Could you explain to me why the political left wants to take away my right to vote on a secret ballot as to whether or not my employer should be unionized? Putting that out in the open is just going to make it that much easier for either side (labor or management) to intimidate people.
How is it right, out of curiosity? I'm not refuting your premise, and I might even agree with it, but the use of the term "right" is just plain goofy in this context. I don't think it is implied by the constitution, I don't really see how we can derive it from natural law, and I surely don't see it in the Bible, therefore God didn't pass the "right to anonymous vote to unionize" down to us from on-high.
Hi there, I am a member of the "political left" (whatever the hell that may be), and I completely disagree with the first point, and somewhat agree with the second point.
Out of curiosity, who the hell is this "political left", why is it a "political" left, and not some other flavor of left, and how is it telling us anything?
Last I checked, the left was far more fractured and disorganized than the right, even when holding a majority in power.
Compare how the "Tiles" view in Windows XP uses three lines for the filename, friendly file type name, and byte size or image dimensions.
Not a bad idea, actually.
Mac OS X is the successor to NeXTstep, and its API is called Cocoa, the successor to OPENSTEP. GNUstep is an implementation of OPENSTEP and parts of Cocoa. So would a Debian-based distribution with Window Maker and GNUstep apps [distrowatch.com] be a good start? See also other thoughts on products that can be built out of GNUstep [gnustep.org].
Thanks for the info, I was aware of the project, but I thought it died a long time ago. Actually it seems to be one of those projects continually on the verge of death, meaning there still might be hope for it. I'm downloading the live CD as we speak to give it a peek.
Though looking at the screenshots, it has the worst GUI I have ever seen. It makes some of the early KDE defaults look positively gorgeous (it also makes System 9 look modern).
You obviously don't use an on-screen keyboard or even an Model M keyboard [youtube.com]. If you take this notion of counting keypresses as free further, you could fudge it by claiming that typing in a whole program from printed source code is free.
I was being a bit facetious.
A graphical file manager could add "subtitles" for the various folders making up the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. It could label/etc as "etc (Preferences)",/bin as "bin (Core Programs)",/usr/bin as "bin (Common Programs)",/tmp as "tmp (Temporary Files)",/opt as "opt (Applications)", etc. Or it could do like Mac OS X does and use/Applications,/Library, etc.
This could make things worse, though. If your asking for help with something, and the community or a man page tells you to edit something in ~/etc/foo/bar, but your seeing/etc(Prefs) instead... Yes, you'd have to be dumb, but that seems to be the problem.
I prefer the OS X way of things. Actually if it wasn't for Apple OS X would be almost perfect, since it does very well at having an intuitive GUI, yet still allowing easy access to the terminal and innards. If someone managed to hash our a decent open OS X-like distro, I would be in love.
The whole reason Microsoft used "/Program Files" instead of/Programs was to force programs to be able to handle spaces in filenames. But if I were designing VFAT, I would have made space the lowercase version of underscore. This way, "Program Files" would have become equivalent to "Program_Files" in the same way that it is equivalent to "program files".
The one nice thing about *Nix naming conventions is the ease of typing. Typing out Progam(space)Files is much more annoying than just/bin. When navigating within the Windows terminal, I sometimes feel like I'm writing a damn novel.
*You*, as an Ubuntu user, could probably figure out how to shift the icons back to the right in pretty much no time flat. I took me around 3 minutes, and I'm not a power-user.
As for driving adoption, it might work both ways. Part of the perceived problem with windows managers were that they all looked like really bad copies of Windows 95. Moving the buttons divorces the image (at least in theory) of being a bad, cheap, Windows copy. It is kind of odd, since the old default Gnome set-up for Ubuntu was pretty slick looking, even with the strange color scheme.
Click on terminal, add the repository (typing, no clicks), hit enter. Apt-get (typing, no clicks)
Software installed.
Yes, I understand what you were getting at, and I fully understand. I find having to hand enter many repositories (even to get the newest release of things like Firefox) to be highly annoying. Right now I have Ubuntu on my laptop, which I only pretty much use for browsing the web and some light text editing/writing, and I still find myself having to use the terminal around every other day. Some of it, obviously, is my fault since I enjoy mucking around in the OS and see what I can do, but good amount of it is inevitable to even your average user.
Every time I have to hand add, and install, a repository I scream a little bit, it should be easier, it should be more streamlined, I should have to carefully copy two lines of text from a random page to a terminal just because Canonical really REALLY doesn't want me to consider installing it. Its even worse with the shrinking fraction of files you have to go compile to make them run, this is FAR above the average users head.
