PCI-SIG owns the exclusive rights to use the "PCI" family of trademarks... including the mark and logo "PCI" bearing U.S. Trademark Registration Number...
Seems to me that they only are staking out legal grounds for complaining about the logo. Never mind that they object to the letters PCI - they don't claim legal ownership of the letters.
Your use of PCI-SIG's trademarked name and logo on your website is likely to cause consumer confusion in the marketplace as to sponsorship, affiliation, or endorsement of the website by PCI-SIG
So the actual complaint is that PCI-SIG's lawyers are concerned that Boemler's site might be implying PCI-SIG is endorsing his material. I can't guess how many sites include a disclaimer - but if Boemler adds one, I'd think that would handle their complaint.
Your website indicates that you are an employee of IBM, a PCI-SIG member.
Maybe this is part of their complaint? But this is also playing dirty - they're threatening the guy's job. Not outright, but it's implied. I already don't like these lawyers.
But: (and with the IANAL) PCI-SIG is complaining about the use of the logo. Then they are putting forward the removal of the name and logo as a solution. Scare tactics, they want him to completely cave in... but they haven't staked out enough ground (yet?) to demand the whole thing.
Many years ago, my grandfather testified at a trial about one of these universal keys as he was a professional lock designer (no, I don't have the year, and he's passed away since). In particular, the case was to ban a universal key that could open any one of those circular bike locks (the one that has a key that's a cylindrical tube with depressions on it - typically used on good U-locks). Their case was that by marketing such a key, the people they were suing would make it very easy for anyone to steal any bike.
There are a few extra tidbits:
1) said grandfather held several of the patents on the lock design. Which means the company being sued reverse-engineered it, a violation of patent law anyway.
2) IIRC, they were suing to block the general sale of this universal key. The key was already available to locksmiths (i.e. people who have a legitimate use for it); every guy on the street doesn't need the universal key, because it would destroy the value of the lock under their patent.
Needless to say, the general sale of this universal key was blocked; I also have never seen one used, so as far as I know they still aren't available.
Kudos for making a stand. And, given the trolls on this thread, I have to put in a decent post (icy look at the AC's and trolls).
But I do dispute. Yes, a lot of major literature dand history goes under what myself, my friends, and many of my teachers call the "Dead White Guy" category. I agree it's biased, but then look at the attempts to do otherwise. A political philosophy class: readings are Aristotle, Machiavelli, Locke, Rousseau,... and Mencius (token non-white guy) - and the class universally thought the Mencius reading shouldn't have been in the syllabus. A literature class: poets are Shakespeare, Tennison, Wordsworth,... and Maya Angelou (token non-white non-guy). With all due respect she may be a great creative force, but her poetry simply isn't in the same ballpark as the other classics. The ONLY time I've ever seen a female author not pulled in as a token gesture but instead as a useful work to study was a Johnathen Swifte - Jane Austen - Nathaniel Hawthorne - John Stienbeck progression. I'm not saying that women can't write (the best essays I've seen usually come from women), but for the general, non-writing/history-intensive education there simply aren't any great works by women to study. And my opinion is that trying to retroactively give women more of a historical voice only creates more problems by showing women as unable to compare to the greatest literary lights ever.
Yes, I AM female. Dammit.
Now that has to be one of the finest statements I've seen here in ages. You have my envy - I only WISH I could use that as a sig.
Which is never going to happen. A BS degree is (at least in theory) four years of college education. Just learning programming takes, at most, two years. There's actually another degree for that - an Associate Degree - which is supposed to be two years. No major university offers it; only community colleges and such, because everyone knows that it's not a true college degree, it's a vocational degree.
Hasn't happened yet, but it's the truth. The problem is that everyone wants a college degree anyway, so anyone looking to work in the programming industry thinks "Computer Science"...
Disclaimer: I'm on track for a full BS in CS degree. I also know other people who are majoring in CS who really shouldn't be.
I shouldn't be biting on trolls, but it's a Saturday, what the heck.
Most of those patches are being distributed illegally as well. I'm pretty sure if you read the licensing agreement, you have to download it from their site or from an authorized mirror. And if you don't like it, that's just too damn bad -- that's the license agreement.
Relies on you having access to said license agreement. I see two cases here: 1) license agreement is part of the file, in which case you would legally be able to download the file, but NOT use it. 2) license has been stripped out. In which case the person who stripped it out is breaking the law - maybe the recipient would be liable for something like "receiving stolen property", but I've never heard of that law being applied to copyrights.
Firstly, FTP has greater accountability. You can't open a Warez FTP site to the public and not get caught. And secondly, FTP was created to transfer files, not to transfer files *AND* mask identities *AND* advertise to pirates.
There is nothing that gives FTP accountability. First, you can't open a warez P2P collection to the public and not get caught either - the instant you start downloading it, you can pull an IP address - exactly as much information as FTP provides. But the analogy is flawed - FTP as a protocol is designed to efficiently transfer files. P2P's design is more of a high-availabilty, low capacity system - hence the massively parallel searching, and consequent slow downloads. P2P's ability to transfer files is an add-on - just like HTTP's ability to send cookies is really an add-on. And finally, the advertising is entirely a separate entity. There is no practical reason P2P clients need advertising, there simply hasn't been a popular non-advertising client yet. Advertising provides a source of income for the development of easy-to-use P2P clients - it's no more a part of the network than the ads you see on TV are a part of the show you're watching.
Kazaa knows that a ton of people are using their network to illegally traffic things, and so they can get money by advertising to them. They know that illegal activity is rampant on their network, and they don't monitor it or report it, which is basically aiding and abetting. So I guess if you wanted to get really technical, we could make a federal case out of this...?
And the people who make guns are aiding and abetting murdurers and the people who make CD burners are aiding and abetting pirates (never mind me who uses it to make off-computer backups of important data). This is an old argument. A while ago, I read a news report about a carjacker who had the bad idea of stealing a car from a group of judo students on their way to a tournament. A bad choice for him... the police, though, were very careful to note that they recommended people NOT attempt to stop carjackers - it's the police's job, they have the training and responsibility to stop carjackings, and everyone else doesn't. This is a similar situation - there is no law demanding that Kazaa take responsibility to police it's own network. Now, they could voluntarily, but it's not their responsibility - nor is it within their capabilities. The difference from Napster? Napster decided to attempt to filter their network, and essentially took responsibility - then failed to succeed. Admittedly Kazaa is being actively hostile to the idea of policing their network - but it's not their job. It's the job of the government - and probably some as-yet-uncreated federal agency. (I wouldn't be happy about such an agency, but I think it's inevitable.)
