I checked a bunch of my cassettes once to find that the record companies had neglected to spell out any of the license terms whatsoever.
Because there is no licencing involved when you buy a musical recording, any more than when you purchase a book. You're not buying a licence, you're buying a copy. You can do whatever you want with your copy except make other copies. (Public performance is considered to be a weird form of making a copy.)
We've never had a probe on the surface of Jupiter or Saturn look up and see the sky. Since gas giants are giant balls of slush with crunchy centers, the idea of "sky" isn't quite clear.
The "right wing" is the Establishment and the "left wing" is the anti-Establishment. Therefore in a conventional Western democracy, "right wing" refers to capitalism (and liberalism?) where that is the Establishment, and "left wing" refers to radical alternatives like Communism, Anarchism etc.
No.
"Left" and "right" have their origins in the seating arrangements of a pre-Revolution French parliament. Nobles sat on the right, commoners (or rather, their representatives, who weren't quite so common) sat on the left. Thus, generally, being on the right was to support the privileged class; being on the left was to support the common people and more equality.
In their modern forms, the right supports (and usually hopes to join) the "privileged nobles" of the capitialist class, those to whom the state has granted control of the means of production; the left seeks a more equitable arrangement, supporting the rights and interests of the "common" laborers.
Properly, "right" and "left" refer to economic arrangements. Using them to talk about the orthogonal political dimensions of legislated morality and foreign policy results in great confusion.
Re:The Handmaid's Tale
on
Oryx and Crake
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Old-school King at his best could kick just about anyone's ass, including Atwood's.
Back in the 80s, I picked up a copy of "The Gunslinger", first in a series by King that his fans (at least some of them) were calling his masterwork. It read like it had been written by a high school student, very flat writing and an unengaging plot.
Was this book in particular overhyped? Or is King just another highly-succesful mediocre author?
My taxes are complicated enough that there's no way I'd give up the benefits of TurboTax unless it's for something equivalent or better.
How about using the online version?
I filed online with H & R block (which is Kiplinger's TaxCut behind the scenes, IIRC) the past two years. I did have to use a Windows box at the end to download a PDF, because their software was too dumb to understand that I had a PDF viewer installed on my Linux box. Otherwise, it went ok.
Where do we draw the line people? what is acceptable and what is not?
Freedom is acceptable. Censorship is not.
Consider: "What if a publisher comes out this year with a new blockbuster book in which someone serially rapes women and then must dump the bodies? What about a Racist book where a band of KKK members run throughout the south killing blacks?"
I just can't take someone seriously who tells me that non-free software is morally unnacceptable.
To believe that non-free software is morally acceptable, is to believe that it is acceptable to use force to prevent users from sharing or making changes to software.
I think it's worth seriously considering that this may be a false proposition.
If most people's expectation of software was to create "cooperation and community", RMS mmight be onto something here. But the truth is that most people and businesses want software that fulfills a particular need (or set of needs).
But among those needs is support; the ability to get questions answered and to have changes made.
There are two possible sources of support. Proprietary vendors, who keep you trapped with lock-ins and who can drop you at any time. (Like MS is dropping Windows 98 users). Or an open cooperating community of users and vendors, where you are not locked in and can almost always find help because you're dealing with peers. (If Windows 98 was free software or open source, the community of users could band together to fund continuing development and support.)
Cooperation and community are among the software needs that people and businesses have. Since software is still a very new thing, most don't realize this until they get burned; but they're learning. Which is why more and more people are becoming interested in free software.
This is certainly overstating the importance of software's influence on each person's ability to cooperate and experience community. And I assert that this is where the open source movement fails.
Except for two little facts:
Stallman is a member - a founding member - of the free software movement, not the open source movement.
Both the free software and open source movements are succeeding spectacularly.
The general popluation doesn't care about the right to see the source code, most of the users of computers can't do any thing with the code any way.
The general population doesn't install new plumbing fixtures either. But only a fool would buy a house where all the pipes were kept locked away with only one plumber having the key.
"Weakness" has nothing to do with addiction, and bullshit judgemental attitudes like yours often lead to people taking foolish chances ("I'm not weak so I won't have a problem") or not getting help ("If I get help I'd be admitting weakness").