Also, the directory structure is annoying. I've been using computers of various types for a very long time, so I don't mind the almost arbitrary use of 3-letter directories, but the average user does, or would. Software being in C:\program files makes more sense that being in some flavor of/usr/bin or/etc/ or whatnot for a purely ease of use standpoint.
A lot of Ubuntu's features also suck, like their power management (which might be the most underpowered GUI tool that ever existed), where you can tell they still are a work in progress, and some group of devs never really got around to putting polish on them, and may never because it isn't a tool that they will ever use, preferring, themselves, to edit config files by hand.
That is another problem. Linux (and all of its family members) are built by nerds, for nerds. The focus is on what THEY want, with only a little work done to add the gloss and sparkle that everyone else in the world wants. Why the hell would I ever build a really decent power management console for Gnome, when I could just edit the damn settings like I have for umpteen years? Whereas the big players spend tons of money focusing on what the majority of people actually want.
That said, I like Ubuntu, I use it, and I enjoy it. Though I am thinking of moving on to either Mint or OpenSuse. It just isn't meant for the average user as it stands. And it won't be until there is a shift in the actually productive Linux community.
And generally it still don't, even under Windows. That is unless you crack open the case and put in a video card, mess with your drivers, and had the general foresight to actually buy a computer with enough horsepower to play games (meaning your technical knowledge is slightly above nill).
And in some games, even through Steam, run around finding the executable and messing with command augments and compatibility modes. And even them some of them died for completely mysterious reasons (damn you Torchlight!)
Also, to reply to myself as a footnote; the site that I got Windows 7 from (the place with heavy student discounts, forgot its name), acknowledged their download problems, and actually put Windows 7 on a torrent for people to download. Another example of legal, and wise, use of torrents. I forgot how many seeders their were when I recently REdownloaded Windows 7, since the damn company didn't actually send me the install media I paid for (and then lied about it, saying it shipped months ago).
Good points. I think what the study was intended to show - certainly how I read it - was the uses of Bittorrent clients (that is to say, what users choose to download when the choice of files is theirs); this would make automatic uses like WoW irrelevant.
This doesn't make much sense. So we should limit our study on the use of torrents to only sites that distribute pirated content. or limit our study to only people who use x client, but not y client (Steam and Blizzard, and the various new streaming torrent sites).
Also you realize that when I click on the "update" button in WoW, I chose to download that content as much as I choose to download the latest (whoever is the big pop star of the day) album. Even more so for downloads from places like the Blizzard store, or other legitimate software channels that use torrent. The other day I used a torrent to grab Starcraft 1, i was right from my Battle.net account, why doesn't that count as much as me navigating to Pirate Bay, and downloading the pirated copy?
As a random question, lets say I did navigate to TPB and downloaded the StarCraft 1 installer, but used my legitimate CD key, would that be infringement? (I've actually done this for Fallout 1 and 2 before, being that my CDs were in a pile of boxes somewhere after moving). I've done it with Windows once, where the actual legitmate download page was killing my download at 60%, so I downloaded it from a torrent site, ran the MD5, and put in my freshly purchased license code. Cases like these (which can't be completely uncommon) make studies like these a bit more... useless.
In 91? I might have my time off by a year, but I remember that our local stores still had 1 or 2 shelves for CDs versus 100 or so for cassettes. I got a CD player some time around 90, and I was pretty cutting edge.
My memory might be a bit off by this point though. And I agree, the record bit was completely off. I meant 8-track.
And who might those be? Its been such a long time since I've seen a real, 100% authentic, grassroots organization. Sure, some of them start out grassroots, but that only lasts long enough for someone to realize that their is money in it, or that they have a pool of people ready to be manipulated (see both the "green" and "tea party" movements).
If I bought a Pearl Jam album in 1991 and still enjoying listening to it today, then I got an awful lot of value out of $11. Even better, I'm not done listening to it. I can listen to it as many timeas as I want over the course of my life.
Except this isn't true. Unless you were on of the lucky few, you bought it on cassette or vinyl. Either way, you got to spend another $16-$20 to switch its format to something modern somewhere in there, even if you bought it is a different (obsolete) format. And now they expect you to buy it in a digital format as well, even if they haven't gotten that wish yet, it still would make them unbelievably happy.