But, going strictly on intent, they are knowingly aiding pirates, which means less money is making it into the hands of the people that are supposed to be getting paid for their work, which means civil suit, and a completely justified one in my opinion.
Conceeded. Deliberately avoiding a resolution to the problem is exactly in keeping with a civil suit. But only a civil suit - this line couldn't go to a criminal case (perhaps that is why the lawyers are making it a civil case?). AND the court has to have the jurisdiction over BOTH parties to institute a resolution to the problem. My opinion is that I doubt the ruling will stand on appeal, but even if it does, the rest of the posters in this thread are exactly correct - the California judge can't do a thing to the company. It's not like there are assets to freeze, a company charter from the state to revoke, or any such matters - the judge's abilities will be restricted to banning future business dealings and throwing around contempt warrents, and will be completely ineffective at actually stopping abuses.
I may be rare among the Slashdot crowd for agreeing (for the most part) with copyright law (my qualms are about overpricing only - which means I actually DO buy much of the stuff I've downloaded in the past. Which amounted to about one movie and a dozen songs). But I really hate how the MPAA/RIAA goes for a publicity-stunt, slap-on-the-wrist lawsuit instead of doing something constructive.
we do expose them to a herd mentality, inefficient bureacracy and mistrust from the administration, and to brute aggression from the football team
Which, unfortunately, are things we have to deal with today in modern society. Herd mentality = rush hour, inefficient bureacracy = [insert favorite gov't agency here, I like simply "Congress"], football team = that jerk that just cut me off. Sad, but the truth. And I think it's better to learn to deal with it in school than in the real world, where overreacting doesn't get you a trip to the principal's office but instead a trip to the slammer.
Some people graduate without the ability to read. I was in the gifted-and-talented set, like many others here, and it's a joke. AFAICT, it exists to keep smart people out of the teacher's hair.
Can't say I disagree - until I hit high school (which was particularly good), the only difference I felt was that the classes tried to separate grades somewhat - move the "A's in normal classes" people into another class so that when John and Joe compare grades over lunch, the fact that one is in gifted-and-talented and the other isn't won't stand out too much and interrupt some "social development process" the psych people came up with. Although there are some systems that seem more successful than others - my sister reported more success, going through the same schools five years after I did, after a few hefty changes. (The bad sign: budget cuts and complaints will probably roll those changes back). Colorado school system.
One of the most useful experiences I had was the year I spent in my sophomore year history class. I picked it because it was the only one my schedule could fit where the teacher wasn't brand new. A few years later (kind of the goodbye-to-teachers I'm-off-to-college time), this teacher told me that her class was actually half under the "learning disabled" heading - i.e. half the students qualified for unlimited time on tests, etc. Click - a lot of the things that went on in that class suddenly made a lot more sense to me. My classmates in there generally did fine - yeah, a few failed because they didn't care, but for a normal-level class everybody did fine. Without grade inflation. Honestly, I think people in there learned more than in other normal-level classes. And I sure felt that many of the people in there were "smarter" than some of the people in my "accelerated" classes - they certainly had better study habits. I didn't stay in touch with many of these people - but the experience did change my perspective of the "advanced" classes - what I gained in learning more raw material, I lost in learning about other people.
I even agree with you that today's public schools don't do a great job of teaching math/reading/etc. Yeah, it needs fixing. But I think the benefits of having a "socially normalizing" educational system are too important to ignore.
First, I apologize, that was a rant and came across a little stronger than I would have liked.
This "learning is dangerous if not tightly controlled" idea is itself pretty dangerous.
Agreed. And it was a work of fiction - to the best of my knowledge, it has not happened. However, Lord of the Flies also has not happened (again, to the best of my knowledge), yet we are concerned about that sort of situtation. I don't want to say that learning is dangerous - but the control aspect is simply demanding that everyone take a balanced perspective. Anyone should be free to read pro-Nazi propoganda - but I insist that if you are not mature enough to know that the Nazis committed a whole mess of atrocities that they justified with propoganda, then you MUST also learn about World War II and the Holocaust. That's the only "control of knowledge" I insist upon. Frankly, this maturity point seems to hit right about at the end of high school and the beginning of college. I agree that limited knowledge is dangerous - but I also claim that unlimited, unbalanced knowledge is also dangerous.
the OP suggested withdrawing from the educational system and doing it yourself, not changing the system
Withdrawing from the educational system is, in effect, changing the system. One person leaving school to do it their own way doesn't look like a problem; ten people shouldn't be a problem... what if 4-5% of the students in a school (i.e. one person per class) leave and learn their own way? 4-5% less students ~ roughly 4-5% less money, which may translate to one less teacher or a set of textbooks that isn't bought, which makes it slightly harder for everyone else still in school to learn - which means another few students leave school because it doesn't work for them, setting off another cycle... A gifted student leaving school because they learn better outside of school isn't always a win-win situation - but the loss to the school is so small that many people ignore it.
And that's even assuming that this gifted student gets a well-rounded education - if we're talking ADHD here, I have one friend with ADHD who believes history and writing are useless, worked only hard enough to pass his english classes... Right after the shooting at Columbine High School, he dug into a teacher asking why the school didn't hold "terrorist drills" or something of the like, to teach "these kids" what to do in a situation like that. The teacher, fortunately, patiently responded that drills, even fire drills, are NOT designed to show what to do in a fire. They exist so that we know where the exits are and in the hope that we don't completely panic - because if there were a real fire, everyone would panic (students and teachers included). The other thing that struck me about this person's comments was: he referred to "these kids". He didn't consider himself one of them. There was he, who was smart enough to see the problem and arrogant enough to assume he would never panic, and everyone else, who wasn't as smart as him. In this particular case, I'd refer to Brave New World - the guy thought that Alphas ruling Betas, ruling on down to Epsilons system was the right way to run a society (yes, we actually argued about this - he walked away with an "I'm right, you don't see my point, this is the right way to do things") - and missed the point that Huxley was CRITICAL of that society. This friend may be a brilliant mathmetician, but I sincerely hope he never gets into a position of power without first having a real awakening.
Whether the educational system is corrupt and twisted, I don't know whether to agree or disagree with you - but in my experience, it wasn't that bad. But I also expect that experiences may vary based on where I, and you, went to school.
that frying pan is there for a reason.
