No, fats are made of fat (lipid molecules) -- think grease and oils. No water in 'em. Nothing magical about water -- it's just that there's water in just about any kind of food you put in a microwave, and water reacts pretty strongly.
"Estadounidense" is the term used, which does transliterate into "unitedstatesian" or, if you're being anal, "statesunitedian."
There's no reason, other than being a politically- minded wanker like Estanislao, not to use "American" -- much like the push to use "Negro" instead of "Black" in the 1970s, it's an attempt to work sympathetic magic: calling a knife a spoon will somehow transform it into one.
You'll note "Negro" today is pretty frigging insulting to your average black person.
Estanislao, of course, is a La Raza zealot, by whose standards people of South American (not Central American) descent are at least as equally scummy and repellent as the nasty gringos.
The southern U.S. doesn't have a monopoly on poisonous racism. Hell, it's arguably a lot better off than large parts of Central and South America in that respect.
gomi colombian dad, ecuadoran mom, U.S. passports all around
given the horrific damage we've done to the planet
What horrific damage would that be, then? Humans are utterly incapable of doing more damage to the planet than a medium meteor strike or average glaciation can't exceed by orders of magnitude.
If every human on earth dropped dead right now, there wouldn't be any evidence we ever existed (with the arguable exceptions of lunar landing debris and the occasional very lucky space probe) within fifty thousand years. Less, probably.
Compare that to the millions of years it takes the earth to recover from a major ice age or meteor strike.
Humans have been on Earth for less than an eyeblink; it is hubris of the highest order to imagine we are capable of inflicting any sort of lasting damage.
And what evil means did she commit? Breaking a an evil law is not an evil act. Her means were fully consistant [sic] with her ends.
And how is that different, exactly, from breaking bad copyright law? Civil disobedience is as civil disobedience does, Arandir -- you can't laud the principle in one instance and condemn it in another. You can condemn the exercise of the principle in the case of abandonware, sure, but that's not what you did.
If you commit wrong acts in the pursuit of good goals, you are a liar if you then go and claim that you did no wrong. Worse, you are a hypocrite.
Whoa, stop right there. How is hypocrisy worse than lying? In fact, why are lies and hypocrisy prima facie wrong? The ability to lie well, more even than a virtue, is a key survival skill today, and people who avoid hypocrisy all day, every day, soon find themselves friendless and alone.
Prevarication, obfuscation, and veils of all sorts are crucial to human interaction (this may explain why programmers tend to suck at it, since lying to computers is seldom the Right Thing).
You cannot try to balance the evil with good and expect the result to be good.
Of course you can. Say Dr. Mengele's horrifying research in the death camps yields useful results that can save dozens, even hundreds, of lives. That's a good result, and there's no reason to turn it down because of its evil source. Balancing evil with good often results in good. Yeesh.
Of course, abandonware is in itself a moral good, since trading and copying these programs has negligible effect on the copyright holder (and is therefore morally neutral with respect to the corporation, insofar as a corporation can be considered an entity to which morality applies, which is not particularly far) and produces a moral good (enjoyment) on the part of the recipients of the abandonwarez.
No conspiracy theory is required; Disney actively lobbies for this sort of thing every time. Their actions are on public record. Currently, I believe, it's lifetime of the author plus 75 years (but it could be 95, I forget -- someone who actually knows copyright law, please feel free to correct me).
Okay, so abandonware isn't something you're interested in. That doesn't mean it's valueless. Many, many people prefer depth of gameplay over eyecandy, and a lovingly researched classic like Microprose's Darklands (out of print, unsupported, and unavailable for many years now) still gives hours of fun.
Many older games display inventiveness and risk-taking that are simply absent in today's gaming market, where 'innovation' means 'new graphics over the old gameplay' or 'bigger tits on our Lara Croft lookalike'. There is the occasional breakout game, the rare Something New. And it's not like cloning and flavour-of-the-month games weren't unknown ten and twenty years ago. But preserving older classics -- the original Ultima trilogy, Starflight, Darklands -- is a valuable thing to do, and we should not expect or force companies to do things that have nothing to do with their bottom line -- that's not the business they're in. It falls on the gaming public as a whole, then, to preserve the history of gaming, to learn from the mistakes and successes of the past.
