I don't imply that your code is in anyway unethical or illegal.
It does seem like there's that assumption. Actually, I didn't want to get into a whole side discussion on it, since that was essentially rehashing the original question. That's why I left a lot out of my first post. I just wanted to skip the issue.
My main point was that the OP had no clue what had gone on regarding that code. Personally, I feel this story gives us way to little info. We don't know what kind of forum the post was on, what the policies of the forum were, what the context of the post was, or anything else. I actually wondered, after reading the post, if it was possible his supervisor could have asked, on the forum, how to solve his problem, and then the post with the code might have been a direct response, which one could argue would include an implicit permission to allow the code to be reused. While that's unlikely, I still feel like we weren't given enough info.
It seems we've both had drama-queen coders that were more interested in creating smoke than writing with fire. We'd both sack them.
I first read that and thought you had written "smack" instead of sack. That image gave me quite a level of emotional satisfaction. Personally, I am usually more interested in the person than in a particular skill. I'm lucky that I'm not doing anything with such a high skill level that I need top "experts." If someone knows Perl they can (usually) learn Python and do well in it. Sure, they may miss a few points and write loops that are 13 steps instead of 10 steps, but in my situation that's rarely an issue. I'd rather have someone that can work with me and others than a prima donna who thinks his skills justify poor people skills. Luckily, I've avoided drama queen employees. I did have way too much experience with people like that when I was directing a movie made with all volunteers and, unfortunately, that's not a place where you can replace someone after the first couple weeks. That's when I learned to watch for that stuff when hiring.
As for drag and drop, if you're talking about a quick operation and not reviewing the code, that's an issue, but we've encountered a number of times where we used other people's code. Any time you use a Perl (or any programming language) library, that's what you're doing. I've seen Perl modules that seemed to do what they said, but we still tested them thoroughly before using them and examined the code. Even with that, it was faster than writing our own library.
I keep my staff small (always 3 or fewer programmers). Sometimes it takes longer, but, overall, it hasn't cost more and it won't be long before our code base is "complete." When that happens, it'll be down to one programmer to handle upkeep and to add the few new things we need. I've been lucky to find a situation where there isn't much need to keep pace with others. That also tends to effect the type of person I can and do hire. I don't need to worry about ambitious or dramatic people who talk about wanting to have a corner office and manage large teams.
So am I. Almost every line of your post is an assumption based on -- well, nothing.
as is mentioned upthread, published works are owned by their authors by copyright in the USA
And where does it say for sure that 1) this company is in the US or that the forum is based in the US? And, again, as I pointed out, how does the OP know that even if it's not in the comments, that permission wasn't obtained elsewhere, in email, for example?
I'd prefer an ethical behavior on the part of all of my employees; some do better jobs than others-- but ethics comes first. Our code is clean, was clean, will be clean, and adheres to the licensing and copyright strictures.
I never said I didn't but you seem to assume so. I set the ethics for my company. There are MANY times when two or more people can have differing views on what is right. I built my company from the ground up, from when I couldn't even afford to buy the tech books I needed without asking relatives and friends for a loan. It's my business which means when views conflict, my ethics prevail. It's my decision that counts.
Dry-ripping/cutting&pasting code from any old website is beyond stupid, it's lax, possibly criminal, and well, you haven't vetted the code against standards and practices-- what if it blows up or creates a nice nugget of crap in otherwise vetted code.
Interesting assumption -- that you haven't vetted it against standards and practices. Depending on the language, a couple hundred lines of code by a third party can be just as easily debugged as if one wrote it himself. That the code comes from outside does not make it better or worse than if it was written by someone inside the company. Yet you assume it is bad and hasn't been debugged or vetted.
And what if this new programmer, the OP, writes replacement code that "blows up or creates a nice nugget of crap?"
I disagree with your practices.
An interesting judgement you make considering, from that first post of mine, the only practice I stated was that I'd rather have someone who works than looks for moral crusades. I've had potential programmers, for example, that felt I was immoral because the program we give our clients to run on their computers to connect to ours is closed source. I'm not going to hire someone who is going to make it a point of continually butting heads with me, thinking that his ethics should or have to rule over mine.
If you re-read my post, I didn't tell the guy what to do. I didn't tell him to shut up, I didn't tell him to go to management. I just brought up one point that was quite relevant. I didn't say what to do or not do.
