But something is going to have to change, or things will get very ugly.
Many of us have been saying the same since the revival of the New Right in the early 1990s. Trouble is, most societies that have been through a spell of affluence become reactionary when something occurs to disturb that complacency, and that is what we have seen in Britain (forget the fact that Blair belongs to the Labour Party, he's a Tory) the US (why Bush's electorate doesn't realise he's an evil moron, I don't know) and here in Australia (where we have an evil fascist from the Liberal Party, which means the opposite).
As for "How we've allowed our politicians to do this to us", that is what's ugly. We (or enough of us) have repeatedly allowed ourselves to be sucked in by their blatant deceit and suspend any pretence of critical thinking.
The point of CNC machining is to turn out parts cheaper than it can be done by hand.
Correct.
Which is why, given that the original poster says he wants the machine for making small parts for his hobbies, he might be getter served by spending his money on a better quality manual machine. He will probably find it more flexible, and he will be able to use any change to buy a good range of accessories.
Am I the only one to have read to the very end of the posts on this topic, and not found one single post that is remotely related to the topic at hand, i.e. the GPL?
Heh... I'm not quite literally a grey-beard (since I am clean-shaven) but back in my day the floors were raised to accommodate the truckloads of cabling that strung all the pieces of machinery to each other and to the power supply.
Air (and lots of it) was pumped through ducts in the roof. It's a fallacy that modern equipment needs that much more cooling; if the air-con blew in a machine-room housing a Burroughs B3700 and associated peripherals, the temperature would soar to 55 deg Celsius in less than 5 minutes, which meant you had half that time to shut everything down.
Under fair use, we are allowed to reproduce in part
Indeed, but I doubt if reproducing content for the express purpose of generating advertising revenue constitutes fair use by even the most flexible definition of the term.
doesn't mean it's legal to copy entire pages and republish them under your own name
Which is apparently the point; if I understand the article correctly, Google seems to be unilaterally trying to change the law to suit its own purposes.
Nearly every copyright statement I've ever read in a book contains the phrase: "...or stored in an information retrieval system without the copyright holder's permission", or words to that effect..
So no matter which pages Google cares to re-release to re-release at a given time, they are indeed breaking the copyright agreement.
In the end, it'll catch on like Firefox: everybody who knows anything about computers will switch
Except that the movement toward Firefox is a bit more effective, probably as a result of security concerns.
A case in point is my university, which (probably) like most is generally in lockstep with MS, except that all the campus computers have Firefox installed and Internet Exploder disabled. No sign of them adopting OOo, though.
To be fair to Office, you're running OpenOffice on a lot faster hardware than you ran Office on all those years ago.
Hmmm. I first started using OOo (well, actually StarOffice, and only on Linux) back in 1998 or 99 I think, on a 400Mhz PII. Now I'm running it on a 2.3 GHz P4, and startup times are still comparable (i.e. very slow indeed). I personally don't care much about the download size, but I really wouldn't mind a bit better response at startup.
... Or just ask them politely to hold for a minute... which turns out to be ten or more.:-)
On an unrelated note (though very much related to the original topic) this whole idea seems somewhat incongrous given that our illustrious (Australian) prime minister deemed it to be perfectly acceptable to *spam* his electorate during his last electoral campaign, so a(nother) tinge of hyprocrisy seems to apply here.
On a totally unrelated note, has anyone any idea why the eds have used Tarzan's Tripes for the flag at the top of this page (above "Politics for Nerds...);-)
this is just plain RUDE, 30 years ago you wouldn't dream of this crap happening.
Agreed, but a bit of perspective here: 30 years ago we all had finger-in-the-hole phones with pulse dialling. Even if anyone had been so inconsiderate as to come up with the idea, their minions would have been hospitalised with RSI after the first few calls.
OpenOffice.org demonstrably reads and writes documents in far more formats than MSOffice. Small details of formatting occasionally suffer (but who is going to claim that never occurs between different computers with MSOffice?) but that is hardly a show-stopper.
OOo is now a mature product, and well able to stand comparison with MSOffice.
I don't think you're being very fair. Sure, you don't have to pick the thing up, but the weight of the mouse does contribute to the effort needed to move it (force = mass x acceleration, remember?) and unless your desk is mirror-smooth, friction will contribute as well.
Lots of mice and trackballs look cool, but I find a lot of them quite hard work after a while, especially the cordless ones which usually have heavy batteries inside them.