Gaming is more than seeing how many more polygons or neato-keeno eyecandy you can push to the screen. The basics of design, plotting, and immersion haven't changed very much. Only the technology is different.
PayMyBills.com is free for me through mid-'01 due to a promotion deal. They cut a check off my bank account, so I get all the float I'd get if I'd written it out myself. And they cover postage. It's frankly cheaper than doing it myself, and I intend to keep using them even after I have to start paying for 'em, because the cost is maybe 25c a payment over and above postage, and I'm perfectly willing to pay that much for the convenience.
Do you actually think the Internet is going to cure societies woes? (Sure, it got you stock options and a shiney new SUV but how is it gonna help the other 99.9% of the world population?)
Maybe they want stock options and a SUV too?
Is the Internet going to be the new missionary cause that will save the third-world?
Yeah, pretty much. It's a great tool for capitalism, which is the best way to dramatically raise per capita incomes. A rising tide lifts all ships.
Here in America, we have the Amish - a group that's sworn off technology and crass consumerism in exchange for a plain, simple lifestyle. By "modern" standards, these people should are supersticious luddites doomed to poverty. Yet, they enjoy a good standard of life and a very happy.
Hoo boy. Someone hasn't been paying attention. Desertion from Amish and Mennonite encampments is legion these days; both communities are moribund.
Maybe its time we forgot about modernizing the third world. Take all the land back from the multi-national agribusinesses, shut down the sweathouses, disarm the psycho dictators (who are often supported by Western governments) and give it all back to the people. Let them resume their lives and then carefully offer some aspects of "modern" life such as medicine and yes, even the Internet, without shoving it down their throats. I'm sure the Internet could be useful as a shared communication medium (perhaps a few terminals available in the village center) rather than a tool for economic competition.
I dunno. I'd rather be free, myself.
No-one is shoving the Internet down anyone's throats. People in less developed countries are begging, cheating, and stealing for the chance to get on-line, and to get access to all the goods and services our modern capitalist society offers. If the simple, less-wired life were so damned compelling, people wouldn't be taking insane risks every day of their lives to get here ("here" defined as the USA, Canada, and to a lesser degree (because of tighter immigration controls) Europe).
The simple fact is we can't all live the almighty "American Dream". We're not better than everyone else, and in some ways, we're alot worse.
Oh, spare me the white liberal guilt, ese. Of course we can all live the American Dream. It has been found to require work in the past, so that might be a bit off-putting to some. I also hear some personal responsibility is required.
Take a deep breath and repeat after me: Economics is not a zero-sum game. People getting rich does not necessarily make you or me any poorer. You don't have to feel bad about having a good life.
I typed "Where can I find a homeless shelter in San Francisco?" into Ask Jeeves, and got a link to Raphael House. Elapsed time: about 10 seconds. Besides, even if it is time-consuming and frustrating, what does a homeless person have other than time? There are a boodle of search engines out there. Yahoo returns links to the Jobs Consortium, an organization geared specifically towards finding jobs for the homeless. Elapsed time: 15 seconds. This information is very readily available on the net, and being on-line helps people find organizations that don't advertise widely and therefore might not be widely known by the homeless population-at-large. This gives Wired Homeless a definite advantage over Unplugged Homeless.
Don't assume information is hard to find on the net. That will often prove incorrect.
Ask a homeless man on the streets of NYC what he thinks about the internet and see what he says. I'm pretty sure he won't give a crap because he's more concerned about where he'll sleep and whether he'll eat.
Tell him internet access can help him find:
Privately run shelters he might not know about
Soup kitchens, or restaurants that don't mind giving food to people if they were gonna throw it out anyway
Places to get cleaned up and look for work
Compared to the 'analog' technique of begging passersby for change. See if he gives a crap then.
