Depends upon how toxic it is. If it will burn their esophagus out on the spot and cause them to cough up blood on the screener, that might just be a clue for the screeners that the substance isn't really toothpaste.
Shakespeare, for example, wrote plays that everyone could enjoy. He had dirty jokes for the aristocrats and flowerly language for the peasants.
Perfectly put. Yes, this is pretty much how Shakespeare worked: the dirty jokes were "highbrow" and the flowery language was good enough to be noticed and enjoyed even by the "lowbrow".
If he were close to anyone under 25, he wouldn't be using this device, as it would be as likely to keep them away as the brats he's trying to drive away.
This is EXACTLY how to deal with this problem. Everybody pretend it isn't working, and he'll return it to the manufacturer, which will tell him that it is indeed working, and will hopefully redirect his rage toward the manufacturer.
The cops thought they could arrest someone for taking their photographs because something in their training led them to believe that they could do so. Now, that was either their police academy training, or something in a more recent training exercise. Based on the sort of things I've been hearing about how federal guidelines are being interpreted, I think the argument that this was caused by "the environment fostered by the USA PATRIOT Act" cannot be so lightly dismissed.
This is a mixed bag of controversies that are only being linked together because they are key issues for the Republican base. Evolution is a fact, like it or not; it is not the only subject on which the Bible is inconsistent, but it is one of the few "controversial" scientific theories for which we can say we have actually seen it in action. Global Warming, on the other hand - more precisely, anthropogenic global warming, for there is no question that the Earth has been getting warmer lately, the only question is why - is a highly politicized question on which I have heard some reputable scientists express doubts. I suspect that anthropogenic global warming is real, and potentially far more serious than the current consensus would suggest, but I can respect some of the scientists who question it. Embryonic stem cell research is not controversial because of the scientific claims made on its behalf - those are pretty clear - but because many people have very serious ethical concerns with using tissue derived from undeveloped human embryoes. Demonizing the opposition to embryonic stem cell research as "theocratic" is neither accurate nor constructive - there are even atheists who have ethical issues with the use of embryonic stem cells in research programs. Lumping them in together may help you with a small niche of voters who are sick of Republican self-righteousness but not sophisticated enough to recognize the differences between these issues, but I'm not sure who else it will help you with.
You're comparing a desktop computer to workstation? Isn't that a little like comparing... oh, I don't know, Apples to oranges?
As far as service is concerned, only one of my four Macs has ever needed service: a dropped laptop. They fixed it in 3 days for a reasonable price, given the amount of damage. Still works great, after 5 years. No other issues with them. Now, with Dell, on the other hand, I have NEVER managed to get a broken machine fixed, and I've sent in at least a dozen (and they were all under-warranty hardware failures, not user damage).
It's entirely possible that either the government official explaining the new policy to the Western Union consuls, or the Western Union consuls themselves, either misunderstood the policy or decided to enact their own draconian version of the policy for the sake of simplicity. That said, I'm glad the IRA bastards are on the list, too. If we're going to have a war on terrorism, we should really have a war on *terrorism*, not just on the terrorists we happen to have issues with at home.
His own *metadata*, you mean - the flags field represents things that aren't in the mbox file, like whether the message was read or was a draft, &c. It's a good point, but on the specifics of email data retention, we also have to keep our eye on practicality here: if you can reverse-engineer emlx, you get more information from it than you get from mbox. Getting the actual email (with headers) itself isn't a problem at all.
If you'll note, most of the data retention problems Pilgrim talks about are actually with metadata - song play counts and ratings, tags on pictures. For the actual music, iTunes can use MP3, which while not an open file format is at least a platform neutral defacto standard, for the actual pictures, iPhoto usually uses JPEG and PNG (the video issue is another problem entirely). I'm not quite sure how good open source software is on maintaining application-independent metadata of this type (I've been using OS X for a number of years now for everything with which I'd need to use this kind of metadata), but I'll concede that it's far more likely to do a better job.
When you're talking about reversing HTTP extensions, you're talking about interoperability today, not data retention tomorrow - and on that score, the argument goes with Windows at the moment - while there are interoperability arguments that Mac can win over Linux, and even a handful that Linux can win over Mac, there are none that either can win over Windows because Windows is the core of the monoculture; one simply has to ask whether perfect compability is worth the price. For me, and I'd guess for you, and for Pilgrim, O'Reilly, and Doctorow, it isn't. I like having the slightly higher interoperability OS X gives you over Ubuntu, but I'd give it up if Ubuntu came closer to meeting my needs.