They put output over ethics, suggest unscrupulous use of code, violate standards practices, and create possible conflicts with other code.
Again, quite an assumption. I am quite strict in how certain situations should be handled and could have "made it" much faster if I didn't make a point of working within ethical boundaries. I have competitors that I could have wiped out if I wanted to, but I haven't due to ethics. You make quite a strong judgement and make some strong statements about me with very little information.
And, again, all the issues you say are possible with someone else's code are just as possible with code written in house.
Thank you, though, for providing a good example of what I'm talking about: Someone who is so eager to find a chance to stand up for what he thinks is right (and a chance to go on an ethical crusade so he can take someone else down) that they're willing to jump in without thinking or examining the situation and start calling people immoral or unjust.
I'd also consider the possibility that you don't know the whole story. I found a version of some well known C code for Java and wanted to be sure, before I included it in a FOSS project, that even though it's based on a mathematical algorithm and that the code for that function in other languages has been published in many FOSS programs, that I could include the code in a FOSS project. In the long run, I tracked it down through several people and basically nobody cared what it was included in and I don't think anyone even wanted to bother to license it. In the long run I kept all the emails and notified the project owner. We did make mention of it in the comments, but didn't feel it appropriate to include any guess at licensing info.
It's possible the project head already has permission to use it or may even know the programmer who posted the code to the forum. There could be any number of legit reasons why nothing was said about it in the code comments. It's even possible that post was made my the project leader under a different name.
To me, this sounds like the OP is a quite young programmer who is looking for a chance to lead a moral crusade rather than get the job done. In my experience I avoid taking on employees like that because they seem more focused on making sure everyone else follows their ethics than in doing a good job on the task at hand.
I used to hate Jack Thompson, but the more I read about him, the more I look forward to hearing what his latest stunt will be. He's become a larger than life comic book villain who will do anything, no matter how outrageous, to get himself publicity or to take down a force much bigger than he could ever hope to stop. Watching his latest absurd attempt to make everyone look at him and trying to figure out what he'll do next has become more entertaining than many of the games I've played. I've gone long past considering him any kind of threat and now often wonder if he is for real or can reasonably believe that any of his ideas are going to work. He's more and more like an incompetent Mr. Mxyzptlk, but more fun to watch.
No. That was just Electrodes from Planet 10 by way of the 8th dimension that thought they were back in the 8th dimension but were still over New Jersey.
First, the point about babies being without sin and getting a "free pass" is only true in some Christian beliefs, not in all. The point is not about sin, but about accepting Jesus as your personal savior. Whether or not one has sinned is not the determination in these beliefs but accepting Jesus and being "saved" is. In others, one can accept Jesus, but if one commits a mortal sin and dies before confessing it, then they lose it all.
I don't buy into these beliefs. I've been reading recently about the real death and resurrection and now I know who died for me and was resurrected (and stayed around a lot longer than 40 days). I live in peace knowing Harry Potter died to save me from evil.
One of our LUG members recently did a presentation on computer forensics. I forgot the group that he took his classes through, but I remember a friend of mine saying they were one of the best. His comment on this was that the myth of data being retrievable after it has been written over is just that, these days: a myth. It seems that was a problem back in the earlier days of hard drives, but not with any recent equipment. It seems that once this became a "fact" it's stayed one for decades, even though there's been no evidence or proof of it being true with any hard drive designs for years.
I don't know how accurate that is, but I know a few others in the LUG started looking into it and nobody posted any links they felt were valid to back up the surviving data myth.
I wish you and I could meet for coffee and discuss that. I think we have some basic agreements but that we're coming at it from such different points of view that we could go over our different thoughts on it for hours.
Yes, schools aren't getting kids ready for life. I would not say what they're forced to teach is always trivial, but I would call the requirements triviality forced into pseudo-importance by people who don't know a think about what goes on in the classroom. While this is likely outdated now, I read about how, at one point, California had spent millions on education reform, but throughout a number of years, that had not resulted in a single change in the classroom. Schools had moved to site-based management (and back from it), buzzwords were created, organizational structures were changed, the teachers were given more work to document everything, but nothing had actually had any effect on how things were taught.
