As an example, contrast installing NVIDIA's drivers under Windows and Linux.
Somebody already gave an example above about doing it simply with an emerge. I'll relate a different experience.
I went to NVIDIA's website, and downloaded the latest binary. I don't believe I even had to set it executable, I just ran the file (from the console).
It brought up a little text menu. I believe the first thing it asked is if I wanted to search for a pre-configured option; I chose yes. It did not find one. It asked me if I wanted to build one myself and I said yes. It built. It installed. Then it asked me if it wanted me to let it change my X configuration for me to take advantage of it. I said yes. It did so. I restarted X and everything was dandy.
That sounds extremely Windows-like to me, with the exception of having to type a filename instead of clicking on it (just because it was a text-based installer; a GUI would, I'm sure, not be hard to create and should work identically well). If "restart X" is too hard for Windows users, they can substitute "reboot" instead; they should definitely be familiar with that, and it will acheive the same effect.
I know the option to change my X configuration was somewhat new (within the last year or so I'd guess), but the rest was just as easy in the previous version I used.
OpenOffice.org shines as an example of what software should NOT be. I tried running it on a fairly new PC, running WindowMaker on Debian. It was dog slow; menus took seconds to open, rather than being instant as they are on Windows.
OO certainly isn't fast, I can't defend a claim like that. But I just did a quick test on my linux box. P4 2.6Ghz with 768 megs of RAM--not great, but not bad. Anyway: Load time from icon-click to where I could do some work was 11 seconds the first time; 7 seconds the second time. Menus worked flawlessly, no delays, and certainly not second-long delays. I'm also running a ton of stuff -- KDE as a WM, Korganizer, Gaim and KMix are sitting in my tray. TVTime is running in the background. I also have Apache 2 and MySQL 5 running in the background, and of course this Firefox window to reply to you. So I've no doubt that the load time could be even quicker than it already is.
And it might sound like a small thing to some people, but there's a complete lack of decent MSN Messenger clients for Linux.
Agreed, Linux is ALWAYS going to lack behind Windows in this sense because they have to play catch up. And usually, have to reverse engineer things on top of that. But...
The closest is Kopete, with Gaim frankly unusable, as Kopete has support for webcams and personal messages while Gaim does not [. ..] Hell, custom emoticon support would be nice.
I use gaim. First of all, you can receive custom emoticons in 2.0 beta and voice/video is coming. Although I don't use it, I do believe that Kopete can both send and receive custom emoticons; I believe that voice/video support is already in it as well, and I have played around with it a little bit. It certainly wasn't HARD to use, though I won't argue that it's probably not optimal.
Then again, it also does more. It connects to multiple services, for one thing; and even multiple connections to services at the same time. That, of necessity, makes the interface issues more prominant. You can't just have a "set personal message" button--you have to be able to set it per account per service, and maybe even a "set 'em all this way" button as well. So yeah, you trade some ease of use for functionality.
What most people want to do is just open Linux Media Player, insert a CD, click the start rip button, wait 5 minutes and come back to find a load of MP3s. That's it.
Others have already mentioned that that sort of pop-up "what do you want to do?" display exists in KDE 3.5.
It's simply far too complex for the average end user to understand, and the software which m
Last I checked Jesus Christ was not a banned term. And we all know that "Jesus Christ" is never used as an expletive or in an offensive way. Whatever.
It is used that way, of course. But last *I* checked, there are no riots going on because somebody dared draw a cartoon Jesus with a bomb for a hat. Dozens of people are not dead because of said cartoon.
I don't see the problem with what they did. As nice as it sounds to say you have to treat everybody and everything identically, it's just not the case. Not everything or everyone is the same.
Nowhere in the Constitution is there a provision for welfare. Nowhere in the Constitution is there any allowance for unbacked currency, social security, medicare, income tax, minimum wage, government housing, sales tax, public schools, or any of the other blights that soil our nation.
I have a really, really hard time believing you considered public schools a blight on our nation. They may not all do a good job at it, but leaving people (with money!) to fend for themselves in terms of education is certainly a worse alternative. But I digress.
Whether there are provisions for these things really depend on your interpretation of the Constitution. Nowhere (in the original text) are you going to find "Congress has the power to create an income tax." Of course not. What you will find, for example, is that Congress has the ability to collect taxes. And when income taxes were challenged? The 16th Amendment was passed to permit them. As it stands today, there is an extremely clear authority to collect them. Similar deal with sales tax; Congress is given the specific ability to lay and collect taxes. Why SHOULDN'T that include, if they so desired, a sales tax?
Is there an allowance for unbacked currency? Nope, not specifically. But Congress can coin money and regulate the value thereof; nowhere does it say it has to be backed by anything at all. In fact, by saying Congress can regulate money the implication seems to be that it doesn't have to be backed by anything at all. It doesn't say, after all, that "Congress can regulate the value of money as long as they have enough gold to back it up." Just that they can regulate it. All of these issues you have raised are very easily dismissed by really just reading the document. None of them seem to require any particular stretching of the mind.