I'm glad you didn't get addicted, but that fact reveals no superiority on your part - any more than not getting cancer means you're "superior" to those who have.
why did they demand you drink 4 liters of water a day, while you were on the fire crew?
With heat and exertion, you will sweat out a tremendous amount of fluid. I remember one evening of dancing around a large bonfire where I was drinking water at a rate of about a liter per hour and didn't urinate at all - sweated it all out.
'flushing out the toxins' does sound a bit like homeopathy.
Sounds like physiology to me, since removing toxins is part of the function of the kidneys. Grabbing an old A & P book (one of my Mom's old nursing texts, "Anatomy and Physiology", Kimber, Gray, Stackpole, and Leavell, 1963) off the shelf:
During illness it is the function of the kidneys to eliminate toxic substances that find their way into the blood, whether these substances result from defective metabolism, from bacterial activity, or from chemical poisons. This may account for the fact that the kidneys are often left in a damaged condition and suggests the desirability of a copious intake of water in order to decrease the concentration of toxic materials and thereby lessen the chances of injury to the tissues.
I.e., drinking water helps flush toxins out.
Of course the liver also has a role in detoxification:
The importance of the "protective" role of the liver cannnot be overemphasized. It controls not only the concentration of various substances but by a variety of chemical reactions such as oxidation, reduction, conjugation, and by other means, the liver detoxifies certain end products of digestion, for example, phenol, skatole, and indole. These are aromatic substances which give odor to fecal material. Through bile the liver eliminates certain drugs, and heavy metals such as mercury; morphine and strychnine can be absorbed and stored by the liver and freed slowly so that dilution their toxicity is diminished. By virtue of the Kupffer cells, which are located in the liver sinusoids, the liver has the ability to detoxify substances. These cells have phagocytic action and hence have an important role in the defense mechanism of the body.
No. Addiction - real addition, not the "psychological addiction" people have started bandying about - is a physiological change in the nervous system. The body becomes reliant on the presence of a substance, and does not function properly without it.
This is why withdrawl has physiological effects. In the case of alcohol or barbituates, the effects can be deadly, with other drugs
It is a slow and poorly designed monolith that often requires considerable chiseling and hacking in order to work with even the most simple of 3D games.
Then don't use it for games. Use libsdl or something similar.
X isn't for 3D games. X - with its wonderful network transparancy - is for people who like to use computers to get work done.
Just get an old 400 baud acoustic coupler-style modem.
I think you mean 300. At least if you were in the U.S. I never encountered a 400 baud one.
Ah, acoustic coupler goodness. (Insert flashback effects here...) First programming I ever did was in a summer program for "gifted" kids, in 1981, at Western Maryland College. They had a PDP-11. The only connection from the terminal room to the computer was dial-up over the campus phone system. With acoustic coupler modems. And, I can't be sure after all these year, but I think the phones were rotary dial.
Yes, kids, this is what we did before broadband...
but realize that if you ever want to get a significant loan (like, oh say, a mortgage) they may ask for the statements from the last 6-12 months on all your accounts.
I've refinanced my mortgage several times. No one has ever asked for anything but paystubs.
Unless it's tax related, I keep the paid bills in a pile for a month or two in case a problem comes up, than zip! Down the shedder.
When's the last time you smelled Hickory or Maple burning and thought about passing a law to specifically cover the combustion of those woods?
Woods fires are generally ventilated so that the vast majority of combustion products are directed away.
If someone wants to smoke, it's not your job to stop them.
So long as they're not causing me, or any unwilling person (including their own children) to do so, yes. (Just as my right to enjoy a good beer doesn't include the right to piss on other people.)
Without copyright the "default" would be the public domain, which would mean that anyone could modify sourcecode, base a product on it, and keep their modifications secret.
True. But without copyright, they couldn't sell that product on a pay-per-copy basis, so market forces would strongly discourage this. (Indeed, this trend can already be percieved in the move towards free / open source software.)