Scarred?:) No... the analogy was "out of the frying pan and into the fire", and I was claiming that ANY educational system that even comes moderately close to succeeding, no matter how inadequate you claim it may be, is better than trying to go it on your own. I suspect you disagree with me:) - and I respect your right to do so.
My apologies, I didn't mean to imply you suggested that. Too late at night, hit a sticky issue for me... hence the rant. It wasn't directed at you - your post just happened to be the convenient one to hang my rant onto.
My point was, more precisely, that too many people see a school system that does not serve them well, and therefore insist that they/their children should not be in the school system. Round peg in a square hole - should we fix the problem drilling a new, round hole, or by stepping back and finding the square peg that actually fits that hole? And too many people insist on drilling that new hole. It solves their immediate problem - but ruins the board for everyone else. Likewise, if everyone pulls children out of school because it "doesn't work" for them, then there won't be enough teachers to teach the people for whom it does work, and then schooling "won't work" for everyone.
I love helping people get through school, I'll answer any question I can in a way that teaches instead of just giving away the answer. But when someone repays my efforts by screwing me over - by abandoning the school system, or by flunking out because they don't care enough to keep trying no matter how much potential they have - I just don't feel compelled to help.
Control children yes... and I think that it's a good thing.
Scenario in one of the scarier short stories I ever read: Government sets up centers for problematic teens - basically, get picked up by the cops for being in a gang and you have to pass a year of class there. The system was failing until they brought in one individual who "got it", and basically convinced all his peers that learning something makes sense, they can leave gang life and move into suburbia with a nice house and a nice job. There's one spot where the advisors go in and see him reading Rousseau's Social Contract, and think that hey, he's doing pretty good, learning about how good government works, and so on and so forth. Unbeknownst to them, he leaves the library with that book, and Mein Kompf. About a week later the police have to come in and clean up after he arranges a "cleansing" of the staff - and the star pupil is now in jail as a murderer. Good idea gone very bad - now you tell me where they went wrong.
I'm not suggesting something like this would happen. It's an exaggeration for sure. The point is that there are certain social rules that society must instill in everyone - killing is unacceptable, racism/biggotry is frowned upon, etc. And one of the rules that I feel is being neglected now is: shit happens. Too many people are expecting the educational system to be tailored to their needs, without realizing that dealing with an imperfect [educational] system is part of the learning process itself. This applies BOTH to people who are handicapped in some manner, and to people who are gifted in some manner.
I went to a high school where the freshman year everyone is assigned a schedule. Later years, students can create their own. An unusually large number of parents saw their freshman student's schedule and immediately asked for changes - why can't I have teacher X, he's really good; teacher Y is a new teacher, why does my student have to have her? I'm sorry, life's not all roses, and I'd rather someone go through school and learn how to deal with life's problems than be pampered and eventually break down, even if that person has an IQ of 150. But this is a realization that most people in high school are simply not capable of making - the maturity just isn't there. Intelligence can be a handicap - by going too fast, we don't learn some of the non-tangible things. How many Slashdot flame wars have we seen about "able to learn" hires versus "long list of certs"?
A lot of the posters in this discussion have mentioned ways they found to get around ADHD - either focusing on interests, doing extra work, or realizing that an A does not necessarily equal intelligence. I have a lot of respect for those people - they tried something, realized they couldn't handle things the "normal" way, and found a way around the problem. What I don't have respect for is people who insist that the system change because they don't happen to fit it.
Well, this has been an overly long rant. (And I hope I feel better for having typed it!) But my basic point is, the school system exists for a reason. The fact that some people have difficulty learning math/writing/whatever in that system does NOT mean they should leave the school system. If you're getting fried by the system, don't jump out of the frying pan. Find another solution, add some more ingredients or turn down the heat, but that frying pan is there for a reason.
Mod as you will.
Re:SCSI for workstations?
on
IDE RAID Examined
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· Score: 5, Informative
And those same ultra-high-capacity 120GB hard drives have horrible seek times. SCSI is so much better there... look at a modern OS, and seek times for disk access will make MORE of a difference than just about anything else (given sufficient RAM, CPU cycles, etc... - but if you're spending on RAID, you'll have those anyway). Heck, if this poster's parent wants to just suck data out of a linear file, any drive'll work - you're really just pulling out of the drive's cache. Idiot-proof.
Try random access. Then you'll see the difference. Sequential is optimized by just about every cache out there - you're NOT benchmarking the drives with sustained transfer! You're benchmarking the caches!
I'd disagree on dual boot - you're just inviting the "students" to go home and say "Mom/Dad, I won't kill your computer, let me install this new thing they showed us in class today" - bang, one mistake and the OS is gone.
Dual boot is good and all - but do you really trust this age group to pay attention enough to NOT make that mistake?
My thought here would be to run under VMware or something so that any dumb mistakes wouldn't kill the machine, but VMware costs a bundle, especially for a purpose like this.
Bingo - I actually started Linux from the shell, but the only reason I could pull that off is my dad's first machines were a CP/M a 386 that ran DOS 6, so I was familiar enough with using a shell to not get frustrated (cd worked the same, dir=ls, that was all I needed). Take away that safety net - I wouldn't be using Linux today. Now, the only reason I use a GUI is to have multiple shells on screen at the same time.
And, with today's GUIs, it's so easy to simply pop up a terminal window of some sort (i.e. xterm, or whatever your favorite is...). Having a GUI behind everything may make it look less... frightful?... but you can still do everything on that shell in a window (or two... or three...:)
Slashdot is the last place I ever expected to get into a discussion on literature... but thank you.:)
Dune, Ender's Game, Brave New World and Asimov are definitely among my favorites. I read Red Mars, but couldn't make it through the sequels - great vision, but so detailed I lost the big picture. Actually, I think Dune Messiah capped off Dune very well - it really fleshes out the characters and nicely ties off everything started in Dune that I was uncomfortable with (e.g. the "messiah complex" of Paul).
One favorite I've had for a while is Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series. Mainly the first few books - the last ones regress into "clever, cheated endings", but she managed to create an amazing society with dragons interweaved. It takes some time to adapt to her terminology and understand the society, but once you have that it makes a great series.