Welfare, social security, medicare, government housing and public schools do, I concede, require more of a stretch. Where authority for these sorts of programs are derrived from is less clear, but I still think valid arguments can be raised for them.
The line about collecting taxes, for example, states they may collect them to "pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States." It seems to me that it can be very well argued that educating our citizens and providing them with means to survive if they have trouble doing so on their own easily contributes to the general welfare. The only one in that list that I have trouble justifying Constitutionally is social security.
You will note that I have not commented on whether or not there are BETTER ways to contribute to the general welfare; I have not, as an example, stated that our public school system is the penultimate thing the government can be doing. Nor that their doing so would be better than if they did NOT do so (which I do believe, but am not arguing); rather, that they do contribute and Congress is thus authorized to enact such legislation. If our Congressmen are doing a poor job of selecting programs best suited for the nation, the fault does not lie with the Constitution -- it lies with the electorate.
The big-picture bottom-line here is that the Constitution is a living document. I love the founding fathers, but it doesn't matter what they intended. They set up a system whereby their intents could be overridden in the future--by amendments and more importantly, by re-interpretation. They set up an entire branch of government with no purpose other than to interpret laws, and I have yet to see anybody argue that judicial review, while not stated in the Constitution, should be revoked or is a bad idea.
I can't sit here and cite case law for these things, but I can pretty well guarantee you that every issue you raised has faced legal challenges and, eventually, come out on top. Just because the founding fathers did not intend something does not mean it is somehow not part of constitutional law. Not only is thinking so particularly naive, it is twice as
You're right though; the word "cunt" is used a ton.
I have some friends in Australia that I talk to, and they use the word "cunt" all the time. Apparently phrases like "mad cunt" are not even insults to them, they're compliments; it's almost as if not only has the word lost its literal meaning, it has lost its status as an insult.
Meh, some entrepreneuring young fellow would just set up an operation in Britain or some other country we still import from, import from China to there, and sell it back to US companies with a nice little "circumventing the law" markup.
This sounds good, and it seems like a hopeful sign that general approval ratings of congress are at 30% (plus-or-minus), and as a result one might be willing to believe that a "throw-the-bums-out" movement is building.
Even if it were, until we in the US fully embrace the idea of third-party candidates, very little will change. Sure, we may throw all the US Representatives out, and what would we have then? Instead of 232 Republicans and 202 Democrats, we'd have 232 Democrats and 202 Republicans. And while many people here would prefer that, it doesn't seem to solve the problems because it's the same old nonsense that got us here in the first place.
The problem is not any words at all; words are not problems, stigmas attached to words are problems. Maybe.
Personally, I don't lose much sleep wondering what people think of my computer use or how much time I spend playing games. It simply doesn't matter to me, and whether they get a vision of a pimply-faced teen (I'm 22 by the way) sitting in a dark basement or not doesn't phase me a lot either.
That said, if there is any problem with the stigmas associated with the word "games," I'm not worrying about it, because the generation(s, depending on how you define) who are going through and exiting school life while still playing games now are going to be the aged adults of the world in short order. My generation, and certainly the ones after me, do not attach the same stigmas as my parents' and grandparents' generations might. Any problem that currently exists here will likely weed itself out in a relatively short time. I don't see any need whatsoever to get worked up about what words we use to describe gaming as long as people know what we're talking about.
POLICE: As if your life didn't suck enough, suicide is illegal, so now you have to go to jail.
Logic at work.
That's because of our views about suicide. It reminds me of some show about religion I once saw on the History Channel. A Rabbi was explaining his religion's policy on suicides, and it went something like this: A person who commits suicide can not be given full religious rites upon their death, but a special exemption is made for mentally-ill people, and all people who commit suicide are considered to be mentally ill. It was a cute little end-around their own beliefs, but I digress.
It's not that the US wants to throw suicidal people in jail, it's that if it's not illegal they have absolutely no way to have a judge force a suicidal person into counseling or psychiatric observation/care. The belief in the US is that something has to be wrong with you if you want to kill yourself, and they want to treat that. Whether or not that is a proper view is open for debate.
nix hackage will just wreck your home, which is supposedly all that matters to a home user. Still wrong.
I don't know about that. I'm a gentoo user, and I recently re-installed my system. (For the record, it had nothing to do with gentoo or linux or viruses or data destruction or what have you--I was simply moving things to a new hard drive and didn't have the space to back up the entire system without some creative hard-drive swapping that I didn't want to do. Anyway...) Obviously, particularly with gentoo, the reinstall process takes quite a bit of time, I conceed that. But it's so simple. You plug the command in, you turn around and play some PS2 until the compile finishes. Rinse and repeat. When you're done, your system is back to essentially the point you had it before.