I probably put in about 28-32 hours a week. My work ethic: If it ain't done by 5, darlin', it's getting done next business day. The deal is money for time -- if I'm not getting paid for the hours worked, they're not gonna get worked. I can get a job and money pretty much anywhere in this economy and with my skills, but there aren't enough $100 bills in the world to buy my afternoons or weekends back -- they're gone forever.
From my personal observations, there's no damn need to work more than 40 hours a day -- most deadlines are utterly arbitrary. How much of those extra hours are productive, anyway? Slap-happy on caffeine, punchy from fatigue toxins, I bet the quality of work done in the 70th or 80th hour of the week sucks a lot harder than work done around hour 10 or 20. Thinking more hours directly translates to more production is delusional at best, especially for knowledge workers where mental acuity is key to useful production.
Why spend 20 hours coding over the weekend if you're so tired and pissed off you'll introduce bugs that it'll take you 40 hours to clean up next week? Don't give your life over to the company, and especially not for freakin' free.
Leave at 5. Read a book. Go minigolfing with a friend or sweetheart. I promise the code will still be there tomorrow.
I'm sorry, but if you truly believe that the US media is unbiased, you are sadly mistaken.
He didn't say that. He said there isn't an organized conspiracy, which is a little bit different. Remember Hanlon's Razor: do not attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Not everyone in media is stupid, but there's enough Not Seeing The Big Picture that everyone's little bit o' spin accumulates (gomi's Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum for Media).
A lot of news-media stories either (a) come straight from AP or (b) someone's press release. Sure. That doesn't automagically imply there's some Evil Konspirakii arm-twisting the Media into Keeping the People Down.
Easy availability of alternate data on the net, however, makes getting different angles on a story not only easy but nigh-inevitable. Humans have bias, inevitably -- we're not perfectly rational creatures. But it behooves every consumer of data to filter it and pass judgement on its quality, and to seek out other data if that quality is lacking.
Finding a song you want is extremely easy and relatively painless, with programs like Napster and some of the better MP3 web searches.
Not really, unless you're looking for the hottest of the hot and the poppest of the pop. It took me about a week of checking Napster nightly to get a copy of Ruben Blades' "Pedro Navaja," to say nothing of Carlos Vives' "La Gota Fria" or 80's Chilean prog-rock band Los Prisioneros. I'd shell out 75c or a buck to download the whole song -- if I could find it. I wouldn't buy a whole album of Blades, because there's only so much salsa I can take in one go -- but "Pedro Navaja" is pretty sweet.
MISplice is right -- while KDE et al. may be nice WMs, getting them up can be a huge pain in the ass, as I've discovered to my chagrin this past weekend, when I installed FreeBSD. XF86 has a known bug with ATI Rage graphics cards, such as is present on-board on my current mobo. My hsync is completely out of whack, and I can't even start X with something vanilla like SVGA or even VGA16 servers (640x480: mode not defined. no valid modes found. exiting.) Now, the webpage for FreeBDSM says XF86 3.3.3 and up support the ATI stuff, but I'm using 3.3.5 and still no dice. I've gotten a new video card, am going to bypass the on-board video through the BIOS, and reinstall: FreeBSD The patch to let FreeBSD recognize my Ethernet card The patch to enable DHCP so the box can talk to my router And then see if I can get X up.
This is freaking light-years beyond what my mom can do. I wouldn't do it if I didn't have a business need to have a Unix system at my house. The effort/reward ratio from the user's perspective sucks, frankly, and I think the article is spot-on, point for point. Major improvements in usability and interface need to happen before any Unix can even begin to think of breaking out of the server ghetto.