That said, yes, DRM is a problem, and file migration is a huge problem. Switching to Linux *doesn't*, by itself, serve notice on the DRM issue, because those users will seem to the content providers to have dropped out of the market altogether, and so won't motivate them to do something about DRM. What you have to do is to work on competitors to DRM-laden content and see how successful they are. Unfortunately, one thing we've seen is that the bazaar doesn't do as good a job of creating and distributing creative content (music, visual art, literature, video) as the cathedral, despite all our hopes (mine too). Where many eyes make software production and Q&A faster (within limits, of course; we all know about the mythical man-month), many hands do not make very good artistic works - literature written by distributed means reads like a horse designed by a committee rides (i.e., a camel) - very bumpy and unsteady, and one can see similar effects in the more aesthetic aspects of software design, such as UI standards and aesthetics and fonts. Now, art created by individual artists and distributed by open source models should work fine in theory, but in practice we've seen that the level of triage that's necessary to direct promotion to those artists most likely to succeed is anathema to open source communities, and when the listener or reader or viewer is inundated with a million different artistic voices all muttering at the same low level - the bazaar model of content distribution - no one can get enough traction to break out and challenge the DRMified standard content providers and their artists. So the real answer to DRM isn't switching to Linux, but working hard to come up with an open-source distribution model that identifies the best content and frankly markets it well enough to challenge the content being sold by the traditional content providers, and so to challenge their distribution model.
Maybe Pilgrim's, and Doctorow's, and O'Reilly's choice is the best way to deal with proprietary file formats - if enough people switch. But for the switchers (to pure open source environments) to have an impact on the decisions of various service providers, we'll need a Linux (or other open source operating system, whether it be
Some very good points here. However, they don't convince me. Why not? Two reasons:
1. I think they're overstating the openness problems on the Mac, and overstating the advantages of open source when it comes to data retention.
Take Apple Mail as an example. Describing.emlx as an undocumented format is problematic: the.emlx file is just a text file with some kind of integer at the beginning (for indexing purposes, I assume), the content of the email including all headers, and then an XML plist fragment at the end. Not much harder to reverse engineer than mbox, I think- unless you can't understand XML, in which case you by definition are not an ueber geek.
Now, open formats are better, yes, because competing programmers can provide solutions for the same format, decreasing the likelihood that the format will become unsupported. That said, the fact is that even open formats will, eventually, become unsupported - software will die, and sooner or later no one will be hosting the source code any more, and the source will rely upon libraries that aren't available for your platform (though maybe you'll still have the source for those, too), and there will be known security issues that were never patched because no one was using the software anymore. Sure, if you want to waste the time, you can always write your own software to handle documented open formats (assuming that someone did a good job on the documentation - never a sure thing with Open Source). But the reality is that most of the time it will simply be more effective to handle open formats the same way you handle closed formats - convert them to a new standard when the old one looks like it is dying. You gain a few more years of being able to rely upon the original file, but not much more than that. Yes, if we could switch everyone over to open formats today, and open source, we should: but that's not going to happen any time soon; and we should not pretend that open source or open formats are silver bullets.
I've had problems with Apple Mail, too. However, I've had worse problems with Thunderbird. Using the mbox format doesn't help much when the mbox file is emptied out for some unknown reason: you still have to pull a backup.
2. I spent several years using Linux as my primary OS, and you know what? I'm too damned old to waste two hours trying to get a new program running, or a new piece of hardware to attach. I'm sick and tired of the way in which so many Linux features and applications only work the way the programmer thought you should work: it's like Microsoft Word, but with all the menu options written in Ainu. Either you know it, or you don't, and you have to rely upon the charity of some HOWTO file, or some discussion list or bulletin board where the reigning despots will deride you for not doing "the obvious" if they deign to help you at all. I'm also too damned old to worry about making my way through poorly commented C spaghetti to try to figure out what I should be doing as a user. And I'm not that old.
Linux isn't there yet with some hardware support that I need. WiFi: on Linux, it simply isn't reliable. This alone is enough for me to use OS X.
Re:FS contruction is extremely complicatied
on
WinFS Gets the Axe
·
· Score: 1
The user interface for Spotlight is barely usable. It needs to expose a search syntax that's easy to use (like Google's). The saved search folders need some work, too.