The material taught has nothing to do with what those in the classroom have found needs to be taught. It's all worked out by bureaucrats who do nothing but read test results.
If you look at the Standards of Learning, for example, that some states use and look at what is being taught overall, it's not trivial. The problem is that most of what kids needs is not getting taught.
And to go with your example about Pre-Columbian Meso-American fishing cultures, did it occur to you there may be other reasons for teaching that other than "trivia?" For example, and this is a broad one, Gene Roddenberry realized he could do a show on the Viet Nam War by basing it on a planet far away. By the same token, often there are things that can be taught to people in a culture by focusing on one that is not so close. Then people, especially kids, don't see how close to home it hits. It's quite possible that such a group might be studied in a social studies class to teach about communities and how each person in a community has a distinct job and it's only through the efforts of all that the community thrives and grows.
I haven't taught for about a decade, but I have friends who are teaching and I keep up with what I can. I've never seen an example of trivia being a big problem, but I've seen many examples of teachers that were restricted on what they could teach and were not able to teach many things they wanted to or need to teach.
And for teachers vs. parents, there's some of both. Parental involvement is a huge issue (and does lead to kids sitting in front of the tv/babysitter way too much), but I have also noticed changes in what some newer teachers know vs. some of the more experienced teachers when they got out of college.
Yes, it is and I'm not sure I believe that most children diagnosed with it actually have any issue, other than impatient parents or teachers. I was using a less accurate but convenient label. I really did not feel like going more into the topic.
Yep. It's nowhere near new. I used data like this in a speech I had to do in public speaking around 1979 in high school. When I worked in Special Ed, many teachers had noticed that the kids who talked more about TV were the ones that tended to have less of an attention span. There's a lot of experience that leads one to believe that kids that watch too much TV tend to have an attention span that's about 10-15 minutes, or the length of time between commercials.
On the other hand, I've seen a huge number of kids who are supposedly ADD or ADHD show an amazing attention span when they sit down with a copy of Harry Potter. It makes me wonder if part of the problem with attention spans in school is due to inappropriate expectations for a child's age and boring teachers that just don't have the skills teachers did in years past.
You're letting your religious beliefs and emotional need to believe something, whether it's true or not, get in the way of the facts. I remember a discussion once about sf spaceships and how scientists have said that it is not possible to go faster than light speed and someone said, "Yeah, but they kept saying it wasn't possible to go faster than sound." The two statements are entirely unrelated. There wasn't "proof" about faster than sound travel. As far was what science can and cannot do, her memories, her personality, everything that made her who she was was lost. Without that, she could never be who she was. That is not an issue of "until recently they thought..." reasoning.
You might want to read up on logic and reasoning and how they are used in debate and discussion because you are making arguments without any basis other than your own beliefs. You are basing your comments on what you want and not on facts or reason.
That's a good point, both your correction and the original joke/question. I don't know if the/. editors ever read discussions, but one thing they don't do that I think could help a lot is to clarify what a story is talking about. I read this and wondered, "Why does Wikia need a boot loader?" I clicked on the link and still wasn't sure they were talking about something other than the boot loader until I clicked on the website's home page.
Sometimes it would be a big help if a story explained what some acronyms are or explained what something was for people not up on that particular topic.
Why would anyone post that other than to be mean, to hurt others and ruin something they might enjoy, and to draw attention to themselves? There's no reason to post spoilers unless you're jealous of someone else getting attention.
I really feel sorry for someone that is so insecure they have to do something like that to get attention.
(And it's because of tiny minds like the poster's that I took the weekend off and read it all before exposing myself to any media again.)
The difference is that true magicians admit they're illusionists. Part of the contract with their audience is that they will fool them and that the audience will try to figure out their tricks. Geller does not claim to be a magician. He claims to actually do what he appears to be doing with the power of his mind.
I'd agree to that. Why do there need to be additions? It's just a list. I want to see many of these "new" wonders some day, but just because Petra is on an arbitrary list and a group of people who knew about the poll doesn't make it any more of a wonder just as Angor Wat not being on the list doesn't make it any less of a wonder. It's just a a way some people found of making money under the guise of world unity. Even the first list isn't really necessary. It reminds me of the Book of Lists. All any list can be is just the opinion of one or more people (unless empirical objective measurements are used) and that book proved it with many lists a lot of people disagreed with. All the lists are arbitrary.