That's what I like about Slashdot. There's just something so cute about a forum where proof by repeated assertion is considered a valid argumentation technique.
jodio is slang for 'jodido,' tense of 'joder,' the verb 'to fuck' in Castilian ('proper' Spanish, like from Spain -- rich and varied regional slang abounds throughout South and Central America, for example: 'chucha,' a large, weasel-like rat in Colombia with no naughty overtones, means 'a woman's pudendum' just 100 miles south in neighboring Ecuador). 'Jodio' could also stand for the past tense of 'joder' if there's an accent over the second o. If you're omitting the second 'd' in 'jodido,' it should be spelt "jodi'o" if you're trying to represent the vernacular -- just like writing "don'" for the slurred "don't".
"Ramera" means "whore."
"Pendejo" is actually a more complicated translation than just "asshole." It occupies a similar linguistic niche, but is at more of a 'damn' level of naughtiness -- you could get away with it in the more relaxed workplaces, or with relatives you're pretty close to, but not in front of Great Grandmother Carmen or in a job interview. Literal translation is tricky -- closest sense (from context) is 'dweeb,' 'loser,' 'suckwad,' 'pusmaggot,' and similar denigrations of eptitude or capacity.
In the same vein, "no tengo tiempo para tus pendejadas" scans to "I don't have time for your crap/shit", but that doesn't mean 'pendejo' means 'shit,' just that it fills the same linguistic niche.
That's very similar to what an ISP I worked for back in The Day did with its newsfroup expiry times: The expiry times were dynamically assigned by newsfroup volume, so (frinstance) alt.fan.karl-malden.nose or alt.sex.hello-kitty had 3-5 week retention, heavy-traffic (but still text) groups like talk.politics.guns got down to 1-2 weeks at the worst, and w4r3z/pr0n newsfroups (especially.iso and multimedia) had retention waaay down in the 'hours,' or sometimes 'minutes,' range.
Just a coincidence that the biggest diskspace hogs happened to be hot IP, really.
Voting is the privilege of citizens. If you are not a citizen, you dont get to vote.
Voting is neither a right (convicted felons cannot vote, not just noncitizens) nor a privilege, but rather a duty of the citizenry. The citizenry, of course, shirks its duties any chance it can.
Which in itself I consider partially a violation of my rights, in that I am being "taxed without adequate representation".
Oh, cry me a river, liberal. You want representation? Move back to the country you hold citizenship in.
Dont give me any "just become a citizen" crap. That doesn't address the injustice that I pay thousands of dollars a year in taxes, but I dont get any say in what gets done with them.
Well boo fucking hoo. You want a say, become a citizen. You don't want to become a citizen? Sorry, no say. You want to keep your original citizenship while leeching off government services (police, firefighting, highways, courts) without having to pay taxes to maintain them? Not here, buddy.
Not having representation (suffrage) is the cost of keeping your original citizenship. When you live in a country and use its public services, you pay taxes to maintain them. That's the deal. You want to alter or abolish those services, you have to vote -- and to that, you have to be a citizen. That's a separate, unrelated deal.
Of course, the government shouldn't be in the business of doing many, many of the things it does, and taxation levels at home (USA) and abroad are atrocious bordering on ludicrous, but hey, that's the welfare-state for you. I'm waiting for the Boomers to destroy Social Security so we can finally freaking get rid of it.
Oh, god, not the tired old Chinese Room argument again. That got refuted decades ago.
For those not in the know: The 'Chinese Room' thoughtexperiment goes like this. You put John Searle in a room with detailed instructions on how to use flash cards. You feed Japanese-language characters in one end. Searle, following the directions on the flash cards, produces Chinese characters as output. In effect, the room with Searle and the flash cards in it translates Japanese to Chinese.
Searle argues that, since he does not know Chinese nor Japanese, the room does not either. He extrapolates from there to say that a program that gives the appearance of consciousness cannot be considered conscious.
Which is bogus on its face, of course, even at the analogy level. Searle may not know Japanese or Chinese, but the algorithm Searle is executing certainly does. Searle is basically a transistor or processing unit in the scheme described above -- a component. I don't expect one of my neurons, or even my whole hippocampus, to contain my entire consciousness/self.
