In my experience, there are far more people insisting that other people (IE or Opera users) to use Firefox, than there are people doing the same for Opera.
(And as I say, it's not necessarily a bad thing - I suspect one reason for Firefox's success in getting people away from IE is the large army of geeks telling random users to use it instead of IE, which never happened so much with Opera.)
No. Where did I suggest that? I said laws don't have to be 100% true, I didn't say that they were all wrong. The laws of thermodynamics are so-called because they are generalisations of observed behaviour.
I want my main character to be a "residual self image", a projection of my personality into the game. I can't do that with a female character because I'm not a woman.
Although not everyone is like this - whether we're talking about gender, or other aspects. Indeed, the whole point of roleplaying traditionally is about taking on different roles (and playing different gender is fairly commonplace), and not simply being yourself.
Sometimes I've played Quake online and picked the female models, and I'm not a female. Sometimes I've played Quake online and picked the skeleton or giant eyeball model, and guess what?
If people are cybering online, but also find it ickky that the person is not who they appear to be (what, are they going to catch Gay-disease through the keyboard or something?) then I would suggest (a) try to get to know someone rather than cybering complete strangers, and (b) don't do it on a roleplaying forum where the whole point is for people to take on different roles.
That depends, can you prove to a blind man that light exists? Or to a 2D being that a third dimension exists?
You don't need to prove it exists. If a model of the world involving 3 dimensions gave a more accurate description of the world that 2D beings experienced (or alternatively, it was as accurate as other models, but also simpler), they would accept it.
So show us your theory involving objective reference frames, and how it is better than existing scientific theories, then we'll believe you. And you can collect your Nobel prize.
Science abandoned that notion centuries ago - it's just non-scientists who misunderstand what a law is, and cling to phrases like "laws of physics".
A law in science is a simple generalisation of some observed behaviour. It doesn't have to be something that's actually true - e.g., gas laws, which we know are only approximations.
And JFTR: Opera fanboys (the few that I've encountered) are worse than Linux, Mac and Amiga fanboys combined.
The very fact that you make that statement suggests that the opposite is true.
By far, it's far more common for people to be telling people to switch to Firefox, not Opera. Hype over things such as "tabs", or it being fashionable to switch from IE, only happened when Firefox appeared; years before, people were silently using Opera. (Of course, not all fanboy-ism is bad; it can be good if it spreads awareness of a product.) And just look at any Slashdot story to see which way the mod points usually go.
I agree. And that it's not open source, although that's the commonly given reason, doesn't make sense - look how popular Mac OS X is here on Slashdot (more so than Linux, it sometimes seems).
I don't understand the dislike of Opera from Firefox fans - people should use what they like, and shouldn't the focus be on converting those who still use IE? People such myself were able to switch from IE to Opera long before Firefox even existed, or it became trendy to not use IE - I find it odd that the latecomers seem to enjoy putting Opera down. What wonderful browser were they using before Firefox was available?
Okay then - I'm a licence payer, and I agree with him.
If the BBC was american, they would probably ban foreigners from even accessing their site, let alone watching their content.
If the BBC wanted to restrict it to UK viewers, or require a paid membership for international viewers, I doubt people would be complaining. The issue is not using open standards.
With this system, it's both true that (a) licence payers don't get open content, and (b) non-licence payers can watch it for free for 30 days; neither situation particularly makes sense.
All of our law, and our society, is based on a moral code handed down by religious people.
What moral code is that? Or if you mean that a secular moral code passed down by people who were religious, so what? All that means is that people a lot of people in the past were religious, and is no different to saying that a lot of them believed in superstition, magic or a flat earth. It dosen't mean any of these things are responsible for our law, society and moral code.
As for right and wrong, these are words which people use to describe that they think some actions are good or bad. To some degree this is opinion and there is no objective standard, but at the same time, many people will agree on certain things. The reason we think certain actions should or shouldn't be done is usually because of the effects of those actions, or because of what things we want to happen, or not happen. If someone thinks something is wrong, I say they should always be able to explain why it is wrong.
Somewhere along the line though, people picked up the idea that something is inherently wrong, so we get "X is wrong because religion/God says so" or the painful tautology "X is wrong because it's immoral", and all chance of reason or rational debate goes out the window.
The one you talked about when you said "Facebook shuts down all kinds of objectionable content, but not this one. Which raises the question, why not this one?"