Read the more recently posted articles here. It turns out EMI is doing so well that even the paranoid companies, like Sony, are considering releasing DRM free music.
Yes, it'll always be around, but at some point the producers realize that it's an unending expense and realize it's better to just drop it and make what money they can. Look at digital media over the past 25 years. In the long run companies tend to drop it.
The AACS will be a good example of consumers getting fed up when they find the players they've paid good money for won't play their HD-DVDs, they'll get upset. Many don't even know what the issue is and haven't heard of AACS. All they'll know is that some discs don't play and they got ripped off. After that goes on for a while, companies will realize they're losing as much in good will as they might be saving in cost.
I am thinking along the same lines as you when you talk about it being in-your-face. When it gets to the point where people can't copy the media they buy for backups or to their own storage, it'll start angering them. It seems that the producers are blind and all they see is their content and the need to control it. They have no respect for their customers and treat them as thieves. The sooner they get high on their own egos and overstep the line, like Sony did with their rootkit, the sooner they'll have to back off.
While the price was about $150, my HP5510 does great with ink usage. When I was starting a business and we had to run on a budget, we got a $60 Epson and it burned through ink. In the long run, it would have been cheaper to just buy a new printer each time the black ink ran out, it was that bad. I think I had to refill it ever month to six weeks. Under the same usage, I don't have to buy ink for the HP5510 that often. It goes over a year before I have to refill the ink. I don't print pictures much, but I print a fair amount of program listings that are syntax highlighted with different colors.
My experience is that the cheaper printers are designed to sell ink cartridges but if you go for the higher end printers, as in over $120 or more for the printer, the refill frequency drops drastically.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't assume at all.
;-)
I said he "sounds" like that and I don't hire that type of person (if I can catch it in time). I never said he was.
Still, don't worry. I'm not going to make you work for me!
I don't imply that your code is in anyway unethical or illegal.
It does seem like there's that assumption. Actually, I didn't want to get into a whole side discussion on it, since that was essentially rehashing the original question. That's why I left a lot out of my first post. I just wanted to skip the issue.
My main point was that the OP had no clue what had gone on regarding that code. Personally, I feel this story gives us way to little info. We don't know what kind of forum the post was on, what the policies of the forum were, what the context of the post was, or anything else. I actually wondered, after reading the post, if it was possible his supervisor could have asked, on the forum, how to solve his problem, and then the post with the code might have been a direct response, which one could argue would include an implicit permission to allow the code to be reused. While that's unlikely, I still feel like we weren't given enough info.
It seems we've both had drama-queen coders that were more interested in creating smoke than writing with fire. We'd both sack them.
I first read that and thought you had written "smack" instead of sack. That image gave me quite a level of emotional satisfaction. Personally, I am usually more interested in the person than in a particular skill. I'm lucky that I'm not doing anything with such a high skill level that I need top "experts." If someone knows Perl they can (usually) learn Python and do well in it. Sure, they may miss a few points and write loops that are 13 steps instead of 10 steps, but in my situation that's rarely an issue. I'd rather have someone that can work with me and others than a prima donna who thinks his skills justify poor people skills. Luckily, I've avoided drama queen employees. I did have way too much experience with people like that when I was directing a movie made with all volunteers and, unfortunately, that's not a place where you can replace someone after the first couple weeks. That's when I learned to watch for that stuff when hiring.
As for drag and drop, if you're talking about a quick operation and not reviewing the code, that's an issue, but we've encountered a number of times where we used other people's code. Any time you use a Perl (or any programming language) library, that's what you're doing. I've seen Perl modules that seemed to do what they said, but we still tested them thoroughly before using them and examined the code. Even with that, it was faster than writing our own library.
I keep my staff small (always 3 or fewer programmers). Sometimes it takes longer, but, overall, it hasn't cost more and it won't be long before our code base is "complete." When that happens, it'll be down to one programmer to handle upkeep and to add the few new things we need. I've been lucky to find a situation where there isn't much need to keep pace with others. That also tends to effect the type of person I can and do hire. I don't need to worry about ambitious or dramatic people who talk about wanting to have a corner office and manage large teams.