If you've given up the idea of pay-per-copy, moving towards programmers being paid for custom solutions, and people are allowed to hack your binaries anyway, what motive do you have to keep your source secret? Would you hire a plumber who insists on putting a locked cover around all your pipes?
LSD came out of Basel, Switzerland (that's in Europe), in the forties.
LSD was invented in Switzerland, and Unix was invented in New Jersey. However, the idiom "Y comes out of X" doesn't mean it was invented there, just that X is a major center of production. E.g.:
Berkeley was a noted production center of LSD and Unix (technically a Unix-like system, Unix is a trademark of whatever it's a trademark of these days, yaddayaddayadda).
say that they now prefer instant messaging (IM) over e-mail as their medium of choice for computer-mediated communication
Good grief, why? IM seems to me to combine the worst features of the telephone and e-mail. I've never understood its allure. E-mail is quite fast enough for non-interactive communication, and if you want interactive communication pick up the phone (or better yet get off your ass and walk over to me, if we're in the sam building, I hate intra-office telephoning) and we can be much more interactive when we don't have to type at each other. And many people have e-mail through work, but not IM accounts. (Sadly, spammers are not amoung them, as IM spam is apparently becoming common.) Plus, the IM space is fragmented.
So, can anyone convince me that I should sign up for an IM account?
Do you honestly think 3rd world countries will have this on a large scale anytime soon?
Perhaps it wasn't clear (though if you followed the links it might have been...), but the point isn't dumping bad batteries into third world markets. It's the dumping of used batteries for "recycling" into nations that have little or no environmental or worker protection laws. Much of the toxic material gets out into the people, the land, and the water.
Slashdot Mirror
Because there is no licencing involved when you buy a musical recording, any more than when you purchase a book. You're not buying a licence, you're buying a copy. You can do whatever you want with your copy except make other copies. (Public performance is considered to be a weird form of making a copy.)
IANAL, YMMV.
We've never had a probe on the surface of Jupiter or Saturn look up and see the sky. Since gas giants are giant balls of slush with crunchy centers, the idea of "sky" isn't quite clear.
You wouldn't be thrown "free to safety". You'd much more likely be thrown to your death. Being thrown from a vehicle by a collision is usually fatal.
I expect it will have no more effect than his daddy's plan to go to build Mars.
No.
"Left" and "right" have their origins in the seating arrangements of a pre-Revolution French parliament. Nobles sat on the right, commoners (or rather, their representatives, who weren't quite so common) sat on the left. Thus, generally, being on the right was to support the privileged class; being on the left was to support the common people and more equality.
In their modern forms, the right supports (and usually hopes to join) the "privileged nobles" of the capitialist class, those to whom the state has granted control of the means of production; the left seeks a more equitable arrangement, supporting the rights and interests of the "common" laborers.
Properly, "right" and "left" refer to economic arrangements. Using them to talk about the orthogonal political dimensions of legislated morality and foreign policy results in great confusion.
Back in the 80s, I picked up a copy of "The Gunslinger", first in a series by King that his fans (at least some of them) were calling his masterwork. It read like it had been written by a high school student, very flat writing and an unengaging plot.
Was this book in particular overhyped? Or is King just another highly-succesful mediocre author?
How about using the online version?
I filed online with H & R block (which is Kiplinger's TaxCut behind the scenes, IIRC) the past two years. I did have to use a Windows box at the end to download a PDF, because their software was too dumb to understand that I had a PDF viewer installed on my Linux box. Otherwise, it went ok.
The right to keep and bear arms is about self-defense, not hunting. And if guns aren't needed, why does the government supply them to police?
My life is not worth less than that of a cop, and I have the right to the same tools of defense.
Freedom is acceptable. Censorship is not.
Consider: "What if a publisher comes out this year with a new blockbuster book in which someone serially rapes women and then must dump the bodies? What about a Racist book where a band of KKK members run throughout the south killing blacks?"
To believe that non-free software is morally acceptable, is to believe that it is acceptable to use force to prevent users from sharing or making changes to software.
I think it's worth seriously considering that this may be a false proposition.
But among those needs is support; the ability to get questions answered and to have changes made.