But, since you've given me license to complain:), here's one of my big complaints: the continuation of Ender's game series, through the "Bean" character, is absolute trash. Card completely unbalanced the Bean character - two-thirds of the shortcomings that made him interesting in Ender's Game are gone (he was deliberately stubborn to provoke Ender into being a better leader? Yeah right...). Peter Wiggins is more tenative than Ender himself (dead wrong). And Bean's weak point of not being able to command more than a few people suddenly and miraculously vanishes. While the idea of following the Hegemon is really interesting, the books I've read so far (2 of 4, the others are due out soon) failed miserably.
Now I'm wishing I were back at home with a decent library that stocks sci-fi. University libraries are great for research, but absolutely stink for any sci-fi literature.
Hmm... I confess I never read The Iliad, hence my inexcusable misspelling!, and instead have seen a zillion references to it and interpolated the story. I classified it as SF primarily because of the supra-normal elements involved - not even in Homer's time did the Greek gods actually show up and act, but the "magic" of their actions produces an analagous "effect" on the story as the "science" in sci-fi. I had never heard of this question the story Odysseus told to the Phaeacians idea, it's facinating, very interesting - though I think it would only add a twist, as instead of a purely sci-fi story (Homer narrating Odysseus's adventures), it becomes a frame story (Homer writing about Odysseus) about a sci-fi story (Odysseus recounting his adventures).
Sci-fi has a funny cycle - I feel that the future and the past are more closely related to each other than either is to the present.
But too much literature and philosophy. One of the more curious pieces I ever read was an otherwise trashy piece by Ben Bova (the Orion series) that had this insight: he suggested that the Trojan Horse was not a horse, but instead an Assyrian seige engine, the likes of which had never been seen in Ionia before (and wouldn't be for 500 years or so), implying that the story of the "Trojan Horse" was simply a distortion of the original story - as Troy was actually sacked (~14th or 12th century BC, I think - and Homer was supposed to have been ~9th? Loss of writing in Greece ~8th-6th makes timing about right and allows the distortion). I'm sort of 50-50 in agreeing with his idea - it is more plausible, but there's so much relatively consistent detail about the Trojan Horse since that time... May I ask what you think?
The irony, I think, is that it's only SF that we can play with history in such a manner. I suppose that dilutes my definition of sci-fi - instead, I consider sci-fi to be any writing that reinterprets the past, present, or future in a manner that we don't expect, with science being the most convenient vehicle for that reinterpretation.
Indeed, I finally remembered that I read a book exactly as you describe. However, I'll add that I think I read one of the other sequels before the PKD original (Replicant Dreams, I think...), which helped because I saw certain parts better, but also meant I zoned in on "Blade Runner" and only caught "Do Androids Dream..." as an afterthought.
I've always been partial to "Starship Troopers". Great satire, and I have a serious weakness for good satire. Movie was junk, book was fantastic. Heinlein nailed all the gripes about Vietnam ten years before it happened. And besides, who doesn't like mecha, especially believable ones?
The depressing thing about sci-fi is, while it's possible to get some fantastic books, it's insanely easy to get absolute junk. For every good book, I read two or three I want to forget.
Hmm... now something one of my teachers once said is coming to mind. This guy was very good - when I took his class he'd been grading AP English Literature exams for more years than I'd been in school. And before the exam, he talked about what books to write on. Basically, any modern "popular" books were out - no Ann Rand, no Tom Clancy, nothing like that. Well-known books older than about 60 years were fair game, as was modern literature that had won literary awards. Sci-fi, however, was a yes-and-no genre - potentially very good material for an essay, but stick with a classic if you want to be safe. It was the only genre he was ambivilant(sp?) about using.
I'm clashing with your terms, but agreeing with you in spirit...
Science Fiction is ENTIRELY about the universe. The key is, once you subtract out the fancy science, it has to be OUR universe. (I'm thinking this is what you were getting at... correct me if you think I'm misinterpretting).
Asimov's Foundation series, for example - boiled down, it's a very large Imperial power, and a small group attempting to change that power. Sure, there's fancy "psychohistory" and "Q-Beams" and "Atomic Drives" involved - but the politics are exactly the same. Every one of the characters is an archetype that we can see in the world around us - maybe not someone we can give a name to, but someone we could say, "yeah, my mayor acts just like that guy." The science doesn't unbalance what is really a story about politics.
Here's an exercise for some bored English major out there: re-create Asimov's series in today's world. Toss in some "stagnant" factor - maybe over-powerful mega-corporations or 1984/Farenheit 451-style thought control. And make the "Foundation" produce one product the rest of the world subconsciously needs - entertainment, perhaps, which would lead to the "Foundation" re-introducing great, revolutionary literature (Upton Sinclair "The Jungle", "Uncle Tom's Cabin", or "1984") in a slightly altered form to change the world. The Foundation universe really IS our world - Asimov's just renamed a few things.
And, in particular, does not pull some "magic" super-gizmo out of a hat that suddenly resolves a horribly tangled storyline. It makes me feel like the author was too lazy to finish the book. (Sorry, this is my worst pet-peeve with modern books.)
Example: Orson Scott Card's series that ends with Children of the Mind. Due to some mystical-science only discovered by the main character, everyone who was a "good person" to Ender comes back to life in a perfect form, and Ender can magically teleport to different planets and solve all the problems in the universe, blah blah blah... Absolutely Not! The reason the earlier books were good was that they were balanced - the good guy is ironically reviled by everyone because of what he had to do to save them, the bad guy ironically ends up doing the most good, and people actually are accountable for their past. The same reasons any good literature is good. There's no "magic" involved.
(Note: for an example of a good use of "magically resolving a storyline", see Robert Asprin's "Myth" series. And realize that the point of those books is not the conclusion, it's the set-up and characterization. One of the few places cartoonish characters actually work.)
I don't know... the best "sci-fi" I've ever read doesn't necessarily fit under the "sci-fi" section of the library. In one sense, Greek epic literature is sci-fi (The Illiad; The Odyssey). 1984 and Brave New World were essentially sci-fi when they were written. It's about books that have literary merit on their own - the "science" part just means that the world doesn't have to obey the same rules as the world around us. (Note to aspiring authors: that doesn't mean you can change the rules on a whim. Your universe must have rules too, and you can't break them. I'm just saying those rules don't have to be the same as this universe's rules.)
AC: good comments! I vividly remember reading Blade Runner... for exactly those reasons.
Ben Bova created a book, "Challenges", on writing Science Fiction. It's aimed at short stories, and technically isn't limited to sci-fi, but it's exceptionally good. One of my half-dozen favorites. Out of print for about ten years, my copy is resold from the decommissioned Panama military base!