The only thing I had space to back up--and thank god I did--was my home directory. To me, he's right about that being the most important thing. Not only is that where all my settings for my apps are stored (and hey, those apps happily picked back up using them when they were reinstalled), but it stores all my documents, images, PHP code, etc etc that I have collected over time and that would be hard, if not impossible, to get back. (It just doesn't work to go, "Hey buddy! You know all those pictures you sent me over the past two years? Send 'em again.")
I disagree with his assertion that this makes unix somehow less secure, nor do I think this is really a problem for anybody who bothers with backups, but I do agree that the home directory is the most important thing. It might be trivial to create a new user and be operable again, but the data loss is going to be the worst part. That's true on Windows as well, it's just that their files have a tendency to be scattered all over the place which I find to be annoying.
In the FTTH case, historically the Telcos have been required to provide fair access to their wires
The reason this recent FTT(H/P/S) craze started was because of a recent FCC decision stating that companies would NOT have to share their fiber if they laid it the way they are forced to share the copper phone lines.
Teleco companies were reluctant to lay the lines previously because doing so costs a ton and they would have been instantly competing with other companies using the lines THEY had paid for. The decision made them leap for joy, and that's why we're seeing fairly speedy roll-outs now.
First, I've seen ZERO evidence that this has anything to with the iPod per se as opposed to just the nature of in-ear earphones.
Right, that's the first thing that came to my mind as well. However, when I first heard of the whole in-ear problem a couple months back, they also mentioned that regular headphones didn't seem to have the same problem.
Now, obviously, hearing loss can ALWAYS happen if something is too loud -- but if regular headphones can't get loud enough to damage your hearing and in-ear ones can, maybe it really is a problem those manufacturers should address.
I believe in personal responsibility, I really do. I'm not the sort that believes that there needs to be stickers on knives warning you not to jam the knife through your eye ball, or even on coffee cups saying that the coffee is hot. Where I start having problems is when there is not enough information available to BE responsible, or where reasonable people would not expect something to occur.
This is, seemingly, new. I keep an eye on the news, at least, and the whole earbud problem is something I have only just heard of. So it seems to me that it's difficult to ask somebody to be responsible about something even researchers didn't know until recently. Likewise, I, for one, would not expect my media players or headphones to be able to go so loud they damage my hearing. It's just something I wouldn't expect, because I don't think that a prescribed use of a product, within that products specifications, should be detrimental to my health. (Yeah, yeah, there are going to be exceptions so please--nobody come back with a comment about smoking or prescription medicines or what have you. You know what I'm trying to say!)
All that said, I'm still conflicted about whether or not this is a reasonable lawsuit because I haven't found a satisfactory way to address whether or not a company should be liable for not knowing something that an individual doesn't know. For example, for the cigarette company lawsuits, it seemed somewhat reasonable (although it's out of hand now)--they clearly had evidence that their product was harmful, and they withheld that evidence. Those people damaged under those circumstances, I think, have a legitimate case. The ones who took up or continued smoking after the dangers were known have nothing, as far as I'm concerned.
I just don't know about this one. I'm willing to let the courts decide, I just don't think it should be instantly thrown out the way most people here have been advocating. I can see at least some merit here.
Here's a shocker: let's give people a better education in how to drive, than spend billions on cars that "drive themselves".
At my school, the classroom phase of a drivers education course was a requirement for graduation. It talked about every aspect you mentioned and more. (As a fairly affluent school, they also had a "simulator" lab where you sat in little mock seats and played along to a "movie" on topics like crash avoidence and such. It would monitor your actions, including things like your use of turn signals and the break, and report a score at the end.) Of course we also had the standard behind-the-wheel segments as well.
Really, I can't imagine that the classroom phase cost much of anything for the school to do, just whatever it cost to pay the PE teachers to teach an extra class. It would be nice if others schools did the same; I don't know how many do.
Still, I think we are all damn-near perfect drivers when we go for that driving test (assuming we're competent enough to pass). We know what we should do in situations, including spinning out on those patches of ice. The problem is, as soon as the license is in most peoples' hands they disregard pretty much all of it and start to forget the parts they're not using anymore. More education won't really help that. People just tend to forget things they don't use once in a while.
I'd be okay with that, but I can still see where people would consider that an abuse of a monopoly. They would still be using the fact that you are installing Windows to get you to install products that are not (or shouldn't be, depending on your position,) a part of the operating system. It's extremely easy for a person to say "yeah, go ahead"--particularly if the product is free to them--without even giving any consideration to other products, just because this one is in front of them.
Gee, like Internet Explorer? They didn't get into any problems with that.
Maybe my recollection sucks, but I don't think they did.
They got into trouble for bundling it with Windows; ie, you don't get Windows without IE. And they got into more trouble because you couldn't even get RID of IE on a Windows system if you wanted to, because it was integrated too tightly with the operating system.