So why not point out those inconsistencies, rather than using Slashdot to push a campaign to shut down this particular group? Why run a campaign at all? It's not like people are going to go "Oh yes, how inconsistent"; all that'll happen is that Facebook will be more likely to shutdown groups anyone disagrees with, and more likely to bow down to advertisers. And that's a good thing?
Okay, I can see that the current situation of including people who aren't convicted of a crime is unfair, but to suggest that the only possible solution is to treat everyone as if they have convicted a crime?! How about we stop adding people to the database so easily in the first place.
I also love that for once, it's a judge proposing authoritarian measures, and Labour who are opposing it: A spokesman for Prime Minister Gordon Brown said to expand the database would create "huge logistical and bureaucratic issues" and civil liberty concerns.
(For non-UK readers, Labour being the Government that have repeatedly brought in authoritarian measures, and plan bureaucratic nightmares like the national ID card scheme, ignoring any civil liberty concerns...)
Only a tiny sample of saliva, blood, semen
Hmm, if we are forced to all turn up to have our DNA taken, can we choose to spit, bleed or er... at them?
It _shouldn't_ mean that it still takes 30 to 60 seconds to load the app, but there it is. Try starting Microsoft Wurd.
Takes about 1 second on my machine.
I don't care what Word can do (which is nothing much until you become an advanced expert in its user hostile interface)
If you're happy with the functionality of older word processors, you can still use a lot of them. E.g., try Wordpad - runs practically instantly (but I've seen that loading on a 486, and it's painfully slow).
I said "may or may not have problems" to mean that I didn't want to get drawn into a Vista debate, and wasn't casting an opinion one way or another on it.
Windows was bloated back in the 90s, and I was happier using AmigaOS, doing the same work on a fraction of the computing power. But at least now computers are finally powerful enough to run Windows:) And we get benefits - as I say, today's OSs like Windows and OS X have advantages (such as memory protection giving far greater stability) over what we had 10 years ago. That comes at a price of higher requirements (for both Windows and Macs), but I think it's worth it.
Yet do I have hundred times more power to run my applications on a modern Operating System?
Yes you do. At least, all the while "power" means "CPU speed". I suspect you are conflating it with a more general meaning of power, but Moore's Law says nothing about this.
Strictly speaking, there are no tasks I do today that I couldn't do in 1997.
Because strictly speaking, a turing machine can do anything that any other turing maching can do. However, you can do them an awful lot quicker (things like video/mp3 encoding, compiling or 3D rendering).
However, I think your problem is that you expect a faster CPU to somehow make you more productive when using a word processor.
Windows Vista may or may not have problems - but note that the Windows line today is a darn sight better and more stable than the hopeless version of Windows most people were using in 1997 (just as Mac OS X is much better and more stable than the primitive OS that shared same name which it replaced).
We are simply pointing out that by locking us out (and you are locking us out because we can't incorporate GPL code into ours without changing to GPL, which I will do over my DEAD BODY), you are no different from proprietary software companies.
In this respect, correct. What's the problem? If you don't want people doing this with your code, then you shouldn't be releasing it under BSD. The whole point about BSD is it gives freedom for other people to do what they like, including releasing derivative works under more restrictive licences.
And then you go around saying how BSD is less free than the GPL
Sounds like a strawman to me. I certainly haven't. Obviously BSD is more free in some respects (like allowing people to release under difference licences) but can lead to less free derivative works (like someone using your work for closed source). Which one is better is up to you, but you should at least choose a licence which suits your needs, rather than complaining at other people, who have done exactly what the licence says they can.
It seems to me that it's only BSD advocates who bring up the "more free" debate - just as you were the one to do it here.
BSD people, like me, want other people to use our code.
Except if they release under the GPL, it seems.
The complaint here is about the hypocrisy of the GPL camp, who claim that they don't want anyone to use their code without giving back the changes, but then turn around and do just that to the BSD people's code.
They can use their code - they just can't release it under BSD. I don't get it - if the GPL is bad for making it so that code can't be released under BSD, why are BSD people moaning that they don't want their code released under GPL? Either your viewpoint is that people should be free to distribute code changes under a more restrictive licence, or not. GPL people clearly choose the latter. BSD is supposed to be about the former, but if people are complaining, it sounds like the BSD isn't for them after all.
The problem is with the GPL camp saying how they are somehow "more free".
Are they saying that? If so, that's silly, but in my experience, it's only BSD people who start going on about "more free". Can't people just get along and see that they are both freer than closed source - they're just two different ways of going about it.