Some of his insights: Edgar Allen Poe's horror stories were great sci-fi. As an "exercise", he rewrote "Masque of the Red Death" into a Cold War-themed "Masque of the RAD Death" - and changed about ten words. Or a story about man first receiving SETI-type signals - which ended after a month and an alien nuclear war.
Ben Bova is one of the sci-fi heavyweights - find this one at your library and give it a read. I promise you won't be disappointed.
Yup, loopholes wide enough to drive a truck through... between the Cold War and the War on Terror, I swear the US has spent 2/3 of the past decade "in [a] time of War or public danger".
Plus, I think "person" is traditionally held to mean something closer to "citizen" than "human being" - that is, a foriegner, or someone who has forfeited his/her citizenship, does not necessarily enjoy the same rights. If someone makes a "forfeit citizenship = commit high crimes" (i.e. treason, murder) argument...
When trials can be held before military tribunals or under seal. If only a civilian court could assign the death penalty, I'd agree with you wholeheartedly. But non-civilian courts (i.e. military, INS, etc.) can hold non-jury trial - or at least distort the idea of a jury trial into something unjust.
United States Code is pretty good law, and generally fair, but a lot of the recent actions by our administration have been to move trials out of civilian courts and into another realm - where the traditional protections (trial by a jury of peers, right of appeal, right to be accused, timely trial, etc.) simply don't apply, or exist only at the pleasure of the court. Once a trial is outside of the normal legal system, then the government is able to arbitrarily dish out sentences with impunity - recent dictatorships that "disappear" people are a perfect example of the extreme, with the ONLY difference being that the government is using it's ability to punish to hold power.
If I get accused of being a terrorist tomorrow, I'm reasonably sure I can defend myself in a regular court (since it's not true!), but if I'm suddenly "declared" a non-citizen and find myself before a military court (held in Cuba?), I don't have a chance. This is what scares me - the precident for tossing terrorists across that line opens the way for tossing anybody over. Very disturbing.
And honestly, this "experimental" browser does better than anything else I've used (for Windows, for free...). Tabbed browsing, stability, better popup control, with quicklaunch it sometimes loads FASTER than IE, and I actually trust the security...
Been happily using Mozilla since 0.9.7, now on 1.1. I'll gladly send TalkBack reports or whatever else back just because this browser WORKS. I'd happily beta-test, but I need a working browser for school and can't afford to deal with serious bugs or spend time installing/reverting.
I'll use whatever browser works best for me. And right now the best is this "experimental, under development" browser. Kudos to the Mozilla team - this browser is a masterpiece.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems to me that they only are staking out legal grounds for complaining about the logo. Never mind that they object to the letters PCI - they don't claim legal ownership of the letters.
So the actual complaint is that PCI-SIG's lawyers are concerned that Boemler's site might be implying PCI-SIG is endorsing his material. I can't guess how many sites include a disclaimer - but if Boemler adds one, I'd think that would handle their complaint.
Maybe this is part of their complaint? But this is also playing dirty - they're threatening the guy's job. Not outright, but it's implied. I already don't like these lawyers.
But: (and with the IANAL) PCI-SIG is complaining about the use of the logo. Then they are putting forward the removal of the name and logo as a solution. Scare tactics, they want him to completely cave in ... but they haven't staked out enough ground (yet?) to demand the whole thing.
There are a few extra tidbits:
1) said grandfather held several of the patents on the lock design. Which means the company being sued reverse-engineered it, a violation of patent law anyway.
2) IIRC, they were suing to block the general sale of this universal key. The key was already available to locksmiths (i.e. people who have a legitimate use for it); every guy on the street doesn't need the universal key, because it would destroy the value of the lock under their patent.
Needless to say, the general sale of this universal key was blocked; I also have never seen one used, so as far as I know they still aren't available.
But I do dispute. Yes, a lot of major literature dand history goes under what myself, my friends, and many of my teachers call the "Dead White Guy" category. I agree it's biased, but then look at the attempts to do otherwise. A political philosophy class: readings are Aristotle, Machiavelli, Locke, Rousseau, ... and Mencius (token non-white guy) - and the class universally thought the Mencius reading shouldn't have been in the syllabus. A literature class: poets are Shakespeare, Tennison, Wordsworth, ... and Maya Angelou (token non-white non-guy). With all due respect she may be a great creative force, but her poetry simply isn't in the same ballpark as the other classics. The ONLY time I've ever seen a female author not pulled in as a token gesture but instead as a useful work to study was a Johnathen Swifte - Jane Austen - Nathaniel Hawthorne - John Stienbeck progression. I'm not saying that women can't write (the best essays I've seen usually come from women), but for the general, non-writing/history-intensive education there simply aren't any great works by women to study. And my opinion is that trying to retroactively give women more of a historical voice only creates more problems by showing women as unable to compare to the greatest literary lights ever.
Yes, I AM female. Dammit.
Now that has to be one of the finest statements I've seen here in ages. You have my envy - I only WISH I could use that as a sig.
Computer Science = Bachelor's Degree
Computer Programming = Associate's Degree
Hasn't happened yet, but it's the truth. The problem is that everyone wants a college degree anyway, so anyone looking to work in the programming industry thinks "Computer Science"...
Disclaimer: I'm on track for a full BS in CS degree. I also know other people who are majoring in CS who really shouldn't be.
There is nothing that gives FTP accountability. First, you can't open a warez P2P collection to the public and not get caught either - the instant you start downloading it, you can pull an IP address - exactly as much information as FTP provides. But the analogy is flawed - FTP as a protocol is designed to efficiently transfer files. P2P's design is more of a high-availabilty, low capacity system - hence the massively parallel searching, and consequent slow downloads. P2P's ability to transfer files is an add-on - just like HTTP's ability to send cookies is really an add-on. And finally, the advertising is entirely a separate entity. There is no practical reason P2P clients need advertising, there simply hasn't been a popular non-advertising client yet. Advertising provides a source of income for the development of easy-to-use P2P clients - it's no more a part of the network than the ads you see on TV are a part of the show you're watching.