Hollywood is infinitely worse, obviously, since they even made it illegal to watch your movie on some devices, and illegal to switch formats from media that you already own (DMCA). So if you bought in on VHS, you need to buy it on DVD. If your more of a gadgeteer, then you bought it on beta, then VHS, then DVD, and now Blu-Ray, and finally a digital copy so you can watch on the go (as long as you don't run a *Nix, then you must break the law).
I really don't mind IP as long as it makes sense, paying more than once for content is absurd. I don't view it as wrong if you are just format switching. Actually I don't view it as wrong if the artist doesn't get paid, the artist is dead, the media is old enough so that the artist should have gotten a new golden egg laying good (around 30 years). And if someone goes out of their way to screw me, I have absolutely no moral compulsion about playing the same game back. You try to get, via underhanded means, free money from me, then I have no problem with trying to get free stuff from you.
I think that, in opposition to your position, marijuana use is becoming more and more acceptable and with generational replacement I think that we'll see legalization of it in general within a few more generations.
Heres hoping. But people said the same thing about the young people of the 60's getting old and grabbing power. They got old, they grabbed power, and things are pretty much exactly as they were.
It would take a large dose of reason to make anything better. I have a fair amount of cynicism on that topic, a rather large amount. Our government doesn't seem to be getting any saner, nor does the civic debate that drives government, the whole messing is turning into a circus sideshow.
There are only a handful of people in Congress that aren't hypocrites on this issue -- Ron Paul on the right and Maurice Hinchey on the left (just to pick two) -- but they are few and far between.
This is why I made the statement. Our politicians really don't represent us anymore. The government's wishes, and our wishes are WILDLY divergent these days. Public opinion might lean in favor of legalizing pot, but it doesn't matter one bit.
I do love the non-reality based anti-marijuana propaganda, without it a lot less people would probably smoke pot.
I remember when I was a young thing I was scared to death of pot. Pot was as scary as heroin, the second I smoked it I would turn into some drooling junky who wears tie-dye and sounds like Keanu Reeves ("woh"). My friends sister was a bit of a dealer (much worse things than pot), and kept on trying to get us to try it, and we stately refused every time for fear of life time addiction and stupidity.
When we eventually did try, and got nothing worse than the giggles and a good nights sleep, we smoked A LOT more since obviously everything we were feed was bogus. It might not be good logic, but it is adolescent logic. Its the same problem we have with booze, by American standards EVERYONE in the rest of the world is a lush, and as a result we have very strange drinking problems. For some reason making something taboo increases its chances for abuse, as opposed to having a sane point of view, and endorsing moderation and intelligent use (see also sex, see also violence).
After I realized that every thing I was told about marijuana was a lie, I quickly moved on to harder substances, that are actually harmful. I figured that if they lied about pot, they probably lied about every thing else as well.
Authority should be based on trust, the second you break that trust, everything you say is dubious, even if truthful.
I don't use any drugs anymore (outside of caffeine, cigarettes, and the occasional stiff martini), but I am all for legalization of at least pot, and a re-examination of the rest of our drug laws and policies. Some drugs I can understand banning, or at least harsh regulation, some drugs I can't. Heroin can have bad effects on society (or methamphetamines), but drugs like pot are rather benign. I actually would rather have more pot heads than alcoholics, alcohol is far more destructive than marijuana.
Let's see...smaller government and lower taxes. That's the exact opposite of "puritan like values" if you know anything about history.
I view this as a rather forced misunderstanding. "Puritan" values generally mean laws against things that are not within religious tenets. "Worship" being the key term. Think "blue laws". Any regulation against sin can be viewed as a law that is puritanical. It isn't so much "your too stupid to know whats good for you", but "we must regulate what we view as moral". The traditional "family values" Republicans are a better example than the Democratic party line.
Any law that is in line with traditional puritan values is a "puritanical" law. the "War on Drugs" is puritanical. Meaning a law based on old religious principles (which by definition is conservative".
One thing I haven't seen anybody touch on yet is that the debate wasn't between those that want it legal and those that don't want it legal, it was between the small growers and the large growers. The small growers are opposed to the large growers simply because the large growers can grow it better and more efficiently and they're causing the price to drop dramatically. That'll mean less tax revenue in the end, but it also means no small grower
I, as a self-admitted socialist liberal, want it legalized, but don't really care about the means to production. As a true liberal, though, I'd rather the government be less involved. As long as production does not harm people overtly (think John Locke), the government should have no say, even if a religious majority has an opinion.
The Tea Party folks are exactly the group within the Republicans who would get behind legalization.
The problem with this idea is that its very hard to tell where the grass ends and the Astroturf begins in the modern tea party movement. The original core of the tea party would be a great ally to legalization, but a lot of the movement has been taken over by the same old creepy Republicans.
