that you just HAVE to tell someone but can't afford to tell anyone that knows you. i see that as its purpose: rather than building yourself a blog fanbase, you're just telling something that just needs telling.
as far as accountability for posting fact over fiction, welcome to the internet. just because you read it on a website doesn't mean it's true, even if someone put a real name on it.
they also make less money off people who rent more. since netflix pays shipping for most, if not all, of the rental plans (i don't keep track), they'd probably rather have people pay them $20 to watch one movie a month than $20 to watch 3+ movies a week.
i'm one of the high-volume renters. i just offset the problem with a massive rental queue, so there's always SOMETHING available, even if i lose a "tie" for the latest sopranos or buffy the vampire slayer. i've suspected them of doing this for months and i just don't care --it's still a great service.
it's nice to know that i'm not insane and they really do "punish" frequent renters, but i'm not getting my bun in a knot over it. as it is i still wouldn't trade it for having to go to the video store.
i believe the BOFH has called that phenomenon "[l]users," hence his mantra that the perfect network is one without users (so it's every operator's job to eliminate as many users as possible). i mean, really; the system was working just fine BEFORE the users touched it --would i give people a broken system?
System Templar
this says:
1) this guy does something with The System.
we don't know what, but that's what he
does. it's very accurate that way.
2) this guy is probably crazy. avoid him.
3) this guy will blame problems on spiritual
forces.
4) nothing new, but sounds cooler.
i have it on my business card.
in the spirit of plugging other authors, what are some of your sci-fi favorites? i can't help but wonder what creative works entertain a creator in the genre.
as far as i know "eminent domain" in the US only applies to real property (not personal property, like your prototype). software is even more fuzzy, there, since the government does not physically take something from the creator (like his land, the classic use of eminient domain).
i'd be interested to hear if the government has ever used eminent domain on personal property, even though i don't think it applies
to software.
yeah, yeah. guns don't kill people; people do. this doesn't make me want to own a gun or work for smith & wesson.
note i didn't say i'd feel CULPABLE for any damage people did with something i wrote, but that i wouldn't feel good about the result. most people can't just say "i made a neutral tool and have no connection with it."
phil zimmerman, while voicing strong support for and belief in pgp and crypto, still mentioned
how bad he felt that the september 11 terrorsts may have used pgp.
my point isn't that people who write things that get used in unpleasant ways are responsible, but that they need to be aware --and prepared for-- that possibility before they start.
he can design his own open source license, if he so chooses.
i'd be vaguely disturbed if something i wrote went toward killing people, but how you deal with that as a developer would be your choice. ultimately you can't control how people use your code once you release it. after all, the government could choose to ignore his "CUL (civil use license)" and who could stop them? who's to say that windows xp doesn't contain half the linux kernel in it? theft is one advantage of having the closed end of a closed source program.
i guess not everyone made it to the last paragraph of the article, so i'll share:
Sun also will continue to offer its
traditional per-CPU pricing model for its
Sun ONE stack and Solaris, Schwartz said.
it sounds to me like the subscription program is going to be an option, like a sun support contract. it's my experience that serious sun shops (like telcos and intrenched blue-chippers) pay for sun support contracts anyway, so this would likely be a big convenience for them in managing licenses. if i read that last paragraph correctly, the little guys with a handful of servers will have the same options before about deciding to run solaris 2.5.1 until the server bursts into flames from excessive dust collection, or doing per-instance upgrades.
i see this as added value.
i regularly encounter perl "gurus" who are terrified of lower-level languages. i put "gurus" in quotes because their perl code sucks, too. i think most geeks have picked up on the strong tendency for exclusive scripters to be poor coders because they're just people who picked up a language's syntax rather than really learning how to program.
hence the heirarchy even among scripters; if you use a unix shell regularly, scripting in that shell is a cakewalk. you just type the commands you'd type at a prompt, but stick them in a file. if you put in some "if" or "while" statements you can congratulate yourself by writing comments and feeling like you have arrived somewhere.
as a result, i'm not impressed by "i know perl." i AM impressed by "i know C/C++, perl, shell, tcl, expect, python, ada, dibol, java, and pascal." while he's not likely to use pascal anywhere outside of a classroom (ok, maybe the odd legacy job), the fact that he has so many tools in his toolkit shows a broader understanding of how things work and more flexibility in how he'd go about a certain task. it also means he could probably pick up a new language more quickly than someone who just knows perl (and, thus, would be unlikely to understand things like pointers and dynamic memory allocation, CLEANING UP AFTER YOURSELF, and data structures like linked lists or binary trees).
i even see bias within scripters (e.g., perl scripters are higher up the ranks than bourne scripters).