And this wouldn't have anti-trust implications...why?
Because you make the CHOICE to download the application and install it based on whatever criteria you want. Microsoft isn't making the choice for you by installing it by default.
I think we can both agree that Microsoft, as an OS maker, is a monopoly--but people don't seem entirely interested in that. What does interest some people (much less than it should, in my opinion), and what is going on in the EU for example, is what Microsoft is using the operating system to get you to install, and whose businesses you are unfairly crushing by it. (Media Player, Internet Explorer, etc.) I remember during the anti-trust stuff against Microsoft a while back there was a debate over what exactly constituted an operating system -- was a web browser a part of that?
Governments aren't saying "you are not allowed to install Internet Explorer [or Media Player or this new AV product] because it will make Microsoft a bigger monopoly!" They're saying "Microsoft, you don't get to use your monopoly status with OSs to create a monopoly in browsers [and media players and AV]."
If this rumor were true--and I have very real doubts that it is--my assumption is that Cisco wouldn't be doing it for the hardware end of things. Like you said, the hardware uses whatever bandwidth the hardware uses and it doesn't matter if it's owned by Nintendo or Cisco. (If you're a real conspiracy theorist I guess you could say Cisco would deliberately make the hardware inefficient.)
However, the owner of Nintendo as a game manufacturer WOULD be able to drive things like the creation of more games with online capabilities and that would, in turn, move up the network utilization a bit (not at any one time, but the amount of time).
Besides, so long as Nintendo is a profitable business, and Cisco believes it will remain so for an acceptable period of time if they purchased it, I don't suppose it matters a whole lot whether it does ANYTHING to Cisco hardware sales. A company (or division) making money is making money. May as well be making it for Cisco as making it for themselves.
If they bundle virus protection (ie, "Make it part of the operating system"), they're accused of unfairly using their monopoly status. If they don't, then they're greedy for trying to sell you extra services.
I see somebody already beat me to an option three, so how about option four:
Give it away as a free download.
If they were really concerned about AV protection for their users and really wanted to bundle it, but they just didn't want to get in legal or PR trouble for bundling it, then it seems the alternative is to give it away, not sell it.
Selling something you're saying you wanted to give away is trying to have it both ways.
There is also a big difference between an anchorman on the nightly news reading something and a politician.
The anchorman, everybody knows he's getting it piped in, and everybody knows that unless it's some sort of monologue piece that it's not his thoughts but those of the directory or writers.
With a politician, everything he says is assumed to be his opinion. Would you be shocked to know that most presidents don't write their State of the Union speeches? -- gasp! But they're the ones who will get the credit for them, they're the ones who will get the blame for them, and you can be damn sure they know what's in there. "Sorry, my speechwriters wrote that, not me" doesn't fly very well in politics.
So yes, Obama (and others) may--and probably do--grab a staffer and say, "hey, write me up a little piece about *insert topic of the week* for my podcast," but they know what they're saying.
It's the latter that many Christians disbelieve, party because you can't just "see" major species transitions happening; it takes too long.
I'm sorry, and no offense to people who hold these views, but does anybody else see an irony in Christians disbelieving something because they can't see it?
But the ballbreaker is *define a species*. Even the best biologists can't.
I thought the definition was something that can reproduce with another of that same species and have viable offspring (ie, offspring who themselves can reproduce)?
First off, since I don't know if your comments were directed specifically at me or not, let me clarify by saying that I never said I believed that the whole trade-equals-rights thing actually works. But I'll respond anyway.
In other way it didn't work well with Cuba and only increased the poverty of the people.
That's the problem with rulers who don't care about their people. It was the same thing in Iraq (and please, no Iraq War comments here -- they're not relevent!) It's hard to punish them because they control the country. Giving the country $X less every year isn't going to be taking food out of THEIR mouths. But what do you do?
It is obviously not an easy subject. But to have an algorithm like this... is the best solution?
In a twist of irony, your algorithm wouldn't compile.:)
More to the point... yes? The else if was clearly a jab at the Iraq War and I'm just not interested in that part of the debate, but other than that... yes, that seems to be the algorithm we're working with.
Does it suck? Yeah, pretty bad. It sucks for a number of reasons not the least of which are the disparity between how we deal with big and small countries and the fact that punishing a country doesn't tend to punish the rulers we're trying to get at--both things you brought up. But to bring that West Wing quote back in (sorry, I love that show), "the end of that sentence is 'we hope,' because nothing else has worked." It's a sucky algorithm, but it seems to be the best we have right now. With any luck, better ones will arise sooner rather than later--but you can expect them to be flawed as well. I doubt a perfect iteration exists, but if it does, I doubt we're close to finding it. The question is, in the interim, do we use a flawed algorithm or ignore the problem entirely waiting for that perfect solution?