Office Standard - $329.99 for Windows, $334.98 for Mac. I don't think that $4.99 is a price difference that users should be "sensitive" to. Oh, the list prices are the same, too.
There are a couple of bits in the film that reflect the attitude toward animals - for instance, when one of the replicants says something to the effect of "do I look like I could afford a real snake?", the fact that the test includes turning a turtle on its back, etc. The film is much more like the book than it seems from a superficial reading of both. So I wouldn't say there is "precious little" of Dick in the film. There's a lot of his spirit, some of his words and plot points, and of course his name.
Do you want to explain to me exactly how you encrypt an http GET command? They're talking about tracking what sites you visit - just like China. At least we know they can count on Google for help.
Beneath the facade of 'ethical foreign policies' western colonial arrogance and sheer inhumanity thrives today in equal proportions to its brutal history.
is at all typical of their postings, I agree with you: they are not a news site.
Go back to school and learn some group theory, will you? The groups "Muslims" and "gay-bashers" intersect; neither is a subset of the other. The same can be said of Christians: there are definitely Christians who hate gays, like those pigs who are "protesting" at the funerals of poor young Americans - soldiers who gave their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq because they wanted to defend America - because they claim that every death in Iraq or Afghanistan is God's way of punishing America for tolerating homosexuality. However, the vast majority of Christians find this as disgusting as I find it, and as I hope you find it.
I oppose Muslims who hate Christians, those who kill their daughters because they have been raped, and those who plant bombs: but I'm smart enough to understand that the fact that a man or a woman prays toward Mecca five times a day does not tell me whether he danced or cried on 9/11.
I can't find it in my heart to feel sorry for a Nazi skinhead who's beaten up in jail - and I can't find it in my heart to feel sorry for a racist jackass whose blog has been "censored" from Google News. Perhaps the editors might actually look at both sides of an issue before they post propaganda from hate groups?
If the $100 computer with open source software is the liberation theology of the information revolution, this is the indentured servitude of the information revolution.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends upon how toxic it is. If it will burn their esophagus out on the spot and cause them to cough up blood on the screener, that might just be a clue for the screeners that the substance isn't really toothpaste.
Shakespeare, for example, wrote plays that everyone could enjoy. He had dirty jokes for the aristocrats and flowerly language for the peasants.
Perfectly put. Yes, this is pretty much how Shakespeare worked: the dirty jokes were "highbrow" and the flowery language was good enough to be noticed and enjoyed even by the "lowbrow".
If he were close to anyone under 25, he wouldn't be using this device, as it would be as likely to keep them away as the brats he's trying to drive away.
Dual processor, dual core. They should have called them Xeon Quad, not Quad Xeon.
This is EXACTLY how to deal with this problem. Everybody pretend it isn't working, and he'll return it to the manufacturer, which will tell him that it is indeed working, and will hopefully redirect his rage toward the manufacturer.
The cops thought they could arrest someone for taking their photographs because something in their training led them to believe that they could do so. Now, that was either their police academy training, or something in a more recent training exercise. Based on the sort of things I've been hearing about how federal guidelines are being interpreted, I think the argument that this was caused by "the environment fostered by the USA PATRIOT Act" cannot be so lightly dismissed.
This is a mixed bag of controversies that are only being linked together because they are key issues for the Republican base. Evolution is a fact, like it or not; it is not the only subject on which the Bible is inconsistent, but it is one of the few "controversial" scientific theories for which we can say we have actually seen it in action. Global Warming, on the other hand - more precisely, anthropogenic global warming, for there is no question that the Earth has been getting warmer lately, the only question is why - is a highly politicized question on which I have heard some reputable scientists express doubts. I suspect that anthropogenic global warming is real, and potentially far more serious than the current consensus would suggest, but I can respect some of the scientists who question it. Embryonic stem cell research is not controversial because of the scientific claims made on its behalf - those are pretty clear - but because many people have very serious ethical concerns with using tissue derived from undeveloped human embryoes. Demonizing the opposition to embryonic stem cell research as "theocratic" is neither accurate nor constructive - there are even atheists who have ethical issues with the use of embryonic stem cells in research programs. Lumping them in together may help you with a small niche of voters who are sick of Republican self-righteousness but not sophisticated enough to recognize the differences between these issues, but I'm not sure who else it will help you with.
Yeah, because the Lernout & Hauspie mess had nothing to do with setting back speech recognition.
Yeah, because plagiarizing another student's code and changing the names of the variables requires great genius.