(Disclaimer: I've released code under GPL and BSD, so I'm not on any side here. I pick the licence which suits me best - and I don't bitch if people then use my code exactly as I've given them permission to do...)
Seems like BSD's intent is to allow code to be used anywhere(including closed-source) without the viral effect, and its understandable that taking the code, modifying it, and applying a viral license to it would anger some developers
The GPL may be "viral", but it is misleading to suggest that closed source is not. If someone modifies and closes my source, how can I make use of those changes? I can't. In fact, I can't even see them. How is that worse than if someone released it under the GPL?
The point is you can't have it both ways - if BSD is better because you can do what you like with the code, you then can't complain when someone takes advantage of that, and does what they like with the code. Also, the modified BSD you suggest would itself be viral!
Being liberal is the opposite of authoritarian. But Libertarians, also believing in a small Government economically, makes them right wing economically.
I know the terms are often used interchangeably, but it's important to stress the difference. People like to make strawmen of liberals enough as it is, it's annoying when people accuse me of being a Libertarian just because I oppose their authoritarian stance...
Indeed - although equally it's a strawman to suggest that Slashdotters/liberals oppose these laws. Clearly, most people are fine with the majority of laws we have.
The issue is laws against things where there is no clear evidence of harm - authoritarians will still pull out the "But it harms society" claim, but they ignore the harm done to society by taking away people's rights, and putting them in prison. Sometimes we hear "But if it only saves one life, it is worth it", or they will spin the question round and put the burden upon us to show why we should have the right to do something - in both cases, ignoring the harm done by the law.
Yes, clearly we must consider that taking away some rights may benefit society, but (a) that claimed benefit still requires evidence, and (b) we must still weigh that up against the harm done by taking away those rights. Since liberals tend not to oppose all laws, it is clear that they tend to understand this.
Slashdot Mirror
In my experience, there are far more people insisting that other people (IE or Opera users) to use Firefox, than there are people doing the same for Opera.
(And as I say, it's not necessarily a bad thing - I suspect one reason for Firefox's success in getting people away from IE is the large army of geeks telling random users to use it instead of IE, which never happened so much with Opera.)
No. Where did I suggest that? I said laws don't have to be 100% true, I didn't say that they were all wrong. The laws of thermodynamics are so-called because they are generalisations of observed behaviour.
I want my main character to be a "residual self image", a projection of my personality into the game. I can't do that with a female character because I'm not a woman.
Although not everyone is like this - whether we're talking about gender, or other aspects. Indeed, the whole point of roleplaying traditionally is about taking on different roles (and playing different gender is fairly commonplace), and not simply being yourself.
Sometimes I've played Quake online and picked the female models, and I'm not a female. Sometimes I've played Quake online and picked the skeleton or giant eyeball model, and guess what?
If people are cybering online, but also find it ickky that the person is not who they appear to be (what, are they going to catch Gay-disease through the keyboard or something?) then I would suggest (a) try to get to know someone rather than cybering complete strangers, and (b) don't do it on a roleplaying forum where the whole point is for people to take on different roles.
Why is roleplaying a different gender any different to roleplaying in general?
I mean, I doubt many of those elves you meet are actually elves...
That depends, can you prove to a blind man that light exists? Or to a 2D being that a third dimension exists?
You don't need to prove it exists. If a model of the world involving 3 dimensions gave a more accurate description of the world that 2D beings experienced (or alternatively, it was as accurate as other models, but also simpler), they would accept it.
So show us your theory involving objective reference frames, and how it is better than existing scientific theories, then we'll believe you. And you can collect your Nobel prize.
Science abandoned that notion centuries ago - it's just non-scientists who misunderstand what a law is, and cling to phrases like "laws of physics".
A law in science is a simple generalisation of some observed behaviour. It doesn't have to be something that's actually true - e.g., gas laws, which we know are only approximations.
And JFTR: Opera fanboys (the few that I've encountered) are worse than Linux, Mac and Amiga fanboys combined.
The very fact that you make that statement suggests that the opposite is true.
By far, it's far more common for people to be telling people to switch to Firefox, not Opera. Hype over things such as "tabs", or it being fashionable to switch from IE, only happened when Firefox appeared; years before, people were silently using Opera. (Of course, not all fanboy-ism is bad; it can be good if it spreads awareness of a product.) And just look at any Slashdot story to see which way the mod points usually go.