And the people who make guns are aiding and abetting murdurers and the people who make CD burners are aiding and abetting pirates (never mind me who uses it to make off-computer backups of important data). This is an old argument. A while ago, I read a news report about a carjacker who had the bad idea of stealing a car from a group of judo students on their way to a tournament. A bad choice for him... the police, though, were very careful to note that they recommended people NOT attempt to stop carjackers - it's the police's job, they have the training and responsibility to stop carjackings, and everyone else doesn't. This is a similar situation - there is no law demanding that Kazaa take responsibility to police it's own network. Now, they could voluntarily, but it's not their responsibility - nor is it within their capabilities. The difference from Napster? Napster decided to attempt to filter their network, and essentially took responsibility - then failed to succeed. Admittedly Kazaa is being actively hostile to the idea of policing their network - but it's not their job. It's the job of the government - and probably some as-yet-uncreated federal agency. (I wouldn't be happy about such an agency, but I think it's inevitable.)
Conceeded. Deliberately avoiding a resolution to the problem is exactly in keeping with a civil suit. But only a civil suit - this line couldn't go to a criminal case (perhaps that is why the lawyers are making it a civil case?). AND the court has to have the jurisdiction over BOTH parties to institute a resolution to the problem. My opinion is that I doubt the ruling will stand on appeal, but even if it does, the rest of the posters in this thread are exactly correct - the California judge can't do a thing to the company. It's not like there are assets to freeze, a company charter from the state to revoke, or any such matters - the judge's abilities will be restricted to banning future business dealings and throwing around contempt warrents, and will be completely ineffective at actually stopping abuses.
I may be rare among the Slashdot crowd for agreeing (for the most part) with copyright law (my qualms are about overpricing only - which means I actually DO buy much of the stuff I've downloaded in the past. Which amounted to about one movie and a dozen songs). But I really hate how the MPAA/RIAA goes for a publicity-stunt, slap-on-the-wrist lawsuit instead of doing something constructive.
we do expose them to a herd mentality, inefficient bureacracy and mistrust from the administration, and to brute aggression from the football team
Which, unfortunately, are things we have to deal with today in modern society. Herd mentality = rush hour, inefficient bureacracy = [insert favorite gov't agency here, I like simply "Congress"], football team = that jerk that just cut me off. Sad, but the truth. And I think it's better to learn to deal with it in school than in the real world, where overreacting doesn't get you a trip to the principal's office but instead a trip to the slammer.
Some people graduate without the ability to read. I was in the gifted-and-talented set, like many others here, and it's a joke. AFAICT, it exists to keep smart people out of the teacher's hair.
Can't say I disagree - until I hit high school (which was particularly good), the only difference I felt was that the classes tried to separate grades somewhat - move the "A's in normal classes" people into another class so that when John and Joe compare grades over lunch, the fact that one is in gifted-and-talented and the other isn't won't stand out too much and interrupt some "social development process" the psych people came up with. Although there are some systems that seem more successful than others - my sister reported more success, going through the same schools five years after I did, after a few hefty changes. (The bad sign: budget cuts and complaints will probably roll those changes back). Colorado school system.
One of the most useful experiences I had was the year I spent in my sophomore year history class. I picked it because it was the only one my schedule could fit where the teacher wasn't brand new. A few years later (kind of the goodbye-to-teachers I'm-off-to-college time), this teacher told me that her class was actually half under the "learning disabled" heading - i.e. half the students qualified for unlimited time on tests, etc. Click - a lot of the things that went on in that class suddenly made a lot more sense to me. My classmates in there generally did fine - yeah, a few failed because they didn't care, but for a normal-level class everybody did fine. Without grade inflation. Honestly, I think people in there learned more than in other normal-level classes. And I sure felt that many of the people in there were "smarter" than some of the people in my "accelerated" classes - they certainly had better study habits. I didn't stay in touch with many of these people - but the experience did change my perspective of the "advanced" classes - what I gained in learning more raw material, I lost in learning about other people.
I even agree with you that today's public schools don't do a great job of teaching math/reading/etc. Yeah, it needs fixing. But I think the benefits of having a "socially normalizing" educational system are too important to ignore.
This "learning is dangerous if not tightly controlled" idea is itself pretty dangerous.
Agreed. And it was a work of fiction - to the best of my knowledge, it has not happened. However, Lord of the Flies also has not happened (again, to the best of my knowledge), yet we are concerned about that sort of situtation. I don't want to say that learning is dangerous - but the control aspect is simply demanding that everyone take a balanced perspective. Anyone should be free to read pro-Nazi propoganda - but I insist that if you are not mature enough to know that the Nazis committed a whole mess of atrocities that they justified with propoganda, then you MUST also learn about World War II and the Holocaust. That's the only "control of knowledge" I insist upon. Frankly, this maturity point seems to hit right about at the end of high school and the beginning of college. I agree that limited knowledge is dangerous - but I also claim that unlimited, unbalanced knowledge is also dangerous.
the OP suggested withdrawing from the educational system and doing it yourself, not changing the system
Withdrawing from the educational system is, in effect, changing the system. One person leaving school to do it their own way doesn't look like a problem; ten people shouldn't be a problem... what if 4-5% of the students in a school (i.e. one person per class) leave and learn their own way? 4-5% less students ~ roughly 4-5% less money, which may translate to one less teacher or a set of textbooks that isn't bought, which makes it slightly harder for everyone else still in school to learn - which means another few students leave school because it doesn't work for them, setting off another cycle... A gifted student leaving school because they learn better outside of school isn't always a win-win situation - but the loss to the school is so small that many people ignore it.
And that's even assuming that this gifted student gets a well-rounded education - if we're talking ADHD here, I have one friend with ADHD who believes history and writing are useless, worked only hard enough to pass his english classes... Right after the shooting at Columbine High School, he dug into a teacher asking why the school didn't hold "terrorist drills" or something of the like, to teach "these kids" what to do in a situation like that. The teacher, fortunately, patiently responded that drills, even fire drills, are NOT designed to show what to do in a fire. They exist so that we know where the exits are and in the hope that we don't completely panic - because if there were a real fire, everyone would panic (students and teachers included). The other thing that struck me about this person's comments was: he referred to "these kids". He didn't consider himself one of them. There was he, who was smart enough to see the problem and arrogant enough to assume he would never panic, and everyone else, who wasn't as smart as him. In this particular case, I'd refer to Brave New World - the guy thought that Alphas ruling Betas, ruling on down to Epsilons system was the right way to run a society (yes, we actually argued about this - he walked away with an "I'm right, you don't see my point, this is the right way to do things") - and missed the point that Huxley was CRITICAL of that society. This friend may be a brilliant mathmetician, but I sincerely hope he never gets into a position of power without first having a real awakening.