According to Apple's own fiscal results report this morning, they shipped 8.11 devices, a significant increase over last year.
You're comparing a desktop computer to workstation? Isn't that a little like comparing ... oh, I don't know, Apples to oranges?
As far as service is concerned, only one of my four Macs has ever needed service: a dropped laptop. They fixed it in 3 days for a reasonable price, given the amount of damage. Still works great, after 5 years. No other issues with them. Now, with Dell, on the other hand, I have NEVER managed to get a broken machine fixed, and I've sent in at least a dozen (and they were all under-warranty hardware failures, not user damage).
Too bad - this was the first time the "overlord" joke made me laugh in a while.
It's entirely possible that either the government official explaining the new policy to the Western Union consuls, or the Western Union consuls themselves, either misunderstood the policy or decided to enact their own draconian version of the policy for the sake of simplicity. That said, I'm glad the IRA bastards are on the list, too. If we're going to have a war on terrorism, we should really have a war on *terrorism*, not just on the terrorists we happen to have issues with at home.
His own *metadata*, you mean - the flags field represents things that aren't in the mbox file, like whether the message was read or was a draft, &c. It's a good point, but on the specifics of email data retention, we also have to keep our eye on practicality here: if you can reverse-engineer emlx, you get more information from it than you get from mbox. Getting the actual email (with headers) itself isn't a problem at all.
If you'll note, most of the data retention problems Pilgrim talks about are actually with metadata - song play counts and ratings, tags on pictures. For the actual music, iTunes can use MP3, which while not an open file format is at least a platform neutral defacto standard, for the actual pictures, iPhoto usually uses JPEG and PNG (the video issue is another problem entirely). I'm not quite sure how good open source software is on maintaining application-independent metadata of this type (I've been using OS X for a number of years now for everything with which I'd need to use this kind of metadata), but I'll concede that it's far more likely to do a better job.
When you're talking about reversing HTTP extensions, you're talking about interoperability today, not data retention tomorrow - and on that score, the argument goes with Windows at the moment - while there are interoperability arguments that Mac can win over Linux, and even a handful that Linux can win over Mac, there are none that either can win over Windows because Windows is the core of the monoculture; one simply has to ask whether perfect compability is worth the price. For me, and I'd guess for you, and for Pilgrim, O'Reilly, and Doctorow, it isn't. I like having the slightly higher interoperability OS X gives you over Ubuntu, but I'd give it up if Ubuntu came closer to meeting my needs.
That said, yes, DRM is a problem, and file migration is a huge problem. Switching to Linux *doesn't*, by itself, serve notice on the DRM issue, because those users will seem to the content providers to have dropped out of the market altogether, and so won't motivate them to do something about DRM. What you have to do is to work on competitors to DRM-laden content and see how successful they are. Unfortunately, one thing we've seen is that the bazaar doesn't do as good a job of creating and distributing creative content (music, visual art, literature, video) as the cathedral, despite all our hopes (mine too). Where many eyes make software production and Q&A faster (within limits, of course; we all know about the mythical man-month), many hands do not make very good artistic works - literature written by distributed means reads like a horse designed by a committee rides (i.e., a camel) - very bumpy and unsteady, and one can see similar effects in the more aesthetic aspects of software design, such as UI standards and aesthetics and fonts. Now, art created by individual artists and distributed by open source models should work fine in theory, but in practice we've seen that the level of triage that's necessary to direct promotion to those artists most likely to succeed is anathema to open source communities, and when the listener or reader or viewer is inundated with a million different artistic voices all muttering at the same low level - the bazaar model of content distribution - no one can get enough traction to break out and challenge the DRMified standard content providers and their artists. So the real answer to DRM isn't switching to Linux, but working hard to come up with an open-source distribution model that identifies the best content and frankly markets it well enough to challenge the content being sold by the traditional content providers, and so to challenge their distribution model.
Maybe Pilgrim's, and Doctorow's, and O'Reilly's choice is the best way to deal with proprietary file formats - if enough people switch. But for the switchers (to pure open source environments) to have an impact on the decisions of various service providers, we'll need a Linux (or other open source operating system, whether it be
Some very good points here. However, they don't convince me. Why not? Two reasons:
.emlx as an undocumented format is problematic: the .emlx file is just a text file with some kind of integer at the beginning (for indexing purposes, I assume), the content of the email including all headers, and then an XML plist fragment at the end. Not much harder to reverse engineer than mbox, I think- unless you can't understand XML, in which case you by definition are not an ueber geek.