There's plenty of reasons to bag on the Kurzweil scenario. But you can't use the 'Chinese Room' thoughtexperiment to show a damn thing, because of its inherent bogosity.
A lot of people on the 'DeCSS is theft, not fair use' side seem to be missing an understanding of what 'Fair Use' is. 'Fair Use' applies to personal copies, not to distribution. Of course it would be illegal to start a movie theatre with your home videos and a big projector.
It is, however, perfectly legal to transfer your videos from (say) NTSC to PAL format, or (by extension) a big-ass.avi,.mpg,.asf,.mov, or what-have-you on a hard-drive or CD, as long as (and this is the tricky part) you don't redistribute.
DeCSS has the legal status of a VCR: it can be used to copy, but is mostly used to view. And the copying is absolutely legal, as long as the copies aren't redistributed. DeCSS wasn't developed by breaking trade secrets -- it was developed by clean reverse engineering.
Anyone copying movies and selling or otherwise distributing them without the copyright holder's blessing is a fair target for a suit, but that principle applies equally to VCRs and DeCSS.
Neither the people who invented the VCR, nor the person who developed DeCSS, are or should be liable for the criminal actions of others -- it's like holding a murder trial for Henry Ford on account of everyone who's been run over.
If it's just a color-changing plastic layer on the disc, it should be relatively trivial to abrade it away with one of those 'repair your scratched CDs' kit thingees.
If you had a TV antenna in Canada and a few thousand miles of antenna cable, and hooked it up to a TV set in Arizona, to watch the Canadian freely-available public TV stream, ads and all, would that be 'theft'?
No. Of course not. That's exactly what iCraveTV is doing -- they're not charging for it (except in the form of a frame with banner ads), and they're not modifying the content or even removing the TV ads. All it does is let you watch Canadian TV wherever you are. The signal is freely available. The MPAA is doing stupid things again, just as it has throughout its existence. IP doesn't even really enter into it.
last i heard, women were still making $.70 to a man's $1
You heard wrong, pal. Those numbers were originally derived by adding up total income for all US men and all US women. Guess what? There's a lot more male billionaires, and they throw off the average a LOT. If the stats were derived in a useful way (by comparing people in comparable jobs, say male v. female front-line tech support staff), you'd find that
(a) there's no discernible difference and (b) that stat won't let gender feminists stir up paranoia and hatred in their constituency.
Why are there more male billionaires?
(a) making money took some time before the Internet. Women's rights are a pretty new concept, 20 to 50 years old depending on how strict your definitions get. Women haven't had time to amass ludicrous wealth in similar numbers.
(b) fewer women in high-tech, where the fast money is being made. this is changing right now, as you watch (PREDICTION: 10 years from now, today's junior high schoolers will be high-tech kings and queens, and in rougly proportionate numbers).
Well, if it'll help save your opinion of Slashdot, no-one modded me up. Anyone with Karma>25 gets an automagic +1 to their score.
But you go on thinking of yourself as a victim if it'll make you feel better. Or start packing heat. It's amazing what a suitable self-defense option can do in the face of violent jerkitude. And the beauty part is, you don't have to be gay, or even oppressed! All people are equally entitled to self-defense!
Hell, that's actually a good idea. I bet heavily arming and training the queer component of the most reactionary US states would do...interesting...things to assault stats. The thing to remember is that the violent jerks are the aberration, not the norm.
Just because some women aren't intimidated by the good ole boy network doesn't mean that everything's okay.
. It works for you and I; our responsibility doesn't extend any further than that. I'll raise my children to get over this sort of silly thing, and I expect other folks to do the same. The attitude/society that produces these sorts of things is already dying; it's nice and socially conscious of you to want to help it along with a few kicks, but it's not strictly necessary.
One of my mom's favorite proverbs is "El que se mete a Redentor muere crucificado," which translates to "Trying to be a Redeemer gets you crucified." Only took a few nasty experiences trying to help some Extremely Broken People to realize the truth behind that: the world fundamentally resents attempts to help or save it, and in general would rather be left alone.