Whether the educational system is corrupt and twisted, I don't know whether to agree or disagree with you - but in my experience, it wasn't that bad. But I also expect that experiences may vary based on where I, and you, went to school.
that frying pan is there for a reason.
Scarred? :) No... the analogy was "out of the frying pan and into the fire", and I was claiming that ANY educational system that even comes moderately close to succeeding, no matter how inadequate you claim it may be, is better than trying to go it on your own. I suspect you disagree with me :) - and I respect your right to do so.
My point was, more precisely, that too many people see a school system that does not serve them well, and therefore insist that they/their children should not be in the school system. Round peg in a square hole - should we fix the problem drilling a new, round hole, or by stepping back and finding the square peg that actually fits that hole? And too many people insist on drilling that new hole. It solves their immediate problem - but ruins the board for everyone else. Likewise, if everyone pulls children out of school because it "doesn't work" for them, then there won't be enough teachers to teach the people for whom it does work, and then schooling "won't work" for everyone.
I love helping people get through school, I'll answer any question I can in a way that teaches instead of just giving away the answer. But when someone repays my efforts by screwing me over - by abandoning the school system, or by flunking out because they don't care enough to keep trying no matter how much potential they have - I just don't feel compelled to help.
Scenario in one of the scarier short stories I ever read: Government sets up centers for problematic teens - basically, get picked up by the cops for being in a gang and you have to pass a year of class there. The system was failing until they brought in one individual who "got it", and basically convinced all his peers that learning something makes sense, they can leave gang life and move into suburbia with a nice house and a nice job. There's one spot where the advisors go in and see him reading Rousseau's Social Contract, and think that hey, he's doing pretty good, learning about how good government works, and so on and so forth. Unbeknownst to them, he leaves the library with that book, and Mein Kompf. About a week later the police have to come in and clean up after he arranges a "cleansing" of the staff - and the star pupil is now in jail as a murderer. Good idea gone very bad - now you tell me where they went wrong.
I'm not suggesting something like this would happen. It's an exaggeration for sure. The point is that there are certain social rules that society must instill in everyone - killing is unacceptable, racism/biggotry is frowned upon, etc. And one of the rules that I feel is being neglected now is: shit happens. Too many people are expecting the educational system to be tailored to their needs, without realizing that dealing with an imperfect [educational] system is part of the learning process itself. This applies BOTH to people who are handicapped in some manner, and to people who are gifted in some manner.
I went to a high school where the freshman year everyone is assigned a schedule. Later years, students can create their own. An unusually large number of parents saw their freshman student's schedule and immediately asked for changes - why can't I have teacher X, he's really good; teacher Y is a new teacher, why does my student have to have her? I'm sorry, life's not all roses, and I'd rather someone go through school and learn how to deal with life's problems than be pampered and eventually break down, even if that person has an IQ of 150. But this is a realization that most people in high school are simply not capable of making - the maturity just isn't there. Intelligence can be a handicap - by going too fast, we don't learn some of the non-tangible things. How many Slashdot flame wars have we seen about "able to learn" hires versus "long list of certs"?
A lot of the posters in this discussion have mentioned ways they found to get around ADHD - either focusing on interests, doing extra work, or realizing that an A does not necessarily equal intelligence. I have a lot of respect for those people - they tried something, realized they couldn't handle things the "normal" way, and found a way around the problem. What I don't have respect for is people who insist that the system change because they don't happen to fit it.
Well, this has been an overly long rant. (And I hope I feel better for having typed it!) But my basic point is, the school system exists for a reason. The fact that some people have difficulty learning math/writing/whatever in that system does NOT mean they should leave the school system. If you're getting fried by the system, don't jump out of the frying pan. Find another solution, add some more ingredients or turn down the heat, but that frying pan is there for a reason.
Mod as you will.
Try random access. Then you'll see the difference. Sequential is optimized by just about every cache out there - you're NOT benchmarking the drives with sustained transfer! You're benchmarking the caches!
Dual boot is good and all - but do you really trust this age group to pay attention enough to NOT make that mistake?
My thought here would be to run under VMware or something so that any dumb mistakes wouldn't kill the machine, but VMware costs a bundle, especially for a purpose like this.
Bingo - I actually started Linux from the shell, but the only reason I could pull that off is my dad's first machines were a CP/M a 386 that ran DOS 6, so I was familiar enough with using a shell to not get frustrated (cd worked the same, dir=ls, that was all I needed). Take away that safety net - I wouldn't be using Linux today. Now, the only reason I use a GUI is to have multiple shells on screen at the same time.
And, with today's GUIs, it's so easy to simply pop up a terminal window of some sort (i.e. xterm, or whatever your favorite is...). Having a GUI behind everything may make it look less... frightful?... but you can still do everything on that shell in a window (or two... or three... :)
Dune, Ender's Game, Brave New World and Asimov are definitely among my favorites. I read Red Mars, but couldn't make it through the sequels - great vision, but so detailed I lost the big picture. Actually, I think Dune Messiah capped off Dune very well - it really fleshes out the characters and nicely ties off everything started in Dune that I was uncomfortable with (e.g. the "messiah complex" of Paul).
One favorite I've had for a while is Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series. Mainly the first few books - the last ones regress into "clever, cheated endings", but she managed to create an amazing society with dragons interweaved. It takes some time to adapt to her terminology and understand the society, but once you have that it makes a great series.
But, since you've given me license to complain :), here's one of my big complaints: the continuation of Ender's game series, through the "Bean" character, is absolute trash. Card completely unbalanced the Bean character - two-thirds of the shortcomings that made him interesting in Ender's Game are gone (he was deliberately stubborn to provoke Ender into being a better leader? Yeah right...). Peter Wiggins is more tenative than Ender himself (dead wrong). And Bean's weak point of not being able to command more than a few people suddenly and miraculously vanishes. While the idea of following the Hegemon is really interesting, the books I've read so far (2 of 4, the others are due out soon) failed miserably.
Now I'm wishing I were back at home with a decent library that stocks sci-fi. University libraries are great for research, but absolutely stink for any sci-fi literature.
Sci-fi has a funny cycle - I feel that the future and the past are more closely related to each other than either is to the present.