1. I think they're overstating the openness problems on the Mac, and overstating the advantages of open source when it comes to data retention.
Take Apple Mail as an example. Describing
Now, open formats are better, yes, because competing programmers can provide solutions for the same format, decreasing the likelihood that the format will become unsupported. That said, the fact is that even open formats will, eventually, become unsupported - software will die, and sooner or later no one will be hosting the source code any more, and the source will rely upon libraries that aren't available for your platform (though maybe you'll still have the source for those, too), and there will be known security issues that were never patched because no one was using the software anymore. Sure, if you want to waste the time, you can always write your own software to handle documented open formats (assuming that someone did a good job on the documentation - never a sure thing with Open Source). But the reality is that most of the time it will simply be more effective to handle open formats the same way you handle closed formats - convert them to a new standard when the old one looks like it is dying. You gain a few more years of being able to rely upon the original file, but not much more than that. Yes, if we could switch everyone over to open formats today, and open source, we should: but that's not going to happen any time soon; and we should not pretend that open source or open formats are silver bullets.
I've had problems with Apple Mail, too. However, I've had worse problems with Thunderbird. Using the mbox format doesn't help much when the mbox file is emptied out for some unknown reason: you still have to pull a backup.
2. I spent several years using Linux as my primary OS, and you know what? I'm too damned old to waste two hours trying to get a new program running, or a new piece of hardware to attach. I'm sick and tired of the way in which so many Linux features and applications only work the way the programmer thought you should work: it's like Microsoft Word, but with all the menu options written in Ainu. Either you know it, or you don't, and you have to rely upon the charity of some HOWTO file, or some discussion list or bulletin board where the reigning despots will deride you for not doing "the obvious" if they deign to help you at all. I'm also too damned old to worry about making my way through poorly commented C spaghetti to try to figure out what I should be doing as a user. And I'm not that old.
Linux isn't there yet with some hardware support that I need. WiFi: on Linux, it simply isn't reliable. This alone is enough for me to use OS X.
The user interface for Spotlight is barely usable. It needs to expose a search syntax that's easy to use (like Google's). The saved search folders need some work, too.
Office Standard - $329.99 for Windows, $334.98 for Mac. I don't think that $4.99 is a price difference that users should be "sensitive" to. Oh, the list prices are the same, too.
There are a couple of bits in the film that reflect the attitude toward animals - for instance, when one of the replicants says something to the effect of "do I look like I could afford a real snake?", the fact that the test includes turning a turtle on its back, etc. The film is much more like the book than it seems from a superficial reading of both. So I wouldn't say there is "precious little" of Dick in the film. There's a lot of his spirit, some of his words and plot points, and of course his name.
Do you want to explain to me exactly how you encrypt an http GET command? They're talking about tracking what sites you visit - just like China. At least we know they can count on Google for help.
Amil Imani's issues I am not competent to discuss, but the "Jawa Report" is pretty fundamental, don't you think?
Beneath the facade of 'ethical foreign policies' western colonial arrogance and sheer inhumanity thrives today in equal proportions to its brutal history.
is at all typical of their postings, I agree with you: they are not a news site.Go back to school and learn some group theory, will you? The groups "Muslims" and "gay-bashers" intersect; neither is a subset of the other. The same can be said of Christians: there are definitely Christians who hate gays, like those pigs who are "protesting" at the funerals of poor young Americans - soldiers who gave their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq because they wanted to defend America - because they claim that every death in Iraq or Afghanistan is God's way of punishing America for tolerating homosexuality. However, the vast majority of Christians find this as disgusting as I find it, and as I hope you find it.
I oppose Muslims who hate Christians, those who kill their daughters because they have been raped, and those who plant bombs: but I'm smart enough to understand that the fact that a man or a woman prays toward Mecca five times a day does not tell me whether he danced or cried on 9/11.
I can't find it in my heart to feel sorry for a Nazi skinhead who's beaten up in jail - and I can't find it in my heart to feel sorry for a racist jackass whose blog has been "censored" from Google News. Perhaps the editors might actually look at both sides of an issue before they post propaganda from hate groups?
What was I thinking? This is /.!
If the $100 computer with open source software is the liberation theology of the information revolution, this is the indentured servitude of the information revolution.
Show me where it says in NISPOM that you can only use US-made hardware.