These days, I keep my generous, charitable, and compassionate impulses for the people I love, my close friends and family. And I expect other people to turn to their close friends and family for help when they need it, and not to me.
Slashdot Mirror
No, fats are made of fat (lipid molecules) -- think grease and oils. No water in 'em. Nothing magical about water -- it's just that there's water in just about any kind of food you put in a microwave, and water reacts pretty strongly.
does transliterate into "unitedstatesian" or,
if you're being anal, "statesunitedian."
There's no reason, other than being a politically-
minded wanker like Estanislao, not to use
"American" -- much like the push to use "Negro"
instead of "Black" in the 1970s, it's an attempt
to work sympathetic magic: calling a knife a
spoon will somehow transform it into one.
You'll note "Negro" today is pretty frigging
insulting to your average black person.
Estanislao, of course, is a La Raza zealot, by
whose standards people of South American (not
Central American) descent are at least as equally
scummy and repellent as the nasty gringos.
The southern U.S. doesn't have a monopoly on
poisonous racism. Hell, it's arguably a lot
better off than large parts of Central and
South America in that respect.
gomi
colombian dad, ecuadoran mom, U.S. passports all around
What horrific damage would that be, then? Humans are utterly incapable of doing more damage to the planet than a medium meteor strike or average glaciation can't exceed by orders of magnitude.
If every human on earth dropped dead right now, there wouldn't be any evidence we ever existed (with the arguable exceptions of lunar landing debris and the occasional very lucky space probe) within fifty thousand years. Less, probably.
Compare that to the millions of years it takes the earth to recover from a major ice age or meteor strike.
Humans have been on Earth for less than an eyeblink; it is hubris of the highest order to imagine we are capable of inflicting any sort of lasting damage.
gomi
And how is that different, exactly, from breaking bad copyright law? Civil disobedience is as civil disobedience does, Arandir -- you can't laud the principle in one instance and condemn it in another. You can condemn the exercise of the principle in the case of abandonware, sure, but that's not what you did.
If you commit wrong acts in the pursuit of good goals, you are a liar if you then go and claim that you did no wrong. Worse, you are a hypocrite.
Whoa, stop right there. How is hypocrisy worse than lying? In fact, why are lies and hypocrisy prima facie wrong? The ability to lie well, more even than a virtue, is a key survival skill today, and people who avoid hypocrisy all day, every day, soon find themselves friendless and alone.
Prevarication, obfuscation, and veils of all sorts are crucial to human interaction (this may explain why programmers tend to suck at it, since lying to computers is seldom the Right Thing).
You cannot try to balance the evil with good and expect the result to be good.
Of course you can. Say Dr. Mengele's horrifying research in the death camps yields useful results that can save dozens, even hundreds, of lives. That's a good result, and there's no reason to turn it down because of its evil source. Balancing evil with good often results in good. Yeesh.
Of course, abandonware is in itself a moral good, since trading and copying these programs has negligible effect on the copyright holder (and is therefore morally neutral with respect to the corporation, insofar as a corporation can be considered an entity to which morality applies, which is not particularly far) and produces a moral good (enjoyment) on the part of the recipients of the abandonwarez.
gomi
i mean, duh
No conspiracy theory is required; Disney actively lobbies for this sort of thing every time. Their actions are on public record. Currently, I believe, it's lifetime of the author plus 75 years (but it could be 95, I forget -- someone who actually knows copyright law, please feel free to correct me).
gomi
Many older games display inventiveness and risk-taking that are simply absent in today's gaming market, where 'innovation' means 'new graphics over the old gameplay' or 'bigger tits on our Lara Croft lookalike'. There is the occasional breakout game, the rare Something New. And it's not like cloning and flavour-of-the-month games weren't unknown ten and twenty years ago. But preserving older classics -- the original Ultima trilogy, Starflight, Darklands -- is a valuable thing to do, and we should not expect or force companies to do things that have nothing to do with their bottom line -- that's not the business they're in. It falls on the gaming public as a whole, then, to preserve the history of gaming, to learn from the mistakes and successes of the past.