It is amusing that legalization is an issue that both the far left, and far right could stand behind though, you just run into problems towards the middle.
...but I think the 'medical marijuana' movement is a farce. The net result is a bunch of stoner rejects inventing various chronic conditions in order to prove to the officials that they need marijuana to make their life tolerable. How embarrassing... how degrading.
I think its a fairly savvy political move. For some reason the feds (and some local fiefdoms) have an irrational fear of marijuana, and puritan like values are on the rise, so the odds of marijuana ever being legalized on its own merits is slim to none. A lot of the population is nebulously hostile to legalization for vague reasons, or completely apathetic. So the only real way to get the discussion started, and to start demystifying pot is to make it public, available, and outside of the purely hedonistic "some drugs are not evil" arena. Medical marijuana has done this very well.
I really don't think many people actually buy the "needing marijuana to make life tolerable" part of medical marijuana, as much as they view it as a way to eventually for the feds to fix their point of view. Medical marijuana is a gateway drug to legalized marijuana.
On Win7 64bit, Firefox (latest release AND the beta candidate) does that every single time, but Chrome/ium (stable and dev) remains stable under the same scenario. That is the problem with anecdotal evidence.
I agree that the "one tab doesn't effect the others" thing is a load of crap, for the most part. Chrome can get VERY sluggish, and eventually not respond at all based on the misbehavior of a single process. I've had tabs, and extensions, kill all of Chrome.
At the same time, paper books and printed scientific articles fail at the portability read. I am tired of hauling 10 books in my luggage whenever I go on vacation.
Agreed. It is oddly comforting to carry around a small library of books where ever you go. The ability to buy books on the fly (or get free public domain books) is also very handy. I recently had to watch someone's house for a week, and they had pretty much nothing in their house but television, no wifi, no computer (well, an old 1Ghz Dell running a badly beaten install of XP), so I quickly used the 3G connection to grab the entire Dune series. My whole $200 purchase was justified at that moment.
t the academic usage, I can easily carry and read 1000s of articles in my Kindle DX.
Does the DX handle PDFs better than the regular Kindle (or Nook, or any other reader I've tried)? I noticed that most of them mangle PDFs pretty badly, and the original Kindle had a very hard time with scaling them to be readable.
Reading digital books also adds the relief of not adding even more books to my (overcrowded) shelfs. Some friends of mine like the idea of having a hard-cover of a given book in a shelf. For me that always sounds like a sort of fetishism.
It is an odd compulsion, I admit, but an enjoyable one. We currently have around 5 or six completely full shelves of books in our house. Both of us are chronic book hoarders (a room for books was even a criteria when we recently were house shopping). There is something nice about having a wall of books though. I think bookshelves are like a photo album for antisocial people, a lot of our fond memories involves books, and it is nice to be reminded of them.
I did go out and buy a Nook, but I was very much against getting an ebook reader for the same reason. I went to school for philosophy (lots of reading, even more marginal notes), and any reader on the market would have completely failed. Yes, some readers have decent note taking abilities, but they still ultimately fail compared to scribbling in margins, especially for those of us who "unconventional" note taking styles. Actually ebooks fail for ANY academic use, since often you read things very non-linearly if you plan on writing a paper, or even if it is just for normal research. All readers fail at non-linear reads.
I used my Nook for fiction, and light non-fiction. For serious reading I still stick with actual, real books. Also me and my girlfriend are book people, there is nothing quite as nice as owning a good book. So even if I read a good book on the Nook, I still will go out and buy it at the local used book store so I can have a hard "backup" version.
Eccleston was kind of boring. He was very nice upon first watching, in the context of "wow, new Doctor", but after Tennant and Smith he shrunk a bit. He was kind of mopey, overly serious, and lacked the quirks that make most of the previous and subsequent doctors interesting.
I would say Tennant (in my completely irrelevant opinion) is tied with Tom Baker, and Smith might be the most likable of the lot.
I equate an lack of knowledge plus inability with stupidity.
That could be true, but often it only means a lack of education or experience. When I first used a computer (much less any *nix) I lacked both knowledge and ability, it wasn't stupidity. More important is the ability and willingness to learn.
Also, how does one leach off of open source? Its not like OSS is a limited commodity.
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Could you explain to me why the political left wants to take away my right to vote on a secret ballot as to whether or not my employer should be unionized? Putting that out in the open is just going to make it that much easier for either side (labor or management) to intimidate people.