Then I'm glad I don't work for you
So am I. Almost every line of your post is an assumption based on -- well, nothing.
as is mentioned upthread, published works are owned by their authors by copyright in the USA
And where does it say for sure that 1) this company is in the US or that the forum is based in the US? And, again, as I pointed out, how does the OP know that even if it's not in the comments, that permission wasn't obtained elsewhere, in email, for example?
I'd prefer an ethical behavior on the part of all of my employees; some do better jobs than others-- but ethics comes first. Our code is clean, was clean, will be clean, and adheres to the licensing and copyright strictures.
I never said I didn't but you seem to assume so. I set the ethics for my company. There are MANY times when two or more people can have differing views on what is right. I built my company from the ground up, from when I couldn't even afford to buy the tech books I needed without asking relatives and friends for a loan. It's my business which means when views conflict, my ethics prevail. It's my decision that counts.
Dry-ripping/cutting&pasting code from any old website is beyond stupid, it's lax, possibly criminal, and well, you haven't vetted the code against standards and practices-- what if it blows up or creates a nice nugget of crap in otherwise vetted code.
Interesting assumption -- that you haven't vetted it against standards and practices. Depending on the language, a couple hundred lines of code by a third party can be just as easily debugged as if one wrote it himself. That the code comes from outside does not make it better or worse than if it was written by someone inside the company. Yet you assume it is bad and hasn't been debugged or vetted.
And what if this new programmer, the OP, writes replacement code that "blows up or creates a nice nugget of crap?"
I disagree with your practices.
An interesting judgement you make considering, from that first post of mine, the only practice I stated was that I'd rather have someone who works than looks for moral crusades. I've had potential programmers, for example, that felt I was immoral because the program we give our clients to run on their computers to connect to ours is closed source. I'm not going to hire someone who is going to make it a point of continually butting heads with me, thinking that his ethics should or have to rule over mine.
If you re-read my post, I didn't tell the guy what to do. I didn't tell him to shut up, I didn't tell him to go to management. I just brought up one point that was quite relevant. I didn't say what to do or not do.
They put output over ethics, suggest unscrupulous use of code, violate standards practices, and create possible conflicts with other code.
Again, quite an assumption. I am quite strict in how certain situations should be handled and could have "made it" much faster if I didn't make a point of working within ethical boundaries. I have competitors that I could have wiped out if I wanted to, but I haven't due to ethics. You make quite a strong judgement and make some strong statements about me with very little information.
And, again, all the issues you say are possible with someone else's code are just as possible with code written in house.
Thank you, though, for providing a good example of what I'm talking about: Someone who is so eager to find a chance to stand up for what he thinks is right (and a chance to go on an ethical crusade so he can take someone else down) that they're willing to jump in without thinking or examining the situation and start calling people immoral or unjust.
I'd also consider the possibility that you don't know the whole story. I found a version of some well known C code for Java and wanted to be sure, before I included it in a FOSS project, that even though it's based on a mathematical algorithm and that the code for that function in other languages has been published in many FOSS programs, that I could include the code in a FOSS project. In the long run, I tracked it down through several people and basically nobody cared what it was included in and I don't think anyone even wanted to bother to license it. In the long run I kept all the emails and notified the project owner. We did make mention of it in the comments, but didn't feel it appropriate to include any guess at licensing info.
It's possible the project head already has permission to use it or may even know the programmer who posted the code to the forum. There could be any number of legit reasons why nothing was said about it in the code comments. It's even possible that post was made my the project leader under a different name.
To me, this sounds like the OP is a quite young programmer who is looking for a chance to lead a moral crusade rather than get the job done. In my experience I avoid taking on employees like that because they seem more focused on making sure everyone else follows their ethics than in doing a good job on the task at hand.
"We want to be nothing if not consistent."
Maybe he's a Pakled. The IQ level seems to match.
I used to hate Jack Thompson, but the more I read about him, the more I look forward to hearing what his latest stunt will be. He's become a larger than life comic book villain who will do anything, no matter how outrageous, to get himself publicity or to take down a force much bigger than he could ever hope to stop. Watching his latest absurd attempt to make everyone look at him and trying to figure out what he'll do next has become more entertaining than many of the games I've played. I've gone long past considering him any kind of threat and now often wonder if he is for real or can reasonably believe that any of his ideas are going to work. He's more and more like an incompetent Mr. Mxyzptlk, but more fun to watch.