Gaming is more than seeing how many more polygons or neato-keeno eyecandy you can push to the screen. The basics of design, plotting, and immersion haven't changed very much. Only the technology is different.
gomi
PayMyBills.com is free for me through mid-'01 due to a promotion deal. They cut a check off my bank account, so I get all the float I'd get if I'd written it out myself. And they cover postage. It's frankly cheaper than doing it myself, and I intend to keep using them even after I have to start paying for 'em, because the cost is maybe 25c a payment over and above postage, and I'm perfectly willing to pay that much for the convenience.
gomi
Do you actually think the Internet is going to cure societies woes? (Sure, it got you stock options and a shiney new SUV but how is it gonna help the other 99.9% of the world population?)
Maybe they want stock options and a SUV too?
Is the Internet going to be the new missionary cause that will save the third-world?
Yeah, pretty much. It's a great tool for capitalism, which is the best way to dramatically raise per capita incomes. A rising tide lifts all ships.
Here in America, we have the Amish - a group that's sworn off technology and crass consumerism in exchange for a plain, simple lifestyle. By "modern" standards, these people should are supersticious luddites doomed to poverty. Yet, they enjoy a good standard of life and a very happy.
Hoo boy. Someone hasn't been paying attention. Desertion from Amish and Mennonite encampments is legion these days; both communities are moribund.
Maybe its time we forgot about modernizing the third world. Take all the land back from the multi-national agribusinesses, shut down the sweathouses, disarm the psycho dictators (who are often supported by Western governments) and give it all back to the people. Let them resume their lives and then carefully offer some aspects of "modern" life such as medicine and yes, even the Internet, without shoving it down their throats. I'm sure the Internet could be useful as a shared communication medium (perhaps a few terminals available in the village center) rather than a tool for economic competition.
I dunno. I'd rather be free, myself.
No-one is shoving the Internet down anyone's throats. People in less developed countries are begging, cheating, and stealing for the chance to get on-line, and to get access to all the goods and services our modern capitalist society offers.
If the simple, less-wired life were so damned compelling, people wouldn't be taking insane risks every day of their lives to get here ("here" defined as the USA, Canada, and to a lesser degree (because of tighter immigration controls) Europe).
The simple fact is we can't all live the almighty "American Dream". We're not better than everyone else, and in some ways, we're alot worse.
Oh, spare me the white liberal guilt, ese. Of course we can all live the American Dream. It has been found to require work in the past, so that might be a bit off-putting to some. I also hear some personal responsibility is required.
Take a deep breath and repeat after me: Economics is not a zero-sum game. People getting rich does not necessarily make you or me any poorer. You don't have to feel bad about having a good life.
gomi
I typed "Where can I find a homeless shelter in San Francisco?" into Ask Jeeves, and got a link to Raphael House. Elapsed time: about 10 seconds. Besides, even if it is time-consuming and frustrating, what does a homeless person have other than time?
There are a boodle of search engines out there.
Yahoo returns links to the Jobs Consortium, an organization geared specifically towards finding jobs for the homeless. Elapsed time: 15 seconds.
This information is very readily available on the net, and being on-line helps people find organizations that don't advertise widely and therefore might not be widely known by the homeless population-at-large. This gives Wired Homeless a definite advantage over Unplugged Homeless.
Don't assume information is hard to find on the net. That will often prove incorrect.
gomi
he says. I'm pretty sure he won't give a crap because he's more concerned about where he'll sleep and whether he'll eat.
Tell him internet access can help him find:
Compared to the 'analog' technique of begging passersby for change. See if he gives a crap then.
gomi
I probably put in about 28-32 hours a week.