I agree. And that it's not open source, although that's the commonly given reason, doesn't make sense - look how popular Mac OS X is here on Slashdot (more so than Linux, it sometimes seems).
I don't understand the dislike of Opera from Firefox fans - people should use what they like, and shouldn't the focus be on converting those who still use IE? People such myself were able to switch from IE to Opera long before Firefox even existed, or it became trendy to not use IE - I find it odd that the latecomers seem to enjoy putting Opera down. What wonderful browser were they using before Firefox was available?
Okay then - I'm a licence payer, and I agree with him.
If the BBC was american, they would probably ban foreigners from even accessing their site, let alone watching their content.
If the BBC wanted to restrict it to UK viewers, or require a paid membership for international viewers, I doubt people would be complaining. The issue is not using open standards.
With this system, it's both true that (a) licence payers don't get open content, and (b) non-licence payers can watch it for free for 30 days; neither situation particularly makes sense.
All of our law, and our society, is based on a moral code handed down by religious people.
What moral code is that? Or if you mean that a secular moral code passed down by people who were religious, so what? All that means is that people a lot of people in the past were religious, and is no different to saying that a lot of them believed in superstition, magic or a flat earth. It dosen't mean any of these things are responsible for our law, society and moral code.
As for right and wrong, these are words which people use to describe that they think some actions are good or bad. To some degree this is opinion and there is no objective standard, but at the same time, many people will agree on certain things. The reason we think certain actions should or shouldn't be done is usually because of the effects of those actions, or because of what things we want to happen, or not happen. If someone thinks something is wrong, I say they should always be able to explain why it is wrong.
Somewhere along the line though, people picked up the idea that something is inherently wrong, so we get "X is wrong because religion/God says so" or the painful tautology "X is wrong because it's immoral", and all chance of reason or rational debate goes out the window.
What inconsistencies?
The one you talked about when you said "Facebook shuts down all kinds of objectionable content, but not this one. Which raises the question, why not this one?"
So why not point out those inconsistencies, rather than using Slashdot to push a campaign to shut down this particular group? Why run a campaign at all? It's not like people are going to go "Oh yes, how inconsistent"; all that'll happen is that Facebook will be more likely to shutdown groups anyone disagrees with, and more likely to bow down to advertisers. And that's a good thing?
Agreed. And if other Facebook users don't like it, why can't they simply not look at the group?
Is it a good thing that other users can decide which groups can exist or not?
Is it a good thing that groups are shutdown to please the advertisers?
Okay, I can see that the current situation of including people who aren't convicted of a crime is unfair, but to suggest that the only possible solution is to treat everyone as if they have convicted a crime?!
... at them?
How about we stop adding people to the database so easily in the first place.
I also love that for once, it's a judge proposing authoritarian measures, and Labour who are opposing it: A spokesman for Prime Minister Gordon Brown said to expand the database would create "huge logistical and bureaucratic issues" and civil liberty concerns.
(For non-UK readers, Labour being the Government that have repeatedly brought in authoritarian measures, and plan bureaucratic nightmares like the national ID card scheme, ignoring any civil liberty concerns...)
Only a tiny sample of saliva, blood, semen
Hmm, if we are forced to all turn up to have our DNA taken, can we choose to spit, bleed or er
Agreed. Also as far as I can tell, the research didn't show that boys had any preference towards blue, but the media assumed this to be true also.
But, for basic tasks it is no "faster" than my very old Pentium 60 w/Win 3.1. We are going backwards.
Can I ask what you mean by a basic task? What are you expecting to be faster, that isn't?
It _shouldn't_ mean that it still takes 30 to 60 seconds to load the app, but there it is. Try starting Microsoft Wurd.
Takes about 1 second on my machine.
I don't care what Word can do (which is nothing much until you become an advanced expert in its user hostile interface)
If you're happy with the functionality of older word processors, you can still use a lot of them. E.g., try Wordpad - runs practically instantly (but I've seen that loading on a 486, and it's painfully slow).
I said "may or may not have problems" to mean that I didn't want to get drawn into a Vista debate, and wasn't casting an opinion one way or another on it.
:) And we get benefits - as I say, today's OSs like Windows and OS X have advantages (such as memory protection giving far greater stability) over what we had 10 years ago. That comes at a price of higher requirements (for both Windows and Macs), but I think it's worth it.