Slashdot Mirror
At the same time, "slippery slope" is a logic error of argumentation.
As an example, contrast installing NVIDIA's drivers under Windows and Linux.
Somebody already gave an example above about doing it simply with an emerge. I'll relate a different experience.
I went to NVIDIA's website, and downloaded the latest binary. I don't believe I even had to set it executable, I just ran the file (from the console).
It brought up a little text menu. I believe the first thing it asked is if I wanted to search for a pre-configured option; I chose yes. It did not find one. It asked me if I wanted to build one myself and I said yes. It built. It installed. Then it asked me if it wanted me to let it change my X configuration for me to take advantage of it. I said yes. It did so. I restarted X and everything was dandy.
That sounds extremely Windows-like to me, with the exception of having to type a filename instead of clicking on it (just because it was a text-based installer; a GUI would, I'm sure, not be hard to create and should work identically well). If "restart X" is too hard for Windows users, they can substitute "reboot" instead; they should definitely be familiar with that, and it will acheive the same effect.
I know the option to change my X configuration was somewhat new (within the last year or so I'd guess), but the rest was just as easy in the previous version I used.
OpenOffice.org shines as an example of what software should NOT be. I tried running it on a fairly new PC, running WindowMaker on Debian. It was dog slow; menus took seconds to open, rather than being instant as they are on Windows.
OO certainly isn't fast, I can't defend a claim like that. But I just did a quick test on my linux box. P4 2.6Ghz with 768 megs of RAM--not great, but not bad. Anyway: Load time from icon-click to where I could do some work was 11 seconds the first time; 7 seconds the second time. Menus worked flawlessly, no delays, and certainly not second-long delays. I'm also running a ton of stuff -- KDE as a WM, Korganizer, Gaim and KMix are sitting in my tray. TVTime is running in the background. I also have Apache 2 and MySQL 5 running in the background, and of course this Firefox window to reply to you. So I've no doubt that the load time could be even quicker than it already is.
And it might sound like a small thing to some people, but there's a complete lack of decent MSN Messenger clients for Linux.
Agreed, Linux is ALWAYS going to lack behind Windows in this sense because they have to play catch up. And usually, have to reverse engineer things on top of that. But...
The closest is Kopete, with Gaim frankly unusable, as Kopete has support for webcams and personal messages while Gaim does not [. . .] Hell, custom emoticon support would be nice.
I use gaim. First of all, you can receive custom emoticons in 2.0 beta and voice/video is coming. Although I don't use it, I do believe that Kopete can both send and receive custom emoticons; I believe that voice/video support is already in it as well, and I have played around with it a little bit. It certainly wasn't HARD to use, though I won't argue that it's probably not optimal.
Then again, it also does more. It connects to multiple services, for one thing; and even multiple connections to services at the same time. That, of necessity, makes the interface issues more prominant. You can't just have a "set personal message" button--you have to be able to set it per account per service, and maybe even a "set 'em all this way" button as well. So yeah, you trade some ease of use for functionality.
What most people want to do is just open Linux Media Player, insert a CD, click the start rip button, wait 5 minutes and come back to find a load of MP3s. That's it.
Others have already mentioned that that sort of pop-up "what do you want to do?" display exists in KDE 3.5.
It's simply far too complex for the average end user to understand, and the software which m
It is used that way, of course. But last *I* checked, there are no riots going on because somebody dared draw a cartoon Jesus with a bomb for a hat. Dozens of people are not dead because of said cartoon.
I don't see the problem with what they did. As nice as it sounds to say you have to treat everybody and everything identically, it's just not the case. Not everything or everyone is the same.
Nowhere in the Constitution is there a provision for welfare. Nowhere in the Constitution is there any allowance for unbacked currency, social security, medicare, income tax, minimum wage, government housing, sales tax, public schools, or any of the other blights that soil our nation.
I have a really, really hard time believing you considered public schools a blight on our nation. They may not all do a good job at it, but leaving people (with money!) to fend for themselves in terms of education is certainly a worse alternative. But I digress.
Whether there are provisions for these things really depend on your interpretation of the Constitution. Nowhere (in the original text) are you going to find "Congress has the power to create an income tax." Of course not. What you will find, for example, is that Congress has the ability to collect taxes. And when income taxes were challenged? The 16th Amendment was passed to permit them. As it stands today, there is an extremely clear authority to collect them. Similar deal with sales tax; Congress is given the specific ability to lay and collect taxes. Why SHOULDN'T that include, if they so desired, a sales tax?
Is there an allowance for unbacked currency? Nope, not specifically. But Congress can coin money and regulate the value thereof; nowhere does it say it has to be backed by anything at all. In fact, by saying Congress can regulate money the implication seems to be that it doesn't have to be backed by anything at all. It doesn't say, after all, that "Congress can regulate the value of money as long as they have enough gold to back it up." Just that they can regulate it. All of these issues you have raised are very easily dismissed by really just reading the document. None of them seem to require any particular stretching of the mind.