My current preference is for a Microsoft Notebook optical mouse (yes, I know MS is evil, but they do make some good hardware) which, since it is very small and very light, I find a lot less of a strain to use for long periods.
While the fact that you can't see it as anything but a joke is tragic. To a lot of people on the outside, that's exactly how the US is seen right now.
Indeed, but the trouble is, saying so on Slashdot doesn't help. You and I might see the US as a joke, but personally I find the number of posts from jingoistic rednecks a bit scary.
Why is it that ignorance and complacence can so successfully turn a (typically) reasonably intelligent person into a rabid bigot?
"Turning the Internet over to countries with problematic human-rights records, muted free-speech laws, and questionable taxation practices will prevent the Internet from remaining the thriving medium it has become today," said California Republican Rep. John Doolittle in a statement.
If anybody fails to see the irony there, I can't help.
Don't you get tired of carrying that great lump of a thing around? Here in Western Australia it would get old fast with summer temperatures >= 40 deg.C.
OK, the price of an iPod Nano might be low-budget to you, but it certainly isn't to me. As it turns out, I was in the market for this quite recently, and came within a squeak of buying a Nano. However, as all the 4Gb models had sold out here (W. Australia) at the time, and I wanted a gadget to take on a long plane trip, I ended up settling for the 6Gb iPod Mini, and have been very happy with it.
If Apple had put the quality of workmanship of the Mini into the Nano, I might have been pursuaded to wait.
...encoding them as high bandwidth mp3s shouldn't hurt the sound too much.
Indeed - this is what I do, but if I had been thinking more clearly when I bought my car stereo, I would have simply bought a set of speakers and an amplifier with a line-in socket to which I could hook up my iPod.
Maybe if I had done that, I wouldn't have had to pay twice for the dashboard unit when that fuckwit saw fit to bust into my car to rip off my stereo.
Surely cross-platform nature of OO.o is the whole point?
Cross-platform under X11, at any rate. I'm a big fan of Linux, but when I was setting up my wife's Mac, it seems the only really good option is NeoOffice.
I value my time -- that leaves Linux out. I value my productivity -- that omits Windows. I value my sanity, that leaves OS X.
Well, you're welcome to your opinion of course, but I personally find I'm more productive on Linux (in my case with Gnome as a desktop environment). Windows is certainly an exercise in frustration, but I continually find the OS X interface so dumbed-down (particularly with regard to what I consider a horrible windowing system) that I find a lot of my time is spent spinning wheels.
Here in Australia, the verb "to root" often has another meaning, and to make it more or less clear, the one doing the rooting is (more often than not) on top.
Printers take layout-oriented information (e.g. 'this character goes at this precise position, a line is drawn from here to here...
They certainly do. But (I'm admitting to some confusion here) what makes an OpenDocument? A regular postscript file? Is there really no way for winboxes to use these?
now you can switch off just about anything except for the ads.
You don't even have to see those. I have a combination of hosts-file site blocking with the adblock and flashblock extensions to Firefox, and I see no ads anywhere on this site.
Slashdot Mirror
Many of us have been saying the same since the revival of the New Right in the early 1990s. Trouble is, most societies that have been through a spell of affluence become reactionary when something occurs to disturb that complacency, and that is what we have seen in Britain (forget the fact that Blair belongs to the Labour Party, he's a Tory) the US (why Bush's electorate doesn't realise he's an evil moron, I don't know) and here in Australia (where we have an evil fascist from the Liberal Party, which means the opposite).
As for "How we've allowed our politicians to do this to us", that is what's ugly. We (or enough of us) have repeatedly allowed ourselves to be sucked in by their blatant deceit and suspend any pretence of critical thinking.
Correct.
Which is why, given that the original poster says he wants the machine for making small parts for his hobbies, he might be getter served by spending his money on a better quality manual machine. He will probably find it more flexible, and he will be able to use any change to buy a good range of accessories.
Some people have the attention span of a flea. :-(
Air (and lots of it) was pumped through ducts in the roof. It's a fallacy that modern equipment needs that much more cooling; if the air-con blew in a machine-room housing a Burroughs B3700 and associated peripherals, the temperature would soar to 55 deg Celsius in less than 5 minutes, which meant you had half that time to shut everything down.