How is it right, out of curiosity? I'm not refuting your premise, and I might even agree with it, but the use of the term "right" is just plain goofy in this context. I don't think it is implied by the constitution, I don't really see how we can derive it from natural law, and I surely don't see it in the Bible, therefore God didn't pass the "right to anonymous vote to unionize" down to us from on-high.
Hi there, I am a member of the "political left" (whatever the hell that may be), and I completely disagree with the first point, and somewhat agree with the second point.
Out of curiosity, who the hell is this "political left", why is it a "political" left, and not some other flavor of left, and how is it telling us anything?
Last I checked, the left was far more fractured and disorganized than the right, even when holding a majority in power.
Compare how the "Tiles" view in Windows XP uses three lines for the filename, friendly file type name, and byte size or image dimensions.
Not a bad idea, actually.
Mac OS X is the successor to NeXTstep, and its API is called Cocoa, the successor to OPENSTEP. GNUstep is an implementation of OPENSTEP and parts of Cocoa. So would a Debian-based distribution with Window Maker and GNUstep apps [distrowatch.com] be a good start? See also other thoughts on products that can be built out of GNUstep [gnustep.org].
Thanks for the info, I was aware of the project, but I thought it died a long time ago. Actually it seems to be one of those projects continually on the verge of death, meaning there still might be hope for it. I'm downloading the live CD as we speak to give it a peek.
Though looking at the screenshots, it has the worst GUI I have ever seen. It makes some of the early KDE defaults look positively gorgeous (it also makes System 9 look modern).
You obviously don't use an on-screen keyboard or even an Model M keyboard [youtube.com]. If you take this notion of counting keypresses as free further, you could fudge it by claiming that typing in a whole program from printed source code is free.
I was being a bit facetious.
A graphical file manager could add "subtitles" for the various folders making up the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. It could label /etc as "etc (Preferences)", /bin as "bin (Core Programs)", /usr/bin as "bin (Common Programs)", /tmp as "tmp (Temporary Files)", /opt as "opt (Applications)", etc. Or it could do like Mac OS X does and use /Applications, /Library, etc.
This could make things worse, though. If your asking for help with something, and the community or a man page tells you to edit something in ~/etc/foo/bar, but your seeing /etc(Prefs) instead... Yes, you'd have to be dumb, but that seems to be the problem.
I prefer the OS X way of things. Actually if it wasn't for Apple OS X would be almost perfect, since it does very well at having an intuitive GUI, yet still allowing easy access to the terminal and innards. If someone managed to hash our a decent open OS X-like distro, I would be in love.
The whole reason Microsoft used "/Program Files" instead of /Programs was to force programs to be able to handle spaces in filenames. But if I were designing VFAT, I would have made space the lowercase version of underscore. This way, "Program Files" would have become equivalent to "Program_Files" in the same way that it is equivalent to "program files".
The one nice thing about *Nix naming conventions is the ease of typing. Typing out Progam(space)Files is much more annoying than just /bin. When navigating within the Windows terminal, I sometimes feel like I'm writing a damn novel.
*You*, as an Ubuntu user, could probably figure out how to shift the icons back to the right in pretty much no time flat. I took me around 3 minutes, and I'm not a power-user.
As for driving adoption, it might work both ways. Part of the perceived problem with windows managers were that they all looked like really bad copies of Windows 95. Moving the buttons divorces the image (at least in theory) of being a bad, cheap, Windows copy. It is kind of odd, since the old default Gnome set-up for Ubuntu was pretty slick looking, even with the strange color scheme.
One.
Click on terminal, add the repository (typing, no clicks), hit enter.
Apt-get (typing, no clicks)
Software installed.
Yes, I understand what you were getting at, and I fully understand. I find having to hand enter many repositories (even to get the newest release of things like Firefox) to be highly annoying. Right now I have Ubuntu on my laptop, which I only pretty much use for browsing the web and some light text editing/writing, and I still find myself having to use the terminal around every other day. Some of it, obviously, is my fault since I enjoy mucking around in the OS and see what I can do, but good amount of it is inevitable to even your average user.
Every time I have to hand add, and install, a repository I scream a little bit, it should be easier, it should be more streamlined, I should have to carefully copy two lines of text from a random page to a terminal just because Canonical really REALLY doesn't want me to consider installing it. Its even worse with the shrinking fraction of files you have to go compile to make them run, this is FAR above the average users head.