There are two possible sources of support. Proprietary vendors, who keep you trapped with lock-ins and who can drop you at any time. (Like MS is dropping Windows 98 users). Or an open cooperating community of users and vendors, where you are not locked in and can almost always find help because you're dealing with peers. (If Windows 98 was free software or open source, the community of users could band together to fund continuing development and support.)
Cooperation and community are among the software needs that people and businesses have. Since software is still a very new thing, most don't realize this until they get burned; but they're learning. Which is why more and more people are becoming interested in free software.
Except for two little facts:
The general population doesn't install new plumbing fixtures either. But only a fool would buy a house where all the pipes were kept locked away with only one plumber having the key.
"Weakness" has nothing to do with addiction, and bullshit judgemental attitudes like yours often lead to people taking foolish chances ("I'm not weak so I won't have a problem") or not getting help ("If I get help I'd be admitting weakness").
I'm glad you didn't get addicted, but that fact reveals no superiority on your part - any more than not getting cancer means you're "superior" to those who have.
With heat and exertion, you will sweat out a tremendous amount of fluid. I remember one evening of dancing around a large bonfire where I was drinking water at a rate of about a liter per hour and didn't urinate at all - sweated it all out.
I.e., drinking water helps flush toxins out.
Of course the liver also has a role in detoxification:
This is why withdrawl has physiological effects. In the case of alcohol or barbituates, the effects can be deadly, with other drugs
Then don't use it for games. Use libsdl or something similar.
X isn't for 3D games. X - with its wonderful network transparancy - is for people who like to use computers to get work done.
I think you mean 300. At least if you were in the U.S. I never encountered a 400 baud one.
Ah, acoustic coupler goodness. (Insert flashback effects here...) First programming I ever did was in a summer program for "gifted" kids, in 1981, at Western Maryland College. They had a PDP-11. The only connection from the terminal room to the computer was dial-up over the campus phone system. With acoustic coupler modems. And, I can't be sure after all these year, but I think the phones were rotary dial.
Yes, kids, this is what we did before broadband...
I've refinanced my mortgage several times. No one has ever asked for anything but paystubs.
Unless it's tax related, I keep the paid bills in a pile for a month or two in case a problem comes up, than zip! Down the shedder.
Filters are made with cellulose acetate, a plastic which is slow to degrade.And they're packed full enough of toxic chemicals from the smoke to be an ecological hazard.
Woods fires are generally ventilated so that the vast majority of combustion products are directed away.So long as they're not causing me, or any unwilling person (including their own children) to do so, yes. (Just as my right to enjoy a good beer doesn't include the right to piss on other people.)
True. But without copyright, they couldn't sell that product on a pay-per-copy basis, so market forces would strongly discourage this. (Indeed, this trend can already be percieved in the move towards free / open source software.)
If you've given up the idea of pay-per-copy, moving towards programmers being paid for custom solutions, and people are allowed to hack your binaries anyway, what motive do you have to keep your source secret? Would you hire a plumber who insists on putting a locked cover around all your pipes?
LSD was invented in Switzerland, and Unix was invented in New Jersey. However, the idiom "Y comes out of X" doesn't mean it was invented there, just that X is a major center of production. E.g.:
Berkeley was a noted production center of LSD and Unix (technically a Unix-like system, Unix is a trademark of whatever it's a trademark of these days, yaddayaddayadda).
Good grief, why? IM seems to me to combine the worst features of the telephone and e-mail. I've never understood its allure. E-mail is quite fast enough for non-interactive communication, and if you want interactive communication pick up the phone (or better yet get off your ass and walk over to me, if we're in the sam building, I hate intra-office telephoning) and we can be much more interactive when we don't have to type at each other. And many people have e-mail through work, but not IM accounts. (Sadly, spammers are not amoung them, as IM spam is apparently becoming common.) Plus, the IM space is fragmented.
So, can anyone convince me that I should sign up for an IM account?
Perhaps it wasn't clear (though if you followed the links it might have been...), but the point isn't dumping bad batteries into third world markets. It's the dumping of used batteries for "recycling" into nations that have little or no environmental or worker protection laws. Much of the toxic material gets out into the people, the land, and the water.