Indeed, but I doubt if reproducing content for the express purpose of generating advertising revenue constitutes fair use by even the most flexible definition of the term.
Which is apparently the point; if I understand the article correctly, Google seems to be unilaterally trying to change the law to suit its own purposes.
So no matter which pages Google cares to re-release to re-release at a given time, they are indeed breaking the copyright agreement.
Except that the movement toward Firefox is a bit more effective, probably as a result of security concerns.
A case in point is my university, which (probably) like most is generally in lockstep with MS, except that all the campus computers have Firefox installed and Internet Exploder disabled. No sign of them adopting OOo, though.
Hmmm. I first started using OOo (well, actually StarOffice, and only on Linux) back in 1998 or 99 I think, on a 400Mhz PII. Now I'm running it on a 2.3 GHz P4, and startup times are still comparable (i.e. very slow indeed). I personally don't care much about the download size, but I really wouldn't mind a bit better response at startup.
On an unrelated note (though very much related to the original topic) this whole idea seems somewhat incongrous given that our illustrious (Australian) prime minister deemed it to be perfectly acceptable to *spam* his electorate during his last electoral campaign, so a(nother) tinge of hyprocrisy seems to apply here.
On a totally unrelated note, has anyone any idea why the eds have used Tarzan's Tripes for the flag at the top of this page (above "Politics for Nerds...) ;-)
Agreed, but a bit of perspective here: 30 years ago we all had finger-in-the-hole phones with pulse dialling. Even if anyone had been so inconsiderate as to come up with the idea, their minions would have been hospitalised with RSI after the first few calls.
OpenOffice.org demonstrably reads and writes documents in far more formats than MSOffice. Small details of formatting occasionally suffer (but who is going to claim that never occurs between different computers with MSOffice?) but that is hardly a show-stopper.
OOo is now a mature product, and well able to stand comparison with MSOffice.
Maybe, but my vet recommended glucosamine + chondroitin for my dog, who has a mild case of arthritis, and it seems to be effective.
I don't think you're being very fair. Sure, you don't have to pick the thing up, but the weight of the mouse does contribute to the effort needed to move it (force = mass x acceleration, remember?) and unless your desk is mirror-smooth, friction will contribute as well.
My current preference is for a Microsoft Notebook optical mouse (yes, I know MS is evil, but they do make some good hardware) which, since it is very small and very light, I find a lot less of a strain to use for long periods.
Oh, and BTW, it's cheap too.
Indeed, but the trouble is, saying so on Slashdot doesn't help. You and I might see the US as a joke, but personally I find the number of posts from jingoistic rednecks a bit scary.
Why is it that ignorance and complacence can so successfully turn a (typically) reasonably intelligent person into a rabid bigot?
This (from TFA):
"Turning the Internet over to countries with problematic human-rights records, muted free-speech laws, and questionable taxation practices will prevent the Internet from remaining the thriving medium it has become today," said California Republican Rep. John Doolittle in a statement.
If anybody fails to see the irony there, I can't help.
Don't you get tired of carrying that great lump of a thing around? Here in Western Australia it would get old fast with summer temperatures >= 40 deg.C.
If Apple had put the quality of workmanship of the Mini into the Nano, I might have been pursuaded to wait.
Indeed - this is what I do, but if I had been thinking more clearly when I bought my car stereo, I would have simply bought a set of speakers and an amplifier with a line-in socket to which I could hook up my iPod.
Maybe if I had done that, I wouldn't have had to pay twice for the dashboard unit when that fuckwit saw fit to bust into my car to rip off my stereo.
Cross-platform under X11, at any rate. I'm a big fan of Linux, but when I was setting up my wife's Mac, it seems the only really good option is NeoOffice.
Well, you're welcome to your opinion of course, but I personally find I'm more productive on Linux (in my case with Gnome as a desktop environment). Windows is certainly an exercise in frustration, but I continually find the OS X interface so dumbed-down (particularly with regard to what I consider a horrible windowing system) that I find a lot of my time is spent spinning wheels.
Here in Australia, the verb "to root" often has another meaning, and to make it more or less clear, the one doing the rooting is (more often than not) on top.
They certainly do. But (I'm admitting to some confusion here) what makes an OpenDocument? A regular postscript file? Is there really no way for winboxes to use these?
You don't even have to see those. I have a combination of hosts-file site blocking with the adblock and flashblock extensions to Firefox, and I see no ads anywhere on this site.