Also, the directory structure is annoying. I've been using computers of various types for a very long time, so I don't mind the almost arbitrary use of 3-letter directories, but the average user does, or would. Software being in C:\program files makes more sense that being in some flavor of /usr/bin or /etc/ or whatnot for a purely ease of use standpoint.
A lot of Ubuntu's features also suck, like their power management (which might be the most underpowered GUI tool that ever existed), where you can tell they still are a work in progress, and some group of devs never really got around to putting polish on them, and may never because it isn't a tool that they will ever use, preferring, themselves, to edit config files by hand.
That is another problem. Linux (and all of its family members) are built by nerds, for nerds. The focus is on what THEY want, with only a little work done to add the gloss and sparkle that everyone else in the world wants. Why the hell would I ever build a really decent power management console for Gnome, when I could just edit the damn settings like I have for umpteen years? Whereas the big players spend tons of money focusing on what the majority of people actually want.
That said, I like Ubuntu, I use it, and I enjoy it. Though I am thinking of moving on to either Mint or OpenSuse. It just isn't meant for the average user as it stands. And it won't be until there is a shift in the actually productive Linux community.
HOW COME MY GAME DOESN'T WORK?
And generally it still don't, even under Windows. That is unless you crack open the case and put in a video card, mess with your drivers, and had the general foresight to actually buy a computer with enough horsepower to play games (meaning your technical knowledge is slightly above nill).
And in some games, even through Steam, run around finding the executable and messing with command augments and compatibility modes. And even them some of them died for completely mysterious reasons (damn you Torchlight!)
Also, to reply to myself as a footnote; the site that I got Windows 7 from (the place with heavy student discounts, forgot its name), acknowledged their download problems, and actually put Windows 7 on a torrent for people to download. Another example of legal, and wise, use of torrents. I forgot how many seeders their were when I recently REdownloaded Windows 7, since the damn company didn't actually send me the install media I paid for (and then lied about it, saying it shipped months ago).
Good points. I think what the study was intended to show - certainly how I read it - was the uses of Bittorrent clients (that is to say, what users choose to download when the choice of files is theirs); this would make automatic uses like WoW irrelevant.
This doesn't make much sense. So we should limit our study on the use of torrents to only sites that distribute pirated content. or limit our study to only people who use x client, but not y client (Steam and Blizzard, and the various new streaming torrent sites).
Also you realize that when I click on the "update" button in WoW, I chose to download that content as much as I choose to download the latest (whoever is the big pop star of the day) album. Even more so for downloads from places like the Blizzard store, or other legitimate software channels that use torrent. The other day I used a torrent to grab Starcraft 1, i was right from my Battle.net account, why doesn't that count as much as me navigating to Pirate Bay, and downloading the pirated copy?
As a random question, lets say I did navigate to TPB and downloaded the StarCraft 1 installer, but used my legitimate CD key, would that be infringement? (I've actually done this for Fallout 1 and 2 before, being that my CDs were in a pile of boxes somewhere after moving). I've done it with Windows once, where the actual legitmate download page was killing my download at 60%, so I downloaded it from a torrent site, ran the MD5, and put in my freshly purchased license code. Cases like these (which can't be completely uncommon) make studies like these a bit more... useless.
In 91? I might have my time off by a year, but I remember that our local stores still had 1 or 2 shelves for CDs versus 100 or so for cassettes. I got a CD player some time around 90, and I was pretty cutting edge.
My memory might be a bit off by this point though. And I agree, the record bit was completely off. I meant 8-track.
Ahem.
The 'real' grassroots gets it.
And who might those be? Its been such a long time since I've seen a real, 100% authentic, grassroots organization. Sure, some of them start out grassroots, but that only lasts long enough for someone to realize that their is money in it, or that they have a pool of people ready to be manipulated (see both the "green" and "tea party" movements).
If I bought a Pearl Jam album in 1991 and still enjoying listening to it today, then I got an awful lot of value out of $11. Even better, I'm not done listening to it. I can listen to it as many timeas as I want over the course of my life.
Except this isn't true. Unless you were on of the lucky few, you bought it on cassette or vinyl. Either way, you got to spend another $16-$20 to switch its format to something modern somewhere in there, even if you bought it is a different (obsolete) format. And now they expect you to buy it in a digital format as well, even if they haven't gotten that wish yet, it still would make them unbelievably happy.
Hollywood is infinitely worse, obviously, since they even made it illegal to watch your movie on some devices, and illegal to switch formats from media that you already own (DMCA). So if you bought in on VHS, you need to buy it on DVD. If your more of a gadgeteer, then you bought it on beta, then VHS, then DVD, and now Blu-Ray, and finally a digital copy so you can watch on the go (as long as you don't run a *Nix, then you must break the law).