Welfare, social security, medicare, government housing and public schools do, I concede, require more of a stretch. Where authority for these sorts of programs are derrived from is less clear, but I still think valid arguments can be raised for them.
The line about collecting taxes, for example, states they may collect them to "pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States." It seems to me that it can be very well argued that educating our citizens and providing them with means to survive if they have trouble doing so on their own easily contributes to the general welfare. The only one in that list that I have trouble justifying Constitutionally is social security.
You will note that I have not commented on whether or not there are BETTER ways to contribute to the general welfare; I have not, as an example, stated that our public school system is the penultimate thing the government can be doing. Nor that their doing so would be better than if they did NOT do so (which I do believe, but am not arguing); rather, that they do contribute and Congress is thus authorized to enact such legislation. If our Congressmen are doing a poor job of selecting programs best suited for the nation, the fault does not lie with the Constitution -- it lies with the electorate.
The big-picture bottom-line here is that the Constitution is a living document. I love the founding fathers, but it doesn't matter what they intended. They set up a system whereby their intents could be overridden in the future--by amendments and more importantly, by re-interpretation. They set up an entire branch of government with no purpose other than to interpret laws, and I have yet to see anybody argue that judicial review, while not stated in the Constitution, should be revoked or is a bad idea.
I can't sit here and cite case law for these things, but I can pretty well guarantee you that every issue you raised has faced legal challenges and, eventually, come out on top. Just because the founding fathers did not intend something does not mean it is somehow not part of constitutional law. Not only is thinking so particularly naive, it is twice as
You're right though; the word "cunt" is used a ton.
I have some friends in Australia that I talk to, and they use the word "cunt" all the time. Apparently phrases like "mad cunt" are not even insults to them, they're compliments; it's almost as if not only has the word lost its literal meaning, it has lost its status as an insult.
Meh, some entrepreneuring young fellow would just set up an operation in Britain or some other country we still import from, import from China to there, and sell it back to US companies with a nice little "circumventing the law" markup.
Even if it were, until we in the US fully embrace the idea of third-party candidates, very little will change. Sure, we may throw all the US Representatives out, and what would we have then? Instead of 232 Republicans and 202 Democrats, we'd have 232 Democrats and 202 Republicans. And while many people here would prefer that, it doesn't seem to solve the problems because it's the same old nonsense that got us here in the first place.
The problem isn't the word "game".
The problem is not any words at all; words are not problems, stigmas attached to words are problems. Maybe.
Personally, I don't lose much sleep wondering what people think of my computer use or how much time I spend playing games. It simply doesn't matter to me, and whether they get a vision of a pimply-faced teen (I'm 22 by the way) sitting in a dark basement or not doesn't phase me a lot either.
That said, if there is any problem with the stigmas associated with the word "games," I'm not worrying about it, because the generation(s, depending on how you define) who are going through and exiting school life while still playing games now are going to be the aged adults of the world in short order. My generation, and certainly the ones after me, do not attach the same stigmas as my parents' and grandparents' generations might. Any problem that currently exists here will likely weed itself out in a relatively short time. I don't see any need whatsoever to get worked up about what words we use to describe gaming as long as people know what we're talking about.
POLICE: As if your life didn't suck enough, suicide is illegal, so now you have to go to jail.
Logic at work.
That's because of our views about suicide. It reminds me of some show about religion I once saw on the History Channel. A Rabbi was explaining his religion's policy on suicides, and it went something like this: A person who commits suicide can not be given full religious rites upon their death, but a special exemption is made for mentally-ill people, and all people who commit suicide are considered to be mentally ill. It was a cute little end-around their own beliefs, but I digress.
It's not that the US wants to throw suicidal people in jail, it's that if it's not illegal they have absolutely no way to have a judge force a suicidal person into counseling or psychiatric observation/care. The belief in the US is that something has to be wrong with you if you want to kill yourself, and they want to treat that. Whether or not that is a proper view is open for debate.
Have you been talking to my girlfriend?!
nix hackage will just wreck your home, which is supposedly all that matters to a home user. Still wrong.
I don't know about that. I'm a gentoo user, and I recently re-installed my system. (For the record, it had nothing to do with gentoo or linux or viruses or data destruction or what have you--I was simply moving things to a new hard drive and didn't have the space to back up the entire system without some creative hard-drive swapping that I didn't want to do. Anyway...) Obviously, particularly with gentoo, the reinstall process takes quite a bit of time, I conceed that. But it's so simple. You plug the command in, you turn around and play some PS2 until the compile finishes. Rinse and repeat. When you're done, your system is back to essentially the point you had it before.