"Nero's hit. I'm going in after him!"
(The immortal words of Flash Gordon!)
No. That was just Electrodes from Planet 10 by way of the 8th dimension that thought they were back in the 8th dimension but were still over New Jersey.
By 2009? I think a lot of people have strong feelings about not using it.
It's now the Vista of Open Source Licensing.
Was that before or after he started secretly working at SCO?
First, the point about babies being without sin and getting a "free pass" is only true in some Christian beliefs, not in all. The point is not about sin, but about accepting Jesus as your personal savior. Whether or not one has sinned is not the determination in these beliefs but accepting Jesus and being "saved" is. In others, one can accept Jesus, but if one commits a mortal sin and dies before confessing it, then they lose it all.
I don't buy into these beliefs. I've been reading recently about the real death and resurrection and now I know who died for me and was resurrected (and stayed around a lot longer than 40 days). I live in peace knowing Harry Potter died to save me from evil.
One of our LUG members recently did a presentation on computer forensics. I forgot the group that he took his classes through, but I remember a friend of mine saying they were one of the best. His comment on this was that the myth of data being retrievable after it has been written over is just that, these days: a myth. It seems that was a problem back in the earlier days of hard drives, but not with any recent equipment. It seems that once this became a "fact" it's stayed one for decades, even though there's been no evidence or proof of it being true with any hard drive designs for years.
I don't know how accurate that is, but I know a few others in the LUG started looking into it and nobody posted any links they felt were valid to back up the surviving data myth.
I wish you and I could meet for coffee and discuss that. I think we have some basic agreements but that we're coming at it from such different points of view that we could go over our different thoughts on it for hours.
Yes, schools aren't getting kids ready for life. I would not say what they're forced to teach is always trivial, but I would call the requirements triviality forced into pseudo-importance by people who don't know a think about what goes on in the classroom. While this is likely outdated now, I read about how, at one point, California had spent millions on education reform, but throughout a number of years, that had not resulted in a single change in the classroom. Schools had moved to site-based management (and back from it), buzzwords were created, organizational structures were changed, the teachers were given more work to document everything, but nothing had actually had any effect on how things were taught.
The material taught has nothing to do with what those in the classroom have found needs to be taught. It's all worked out by bureaucrats who do nothing but read test results.
If you look at the Standards of Learning, for example, that some states use and look at what is being taught overall, it's not trivial. The problem is that most of what kids needs is not getting taught.
And to go with your example about Pre-Columbian Meso-American fishing cultures, did it occur to you there may be other reasons for teaching that other than "trivia?" For example, and this is a broad one, Gene Roddenberry realized he could do a show on the Viet Nam War by basing it on a planet far away. By the same token, often there are things that can be taught to people in a culture by focusing on one that is not so close. Then people, especially kids, don't see how close to home it hits. It's quite possible that such a group might be studied in a social studies class to teach about communities and how each person in a community has a distinct job and it's only through the efforts of all that the community thrives and grows.
I haven't taught for about a decade, but I have friends who are teaching and I keep up with what I can. I've never seen an example of trivia being a big problem, but I've seen many examples of teachers that were restricted on what they could teach and were not able to teach many things they wanted to or need to teach.
And for teachers vs. parents, there's some of both. Parental involvement is a huge issue (and does lead to kids sitting in front of the tv/babysitter way too much), but I have also noticed changes in what some newer teachers know vs. some of the more experienced teachers when they got out of college.
Actually ADD/ADHD is a bit of a misnomer.
Yes, it is and I'm not sure I believe that most children diagnosed with it actually have any issue, other than impatient parents or teachers. I was using a less accurate but convenient label. I really did not feel like going more into the topic.
Yep. It's nowhere near new. I used data like this in a speech I had to do in public speaking around 1979 in high school. When I worked in Special Ed, many teachers had noticed that the kids who talked more about TV were the ones that tended to have less of an attention span. There's a lot of experience that leads one to believe that kids that watch too much TV tend to have an attention span that's about 10-15 minutes, or the length of time between commercials.