But too much literature and philosophy. One of the more curious pieces I ever read was an otherwise trashy piece by Ben Bova (the Orion series) that had this insight: he suggested that the Trojan Horse was not a horse, but instead an Assyrian seige engine, the likes of which had never been seen in Ionia before (and wouldn't be for 500 years or so), implying that the story of the "Trojan Horse" was simply a distortion of the original story - as Troy was actually sacked (~14th or 12th century BC, I think - and Homer was supposed to have been ~9th? Loss of writing in Greece ~8th-6th makes timing about right and allows the distortion). I'm sort of 50-50 in agreeing with his idea - it is more plausible, but there's so much relatively consistent detail about the Trojan Horse since that time... May I ask what you think?
The irony, I think, is that it's only SF that we can play with history in such a manner. I suppose that dilutes my definition of sci-fi - instead, I consider sci-fi to be any writing that reinterprets the past, present, or future in a manner that we don't expect, with science being the most convenient vehicle for that reinterpretation.
Indeed, I finally remembered that I read a book exactly as you describe. However, I'll add that I think I read one of the other sequels before the PKD original (Replicant Dreams, I think...), which helped because I saw certain parts better, but also meant I zoned in on "Blade Runner" and only caught "Do Androids Dream..." as an afterthought.
Good! Very good! Thanks!
The depressing thing about sci-fi is, while it's possible to get some fantastic books, it's insanely easy to get absolute junk. For every good book, I read two or three I want to forget.
Hmm... now something one of my teachers once said is coming to mind. This guy was very good - when I took his class he'd been grading AP English Literature exams for more years than I'd been in school. And before the exam, he talked about what books to write on. Basically, any modern "popular" books were out - no Ann Rand, no Tom Clancy, nothing like that. Well-known books older than about 60 years were fair game, as was modern literature that had won literary awards. Sci-fi, however, was a yes-and-no genre - potentially very good material for an essay, but stick with a classic if you want to be safe. It was the only genre he was ambivilant(sp?) about using.
Science Fiction is ENTIRELY about the universe. The key is, once you subtract out the fancy science, it has to be OUR universe. (I'm thinking this is what you were getting at... correct me if you think I'm misinterpretting).
Asimov's Foundation series, for example - boiled down, it's a very large Imperial power, and a small group attempting to change that power. Sure, there's fancy "psychohistory" and "Q-Beams" and "Atomic Drives" involved - but the politics are exactly the same. Every one of the characters is an archetype that we can see in the world around us - maybe not someone we can give a name to, but someone we could say, "yeah, my mayor acts just like that guy." The science doesn't unbalance what is really a story about politics.
Here's an exercise for some bored English major out there: re-create Asimov's series in today's world. Toss in some "stagnant" factor - maybe over-powerful mega-corporations or 1984/Farenheit 451-style thought control. And make the "Foundation" produce one product the rest of the world subconsciously needs - entertainment, perhaps, which would lead to the "Foundation" re-introducing great, revolutionary literature (Upton Sinclair "The Jungle", "Uncle Tom's Cabin", or "1984") in a slightly altered form to change the world. The Foundation universe really IS our world - Asimov's just renamed a few things.
(read: not necessary ends with happy end)
And, in particular, does not pull some "magic" super-gizmo out of a hat that suddenly resolves a horribly tangled storyline. It makes me feel like the author was too lazy to finish the book. (Sorry, this is my worst pet-peeve with modern books.)
Example: Orson Scott Card's series that ends with Children of the Mind. Due to some mystical-science only discovered by the main character, everyone who was a "good person" to Ender comes back to life in a perfect form, and Ender can magically teleport to different planets and solve all the problems in the universe, blah blah blah... Absolutely Not! The reason the earlier books were good was that they were balanced - the good guy is ironically reviled by everyone because of what he had to do to save them, the bad guy ironically ends up doing the most good, and people actually are accountable for their past. The same reasons any good literature is good. There's no "magic" involved.
(Note: for an example of a good use of "magically resolving a storyline", see Robert Asprin's "Myth" series. And realize that the point of those books is not the conclusion, it's the set-up and characterization. One of the few places cartoonish characters actually work.)
I don't know... the best "sci-fi" I've ever read doesn't necessarily fit under the "sci-fi" section of the library. In one sense, Greek epic literature is sci-fi (The Illiad; The Odyssey). 1984 and Brave New World were essentially sci-fi when they were written. It's about books that have literary merit on their own - the "science" part just means that the world doesn't have to obey the same rules as the world around us. (Note to aspiring authors: that doesn't mean you can change the rules on a whim. Your universe must have rules too, and you can't break them. I'm just saying those rules don't have to be the same as this universe's rules.)
AC: good comments! I vividly remember reading Blade Runner... for exactly those reasons.
Some of his insights: Edgar Allen Poe's horror stories were great sci-fi. As an "exercise", he rewrote "Masque of the Red Death" into a Cold War-themed "Masque of the RAD Death" - and changed about ten words. Or a story about man first receiving SETI-type signals - which ended after a month and an alien nuclear war.
Ben Bova is one of the sci-fi heavyweights - find this one at your library and give it a read. I promise you won't be disappointed.
s/decade/century (oops...)
Plus, I think "person" is traditionally held to mean something closer to "citizen" than "human being" - that is, a foriegner, or someone who has forfeited his/her citizenship, does not necessarily enjoy the same rights. If someone makes a "forfeit citizenship = commit high crimes" (i.e. treason, murder) argument...
United States Code is pretty good law, and generally fair, but a lot of the recent actions by our administration have been to move trials out of civilian courts and into another realm - where the traditional protections (trial by a jury of peers, right of appeal, right to be accused, timely trial, etc.) simply don't apply, or exist only at the pleasure of the court. Once a trial is outside of the normal legal system, then the government is able to arbitrarily dish out sentences with impunity - recent dictatorships that "disappear" people are a perfect example of the extreme, with the ONLY difference being that the government is using it's ability to punish to hold power.
If I get accused of being a terrorist tomorrow, I'm reasonably sure I can defend myself in a regular court (since it's not true!), but if I'm suddenly "declared" a non-citizen and find myself before a military court (held in Cuba?), I don't have a chance. This is what scares me - the precident for tossing terrorists across that line opens the way for tossing anybody over. Very disturbing.
Been happily using Mozilla since 0.9.7, now on 1.1. I'll gladly send TalkBack reports or whatever else back just because this browser WORKS. I'd happily beta-test, but I need a working browser for school and can't afford to deal with serious bugs or spend time installing/reverting.
I'll use whatever browser works best for me. And right now the best is this "experimental, under development" browser. Kudos to the Mozilla team - this browser is a masterpiece.