I really don't mind IP as long as it makes sense, paying more than once for content is absurd. I don't view it as wrong if you are just format switching. Actually I don't view it as wrong if the artist doesn't get paid, the artist is dead, the media is old enough so that the artist should have gotten a new golden egg laying good (around 30 years). And if someone goes out of their way to screw me, I have absolutely no moral compulsion about playing the same game back. You try to get, via underhanded means, free money from me, then I have no problem with trying to get free stuff from you.
I think that, in opposition to your position, marijuana use is becoming more and more acceptable and with generational replacement I think that we'll see legalization of it in general within a few more generations.
Heres hoping. But people said the same thing about the young people of the 60's getting old and grabbing power. They got old, they grabbed power, and things are pretty much exactly as they were.
It would take a large dose of reason to make anything better. I have a fair amount of cynicism on that topic, a rather large amount. Our government doesn't seem to be getting any saner, nor does the civic debate that drives government, the whole messing is turning into a circus sideshow.
There are only a handful of people in Congress that aren't hypocrites on this issue -- Ron Paul on the right and Maurice Hinchey on the left (just to pick two) -- but they are few and far between.
This is why I made the statement. Our politicians really don't represent us anymore. The government's wishes, and our wishes are WILDLY divergent these days. Public opinion might lean in favor of legalizing pot, but it doesn't matter one bit.
I do love the non-reality based anti-marijuana propaganda, without it a lot less people would probably smoke pot.
I remember when I was a young thing I was scared to death of pot. Pot was as scary as heroin, the second I smoked it I would turn into some drooling junky who wears tie-dye and sounds like Keanu Reeves ("woh"). My friends sister was a bit of a dealer (much worse things than pot), and kept on trying to get us to try it, and we stately refused every time for fear of life time addiction and stupidity.
When we eventually did try, and got nothing worse than the giggles and a good nights sleep, we smoked A LOT more since obviously everything we were feed was bogus. It might not be good logic, but it is adolescent logic. Its the same problem we have with booze, by American standards EVERYONE in the rest of the world is a lush, and as a result we have very strange drinking problems. For some reason making something taboo increases its chances for abuse, as opposed to having a sane point of view, and endorsing moderation and intelligent use (see also sex, see also violence).
After I realized that every thing I was told about marijuana was a lie, I quickly moved on to harder substances, that are actually harmful. I figured that if they lied about pot, they probably lied about every thing else as well.
Authority should be based on trust, the second you break that trust, everything you say is dubious, even if truthful.
I don't use any drugs anymore (outside of caffeine, cigarettes, and the occasional stiff martini), but I am all for legalization of at least pot, and a re-examination of the rest of our drug laws and policies. Some drugs I can understand banning, or at least harsh regulation, some drugs I can't. Heroin can have bad effects on society (or methamphetamines), but drugs like pot are rather benign. I actually would rather have more pot heads than alcoholics, alcohol is far more destructive than marijuana.
Let's see...smaller government and lower taxes. That's the exact opposite of "puritan like values" if you know anything about history.
I view this as a rather forced misunderstanding. "Puritan" values generally mean laws against things that are not within religious tenets. "Worship" being the key term. Think "blue laws". Any regulation against sin can be viewed as a law that is puritanical. It isn't so much "your too stupid to know whats good for you", but "we must regulate what we view as moral". The traditional "family values" Republicans are a better example than the Democratic party line.
Any law that is in line with traditional puritan values is a "puritanical" law. the "War on Drugs" is puritanical. Meaning a law based on old religious principles (which by definition is conservative".
One thing I haven't seen anybody touch on yet is that the debate wasn't between those that want it legal and those that don't want it legal, it was between the small growers and the large growers. The small growers are opposed to the large growers simply because the large growers can grow it better and more efficiently and they're causing the price to drop dramatically. That'll mean less tax revenue in the end, but it also means no small grower
I, as a self-admitted socialist liberal, want it legalized, but don't really care about the means to production. As a true liberal, though, I'd rather the government be less involved. As long as production does not harm people overtly (think John Locke), the government should have no say, even if a religious majority has an opinion.
The Tea Party folks are exactly the group within the Republicans who would get behind legalization.
The problem with this idea is that its very hard to tell where the grass ends and the Astroturf begins in the modern tea party movement. The original core of the tea party would be a great ally to legalization, but a lot of the movement has been taken over by the same old creepy Republicans.