On the other hand, I've seen a huge number of kids who are supposedly ADD or ADHD show an amazing attention span when they sit down with a copy of Harry Potter. It makes me wonder if part of the problem with attention spans in school is due to inappropriate expectations for a child's age and boring teachers that just don't have the skills teachers did in years past.
Or can we?
Do we FOSS people still hate Novell because of their deal with Microsoft or love them for standing up for this?
You're letting your religious beliefs and emotional need to believe something, whether it's true or not, get in the way of the facts. I remember a discussion once about sf spaceships and how scientists have said that it is not possible to go faster than light speed and someone said, "Yeah, but they kept saying it wasn't possible to go faster than sound." The two statements are entirely unrelated. There wasn't "proof" about faster than sound travel. As far was what science can and cannot do, her memories, her personality, everything that made her who she was was lost. Without that, she could never be who she was. That is not an issue of "until recently they thought..." reasoning.
You might want to read up on logic and reasoning and how they are used in debate and discussion because you are making arguments without any basis other than your own beliefs. You are basing your comments on what you want and not on facts or reason.
That's a good point, both your correction and the original joke/question. I don't know if the /. editors ever read discussions, but one thing they don't do that I think could help a lot is to clarify what a story is talking about. I read this and wondered, "Why does Wikia need a boot loader?" I clicked on the link and still wasn't sure they were talking about something other than the boot loader until I clicked on the website's home page.
Sometimes it would be a big help if a story explained what some acronyms are or explained what something was for people not up on that particular topic.
Why would anyone post that other than to be mean, to hurt others and ruin something they might enjoy, and to draw attention to themselves? There's no reason to post spoilers unless you're jealous of someone else getting attention.
I really feel sorry for someone that is so insecure they have to do something like that to get attention.
(And it's because of tiny minds like the poster's that I took the weekend off and read it all before exposing myself to any media again.)
The difference is that true magicians admit they're illusionists. Part of the contract with their audience is that they will fool them and that the audience will try to figure out their tricks. Geller does not claim to be a magician. He claims to actually do what he appears to be doing with the power of his mind.
I'd agree to that. Why do there need to be additions? It's just a list. I want to see many of these "new" wonders some day, but just because Petra is on an arbitrary list and a group of people who knew about the poll doesn't make it any more of a wonder just as Angor Wat not being on the list doesn't make it any less of a wonder. It's just a a way some people found of making money under the guise of world unity. Even the first list isn't really necessary. It reminds me of the Book of Lists. All any list can be is just the opinion of one or more people (unless empirical objective measurements are used) and that book proved it with many lists a lot of people disagreed with. All the lists are arbitrary.
They can ignore copyrights if they want to. They can't easily ignore this.
Read the more recently posted articles here. It turns out EMI is doing so well that even the paranoid companies, like Sony, are considering releasing DRM free music.
Yes, it'll always be around, but at some point the producers realize that it's an unending expense and realize it's better to just drop it and make what money they can. Look at digital media over the past 25 years. In the long run companies tend to drop it.
The AACS will be a good example of consumers getting fed up when they find the players they've paid good money for won't play their HD-DVDs, they'll get upset. Many don't even know what the issue is and haven't heard of AACS. All they'll know is that some discs don't play and they got ripped off. After that goes on for a while, companies will realize they're losing as much in good will as they might be saving in cost.
I am thinking along the same lines as you when you talk about it being in-your-face. When it gets to the point where people can't copy the media they buy for backups or to their own storage, it'll start angering them. It seems that the producers are blind and all they see is their content and the need to control it. They have no respect for their customers and treat them as thieves. The sooner they get high on their own egos and overstep the line, like Sony did with their rootkit, the sooner they'll have to back off.
While the price was about $150, my HP5510 does great with ink usage. When I was starting a business and we had to run on a budget, we got a $60 Epson and it burned through ink. In the long run, it would have been cheaper to just buy a new printer each time the black ink ran out, it was that bad. I think I had to refill it ever month to six weeks. Under the same usage, I don't have to buy ink for the HP5510 that often. It goes over a year before I have to refill the ink. I don't print pictures much, but I print a fair amount of program listings that are syntax highlighted with different colors.
My experience is that the cheaper printers are designed to sell ink cartridges but if you go for the higher end printers, as in over $120 or more for the printer, the refill frequency drops drastically.