Windows was bloated back in the 90s, and I was happier using AmigaOS, doing the same work on a fraction of the computing power. But at least now computers are finally powerful enough to run Windows
Yet do I have hundred times more power to run my applications on a modern Operating System?
Yes you do. At least, all the while "power" means "CPU speed". I suspect you are conflating it with a more general meaning of power, but Moore's Law says nothing about this.
Strictly speaking, there are no tasks I do today that I couldn't do in 1997.
Because strictly speaking, a turing machine can do anything that any other turing maching can do. However, you can do them an awful lot quicker (things like video/mp3 encoding, compiling or 3D rendering).
However, I think your problem is that you expect a faster CPU to somehow make you more productive when using a word processor.
Windows Vista may or may not have problems - but note that the Windows line today is a darn sight better and more stable than the hopeless version of Windows most people were using in 1997 (just as Mac OS X is much better and more stable than the primitive OS that shared same name which it replaced).
We are simply pointing out that by locking us out (and you are locking us out because we can't incorporate GPL code into ours without changing to GPL, which I will do over my DEAD BODY), you are no different from proprietary software companies.
In this respect, correct. What's the problem? If you don't want people doing this with your code, then you shouldn't be releasing it under BSD. The whole point about BSD is it gives freedom for other people to do what they like, including releasing derivative works under more restrictive licences.
And then you go around saying how BSD is less free than the GPL
Sounds like a strawman to me. I certainly haven't. Obviously BSD is more free in some respects (like allowing people to release under difference licences) but can lead to less free derivative works (like someone using your work for closed source). Which one is better is up to you, but you should at least choose a licence which suits your needs, rather than complaining at other people, who have done exactly what the licence says they can.
It seems to me that it's only BSD advocates who bring up the "more free" debate - just as you were the one to do it here.
BSD people, like me, want other people to use our code.
Except if they release under the GPL, it seems.
The complaint here is about the hypocrisy of the GPL camp, who claim that they don't want anyone to use their code without giving back the changes, but then turn around and do just that to the BSD people's code.
They can use their code - they just can't release it under BSD. I don't get it - if the GPL is bad for making it so that code can't be released under BSD, why are BSD people moaning that they don't want their code released under GPL? Either your viewpoint is that people should be free to distribute code changes under a more restrictive licence, or not. GPL people clearly choose the latter. BSD is supposed to be about the former, but if people are complaining, it sounds like the BSD isn't for them after all.
The problem is with the GPL camp saying how they are somehow "more free".
Are they saying that? If so, that's silly, but in my experience, it's only BSD people who start going on about "more free". Can't people just get along and see that they are both freer than closed source - they're just two different ways of going about it.
(Disclaimer: I've released code under GPL and BSD, so I'm not on any side here. I pick the licence which suits me best - and I don't bitch if people then use my code exactly as I've given them permission to do...)
Seems like BSD's intent is to allow code to be used anywhere(including closed-source) without the viral effect, and its understandable that taking the code, modifying it, and applying a viral license to it would anger some developers
The GPL may be "viral", but it is misleading to suggest that closed source is not. If someone modifies and closes my source, how can I make use of those changes? I can't. In fact, I can't even see them. How is that worse than if someone released it under the GPL?
The point is you can't have it both ways - if BSD is better because you can do what you like with the code, you then can't complain when someone takes advantage of that, and does what they like with the code. Also, the modified BSD you suggest would itself be viral!
Being liberal is the opposite of authoritarian. But Libertarians, also believing in a small Government economically, makes them right wing economically.
I know the terms are often used interchangeably, but it's important to stress the difference. People like to make strawmen of liberals enough as it is, it's annoying when people accuse me of being a Libertarian just because I oppose their authoritarian stance...
Indeed, libertarians are economically right wing. And that's true in the US or Europe.
Indeed - although equally it's a strawman to suggest that Slashdotters/liberals oppose these laws. Clearly, most people are fine with the majority of laws we have.
The issue is laws against things where there is no clear evidence of harm - authoritarians will still pull out the "But it harms society" claim, but they ignore the harm done to society by taking away people's rights, and putting them in prison. Sometimes we hear "But if it only saves one life, it is worth it", or they will spin the question round and put the burden upon us to show why we should have the right to do something - in both cases, ignoring the harm done by the law.
Yes, clearly we must consider that taking away some rights may benefit society, but (a) that claimed benefit still requires evidence, and (b) we must still weigh that up against the harm done by taking away those rights. Since liberals tend not to oppose all laws, it is clear that they tend to understand this.