The only thing I had space to back up--and thank god I did--was my home directory. To me, he's right about that being the most important thing. Not only is that where all my settings for my apps are stored (and hey, those apps happily picked back up using them when they were reinstalled), but it stores all my documents, images, PHP code, etc etc that I have collected over time and that would be hard, if not impossible, to get back. (It just doesn't work to go, "Hey buddy! You know all those pictures you sent me over the past two years? Send 'em again.")
I disagree with his assertion that this makes unix somehow less secure, nor do I think this is really a problem for anybody who bothers with backups, but I do agree that the home directory is the most important thing. It might be trivial to create a new user and be operable again, but the data loss is going to be the worst part. That's true on Windows as well, it's just that their files have a tendency to be scattered all over the place which I find to be annoying.
Err -- what? That the public knows you're not able (or don't have the time) to hook up your own XBox? Big whoop.
Maybe he's just screwing with you for wasting his time with the runs. :P
In the FTTH case, historically the Telcos have been required to provide fair access to their wires
The reason this recent FTT(H/P/S) craze started was because of a recent FCC decision stating that companies would NOT have to share their fiber if they laid it the way they are forced to share the copper phone lines.
Teleco companies were reluctant to lay the lines previously because doing so costs a ton and they would have been instantly competing with other companies using the lines THEY had paid for. The decision made them leap for joy, and that's why we're seeing fairly speedy roll-outs now.
First, I've seen ZERO evidence that this has anything to with the iPod per se as opposed to just the nature of in-ear earphones.
Right, that's the first thing that came to my mind as well. However, when I first heard of the whole in-ear problem a couple months back, they also mentioned that regular headphones didn't seem to have the same problem.
Now, obviously, hearing loss can ALWAYS happen if something is too loud -- but if regular headphones can't get loud enough to damage your hearing and in-ear ones can, maybe it really is a problem those manufacturers should address.
I believe in personal responsibility, I really do. I'm not the sort that believes that there needs to be stickers on knives warning you not to jam the knife through your eye ball, or even on coffee cups saying that the coffee is hot. Where I start having problems is when there is not enough information available to BE responsible, or where reasonable people would not expect something to occur.
This is, seemingly, new. I keep an eye on the news, at least, and the whole earbud problem is something I have only just heard of. So it seems to me that it's difficult to ask somebody to be responsible about something even researchers didn't know until recently. Likewise, I, for one, would not expect my media players or headphones to be able to go so loud they damage my hearing. It's just something I wouldn't expect, because I don't think that a prescribed use of a product, within that products specifications, should be detrimental to my health. (Yeah, yeah, there are going to be exceptions so please--nobody come back with a comment about smoking or prescription medicines or what have you. You know what I'm trying to say!)
All that said, I'm still conflicted about whether or not this is a reasonable lawsuit because I haven't found a satisfactory way to address whether or not a company should be liable for not knowing something that an individual doesn't know. For example, for the cigarette company lawsuits, it seemed somewhat reasonable (although it's out of hand now)--they clearly had evidence that their product was harmful, and they withheld that evidence. Those people damaged under those circumstances, I think, have a legitimate case. The ones who took up or continued smoking after the dangers were known have nothing, as far as I'm concerned.
I just don't know about this one. I'm willing to let the courts decide, I just don't think it should be instantly thrown out the way most people here have been advocating. I can see at least some merit here.
Here's a shocker: let's give people a better education in how to drive, than spend billions on cars that "drive themselves".
At my school, the classroom phase of a drivers education course was a requirement for graduation. It talked about every aspect you mentioned and more. (As a fairly affluent school, they also had a "simulator" lab where you sat in little mock seats and played along to a "movie" on topics like crash avoidence and such. It would monitor your actions, including things like your use of turn signals and the break, and report a score at the end.) Of course we also had the standard behind-the-wheel segments as well.
Really, I can't imagine that the classroom phase cost much of anything for the school to do, just whatever it cost to pay the PE teachers to teach an extra class. It would be nice if others schools did the same; I don't know how many do.
Still, I think we are all damn-near perfect drivers when we go for that driving test (assuming we're competent enough to pass). We know what we should do in situations, including spinning out on those patches of ice. The problem is, as soon as the license is in most peoples' hands they disregard pretty much all of it and start to forget the parts they're not using anymore. More education won't really help that. People just tend to forget things they don't use once in a while.
I'd be okay with that, but I can still see where people would consider that an abuse of a monopoly. They would still be using the fact that you are installing Windows to get you to install products that are not (or shouldn't be, depending on your position,) a part of the operating system. It's extremely easy for a person to say "yeah, go ahead"--particularly if the product is free to them--without even giving any consideration to other products, just because this one is in front of them.
Gee, like Internet Explorer? They didn't get into any problems with that.
Maybe my recollection sucks, but I don't think they did.