It is amusing that legalization is an issue that both the far left, and far right could stand behind though, you just run into problems towards the middle.
...but I think the 'medical marijuana' movement is a farce. The net result is a bunch of stoner rejects inventing various chronic conditions in order to prove to the officials that they need marijuana to make their life tolerable. How embarrassing... how degrading.
I think its a fairly savvy political move. For some reason the feds (and some local fiefdoms) have an irrational fear of marijuana, and puritan like values are on the rise, so the odds of marijuana ever being legalized on its own merits is slim to none. A lot of the population is nebulously hostile to legalization for vague reasons, or completely apathetic. So the only real way to get the discussion started, and to start demystifying pot is to make it public, available, and outside of the purely hedonistic "some drugs are not evil" arena. Medical marijuana has done this very well.
I really don't think many people actually buy the "needing marijuana to make life tolerable" part of medical marijuana, as much as they view it as a way to eventually for the feds to fix their point of view. Medical marijuana is a gateway drug to legalized marijuana.
On Win7 64bit, Firefox (latest release AND the beta candidate) does that every single time, but Chrome/ium (stable and dev) remains stable under the same scenario. That is the problem with anecdotal evidence.
I agree that the "one tab doesn't effect the others" thing is a load of crap, for the most part. Chrome can get VERY sluggish, and eventually not respond at all based on the misbehavior of a single process. I've had tabs, and extensions, kill all of Chrome.
At the same time, paper books and printed scientific articles fail at the portability read. I am tired of hauling 10 books in my luggage whenever I go on vacation.
Agreed. It is oddly comforting to carry around a small library of books where ever you go. The ability to buy books on the fly (or get free public domain books) is also very handy. I recently had to watch someone's house for a week, and they had pretty much nothing in their house but television, no wifi, no computer (well, an old 1Ghz Dell running a badly beaten install of XP), so I quickly used the 3G connection to grab the entire Dune series. My whole $200 purchase was justified at that moment.
t the academic usage, I can easily carry and read 1000s of articles in my Kindle DX.
Does the DX handle PDFs better than the regular Kindle (or Nook, or any other reader I've tried)? I noticed that most of them mangle PDFs pretty badly, and the original Kindle had a very hard time with scaling them to be readable.
Reading digital books also adds the relief of not adding even more books to my (overcrowded) shelfs. Some friends of mine like the idea of having a hard-cover of a given book in a shelf. For me that always sounds like a sort of fetishism.
It is an odd compulsion, I admit, but an enjoyable one. We currently have around 5 or six completely full shelves of books in our house. Both of us are chronic book hoarders (a room for books was even a criteria when we recently were house shopping). There is something nice about having a wall of books though. I think bookshelves are like a photo album for antisocial people, a lot of our fond memories involves books, and it is nice to be reminded of them.
I did go out and buy a Nook, but I was very much against getting an ebook reader for the same reason. I went to school for philosophy (lots of reading, even more marginal notes), and any reader on the market would have completely failed. Yes, some readers have decent note taking abilities, but they still ultimately fail compared to scribbling in margins, especially for those of us who "unconventional" note taking styles. Actually ebooks fail for ANY academic use, since often you read things very non-linearly if you plan on writing a paper, or even if it is just for normal research. All readers fail at non-linear reads.
I used my Nook for fiction, and light non-fiction. For serious reading I still stick with actual, real books. Also me and my girlfriend are book people, there is nothing quite as nice as owning a good book. So even if I read a good book on the Nook, I still will go out and buy it at the local used book store so I can have a hard "backup" version.
As someone else who has been rewatching the Tom Baker episodes, I can honestly say that they do stand the test of time.
Or at least I've been enjoying them.
Eccleston was kind of boring. He was very nice upon first watching, in the context of "wow, new Doctor", but after Tennant and Smith he shrunk a bit. He was kind of mopey, overly serious, and lacked the quirks that make most of the previous and subsequent doctors interesting.
I would say Tennant (in my completely irrelevant opinion) is tied with Tom Baker, and Smith might be the most likable of the lot.
I equate an lack of knowledge plus inability with stupidity.
That could be true, but often it only means a lack of education or experience. When I first used a computer (much less any *nix) I lacked both knowledge and ability, it wasn't stupidity. More important is the ability and willingness to learn.
Also, how does one leach off of open source? Its not like OSS is a limited commodity.
That should tell you that the Replica* party is really the Hollywood party.
*I heard that dropping the last couple letters from political parties was the cool thing to do today.