in a lot of cases this bias is justified: shell scripts have more portability problems as, say, the location and vendor for awk differs from system to system, or the behavior of "echo -n" changes. this carries over to, say, C vs perl as well: in most cases a C program will run faster with a lighter footprint than a perl script, so when either of those are a big concern then how you solve the problem is as important as the fact that you solved it.
i'm afraid i share the bias for this reason. i think you should pick the right tool for the job, not just do everything in perl because you're a "perl guy" (or a "C++ guy," for that matter). sometimes that means spending weeks writing a program in C that you could do in a few days with perl.
i'll agree there. while i, myself, hate watching dubs i know most people refuse to watch something with subtitles. when i show my parents things like princess mononoke and grave of the fireflies (you know, to explain why i "still" watch animated shows), they want to see the dub.
i think the only dubs i really object to are the butcher dubs, like that awful cardcaptors that came out of the beautiful and perfect cardcaptor sakura. while i should hate robotech for that reason, i just can't. too many fond memories.
i understand why anime is more expensive: niche market, licensing and republishing (dubbing and subbing) costs, blah blah blah. i'm not really complaining about that so much as the ways publishers try to yank money directly from my rectum. evangelion is a very good example of that:
not every publisher does this, but it's really irritating when it happens with one of your favorite series. the worst part is that we put up with it because we really do want that show. how many people bought blue submarine 6 on four discs (each disc containing one thirty-minute episode)? no thanks, i'll put up with the bad translations on the all-in-one-disc import version.
i know this problem isn't exclusive to anime, but it seems a lot more common. the sad thing is that fan loyalty is to shows rather than publishing houses, so a "good" publisher won't necessarily make more money from fan loyalty. since voting with dollars doesn't work well, is there a better way for fans to reward and punish?
i once worked on a website that was behind a nat. basically all the web and mail servers lived in rfc1918 ip space so they could save money on ips. i'm not kidding. they had like 200 servers and 4 ip addresses.
they had other reasons for doing it, like they were able to pretend it made their site secure, but they were adamantly convinced that their architecture was the best way to run a site.
i can't think of why you'd care to count how many servers they had, and they were running mostly freebsd so this wouldn't have worked anyway, but there's no absolute rule for "everyone who uses nat uses it the way i do."
my experience has been opposite: mozilla has gotten slower and slower for me, while opera 5.x->6.x got faster. then again, i'm not using linux or windows, which i'm sure get the most attention for mozilla. it's still nice to have the choice.
i'm with the parent on paying for software. it's a way of voting. by paying them i say "yes this is good. please make more." it's also why i pay for music.
i'm on my second dead battery in a year and a half with my 600e. my year old ibook, though, which i use daily works beautifully.
i remember, when i was a kid, a lot of rechargeable batteries required you to run them down all the way before charging them up and i wondered if i was just charging it wrong. i write a power daemon to print the charge level and watched it run down: 100%, 98%, 95%, 90%, 85%, *shutdown*.
now i think i know why i couldn't figure out the right balance between use and charging --it didn't exist. i don't have these problems with my ibook, nor --thinking back-- did i with my toshiba satellite (what was it, a 1600? so hard to remember the 386 days).
a battery should last longer than six months.
other than that, it's a nice laptop, almost no work at all installing freebsd on it. the battery bit's just a shame.
so, yes, even half-witted sysadmins know it's important to keep their stuff physically secure.
i also know it's important to have legal help should someone break in to the system, or just plain decide to sue the company. however, as a sysadmin, i'm not expected to take the lead in any lawsuits. when we're talking about physical and network security, we're talking about two different skillsets.
i can see the value of putting them in the same group, under some greater auspices of "Security," but if you're talking about making *one person* do both i just don't know. i can't say i'd want any of the sysadmins *i* know responsible for handling intruders. even things like evaluating badge systems and alarm systems are outside a sysadmin's real skillset. sure, i could pick an alarm system. so could the receptionist. we'd probably do about the same job picking one, too.
what makes you think you're not going to be buying books for class? you can find free copies of milton and shakespeare, but iowa's still subject to the copyright laws keeping free copies of joyce and morrison off the internet. those e-books aren't likely to be free.
"no library?" i'm sorry, but there are way too many books that just don't exist on the internet. depending on what you're studying, the quality of a library is that it has books that are out of print that you couldn't buy if you wanted to (without a book agent and a the cash to spend on one). for one paper i did in college, one of my sources was someone's doctoral dissertation. those generally have about five copies in existence (one for the author, one for his college, so on). do you think you'd find THAT as an e-book?
basially you'll be trading in superior textbooks (i still have my _A Book on C_ from college) and reading material for a laptop and whatever second- and third-rate materials are avaliable in electronic form (i still use the book from time to time, but i can't say i ever touch the i386 laptop i had then).
i feel sorry for most students in a program like this.