They got into trouble for bundling it with Windows; ie, you don't get Windows without IE. And they got into more trouble because you couldn't even get RID of IE on a Windows system if you wanted to, because it was integrated too tightly with the operating system.
And this wouldn't have anti-trust implications...why?
Because you make the CHOICE to download the application and install it based on whatever criteria you want. Microsoft isn't making the choice for you by installing it by default.
I think we can both agree that Microsoft, as an OS maker, is a monopoly--but people don't seem entirely interested in that. What does interest some people (much less than it should, in my opinion), and what is going on in the EU for example, is what Microsoft is using the operating system to get you to install, and whose businesses you are unfairly crushing by it. (Media Player, Internet Explorer, etc.) I remember during the anti-trust stuff against Microsoft a while back there was a debate over what exactly constituted an operating system -- was a web browser a part of that?
Governments aren't saying "you are not allowed to install Internet Explorer [or Media Player or this new AV product] because it will make Microsoft a bigger monopoly!" They're saying "Microsoft, you don't get to use your monopoly status with OSs to create a monopoly in browsers [and media players and AV]."
If this rumor were true--and I have very real doubts that it is--my assumption is that Cisco wouldn't be doing it for the hardware end of things. Like you said, the hardware uses whatever bandwidth the hardware uses and it doesn't matter if it's owned by Nintendo or Cisco. (If you're a real conspiracy theorist I guess you could say Cisco would deliberately make the hardware inefficient.)
However, the owner of Nintendo as a game manufacturer WOULD be able to drive things like the creation of more games with online capabilities and that would, in turn, move up the network utilization a bit (not at any one time, but the amount of time).
Besides, so long as Nintendo is a profitable business, and Cisco believes it will remain so for an acceptable period of time if they purchased it, I don't suppose it matters a whole lot whether it does ANYTHING to Cisco hardware sales. A company (or division) making money is making money. May as well be making it for Cisco as making it for themselves.
Aww, but he's adorable! You MONSTER!
On the other hand, probably tastes like chicken.. *shrugs*
If they bundle virus protection (ie, "Make it part of the operating system"), they're accused of unfairly using their monopoly status. If they don't, then they're greedy for trying to sell you extra services.
I see somebody already beat me to an option three, so how about option four:
Give it away as a free download.
If they were really concerned about AV protection for their users and really wanted to bundle it, but they just didn't want to get in legal or PR trouble for bundling it, then it seems the alternative is to give it away, not sell it.
Selling something you're saying you wanted to give away is trying to have it both ways.
There is also a big difference between an anchorman on the nightly news reading something and a politician.
The anchorman, everybody knows he's getting it piped in, and everybody knows that unless it's some sort of monologue piece that it's not his thoughts but those of the directory or writers.
With a politician, everything he says is assumed to be his opinion. Would you be shocked to know that most presidents don't write their State of the Union speeches? -- gasp! But they're the ones who will get the credit for them, they're the ones who will get the blame for them, and you can be damn sure they know what's in there. "Sorry, my speechwriters wrote that, not me" doesn't fly very well in politics.
So yes, Obama (and others) may--and probably do--grab a staffer and say, "hey, write me up a little piece about *insert topic of the week* for my podcast," but they know what they're saying.
I'm sorry, and no offense to people who hold these views, but does anybody else see an irony in Christians disbelieving something because they can't see it?
I thought the definition was something that can reproduce with another of that same species and have viable offspring (ie, offspring who themselves can reproduce)?
First off, since I don't know if your comments were directed specifically at me or not, let me clarify by saying that I never said I believed that the whole trade-equals-rights thing actually works. But I'll respond anyway.
In other way it didn't work well with Cuba and only increased the poverty of the people.
That's the problem with rulers who don't care about their people. It was the same thing in Iraq (and please, no Iraq War comments here -- they're not relevent!) It's hard to punish them because they control the country. Giving the country $X less every year isn't going to be taking food out of THEIR mouths. But what do you do?
It is obviously not an easy subject. But to have an algorithm like this... is the best solution?
In a twist of irony, your algorithm wouldn't compile. :)
More to the point... yes? The else if was clearly a jab at the Iraq War and I'm just not interested in that part of the debate, but other than that... yes, that seems to be the algorithm we're working with.
Does it suck? Yeah, pretty bad. It sucks for a number of reasons not the least of which are the disparity between how we deal with big and small countries and the fact that punishing a country doesn't tend to punish the rulers we're trying to get at--both things you brought up. But to bring that West Wing quote back in (sorry, I love that show), "the end of that sentence is 'we hope,' because nothing else has worked." It's a sucky algorithm, but it seems to be the best we have right now. With any luck, better ones will arise sooner rather than later--but you can expect them to be flawed as well. I doubt a perfect iteration exists, but if it does, I doubt we're close to finding it. The question is, in the interim, do we use a flawed algorithm or ignore the problem entirely waiting for that perfect solution?