My work ethic: If it ain't done by 5, darlin', it's getting done next business day. The deal is money for time -- if I'm not getting paid for the hours worked, they're not gonna get worked. I can get a job and money pretty much anywhere in this economy and with my skills, but there aren't enough $100 bills in the world to buy my afternoons or weekends back -- they're gone forever.
From my personal observations, there's no damn need to work more than 40 hours a day -- most deadlines are utterly arbitrary. How much of those extra hours are productive, anyway? Slap-happy on caffeine, punchy from fatigue toxins, I bet the quality of work done in the 70th or 80th hour of the week sucks a lot harder than work done around hour 10 or 20. Thinking more hours directly translates to more production is delusional at best, especially for knowledge workers where mental acuity is key to useful production.
Why spend 20 hours coding over the weekend if you're so tired and pissed off you'll introduce bugs that it'll take you 40 hours to clean up next week? Don't give your life over to the company, and especially not for freakin' free.
Leave at 5. Read a book. Go minigolfing with a friend or sweetheart. I promise the code will still be there tomorrow.
gomi
I'm sorry, but if you truly believe that the US media is unbiased, you are sadly mistaken.
He didn't say that. He said there isn't an organized conspiracy, which is a little bit different. Remember Hanlon's Razor: do not attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Not everyone in media is stupid, but there's enough Not Seeing The Big Picture that everyone's little bit o' spin accumulates (gomi's Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum for Media).
A lot of news-media stories either (a) come straight from AP or (b) someone's press release. Sure. That doesn't automagically imply there's some Evil Konspirakii arm-twisting the Media into Keeping the People Down.
Easy availability of alternate data on the net, however, makes getting different angles on a story not only easy but nigh-inevitable. Humans have bias, inevitably -- we're not perfectly rational creatures. But it behooves every consumer of data to filter it and pass judgement on its quality, and to seek out other data if that quality is lacking.
gomi
Finding a song you want is extremely easy and relatively painless, with
programs like Napster and some of the better MP3 web searches.
Not really, unless you're looking for the hottest of the hot and the poppest of the pop. It took me about a week of checking Napster nightly to get a copy of Ruben Blades' "Pedro Navaja," to say nothing of Carlos Vives' "La Gota Fria" or 80's Chilean prog-rock band Los Prisioneros. I'd shell out 75c or a buck to download the whole song -- if I could find it. I wouldn't buy a whole album of Blades, because there's only so much salsa I can take in one go -- but "Pedro Navaja" is pretty sweet.
gomi
MISplice is right -- while KDE et al. may be nice WMs, getting them up can be a huge pain in the ass, as I've discovered to my chagrin this past weekend, when I installed FreeBSD. XF86 has a known bug with ATI Rage graphics cards, such as is present on-board on my current mobo. My hsync is completely out of whack, and I can't even start X with something vanilla like SVGA or even VGA16 servers (640x480: mode not defined. no valid modes found. exiting.) Now, the webpage for FreeBDSM says XF86 3.3.3 and up support the ATI stuff, but I'm using 3.3.5 and still no dice. I've gotten a new video card, am going to bypass the on-board video through the BIOS, and reinstall:
FreeBSD
The patch to let FreeBSD recognize my Ethernet card
The patch to enable DHCP so the box can talk to my router
And then see if I can get X up.
This is freaking light-years beyond what my mom can do. I wouldn't do it if I didn't have a business need to have a Unix system at my house. The effort/reward ratio from the user's perspective sucks, frankly, and I think the article is spot-on, point for point. Major improvements in usability and interface need to happen before any Unix can even begin to think of breaking out of the server ghetto.
gomi
That's what I like about Slashdot. There's just something so cute about a forum where proof by repeated assertion is considered a valid argumentation technique.
gomi
jodio is slang for 'jodido,' tense of 'joder,' the verb 'to fuck' in Castilian ('proper' Spanish, like from Spain -- rich and varied regional slang abounds throughout South and Central America, for example: 'chucha,' a large, weasel-like rat in Colombia with no naughty overtones, means 'a woman's pudendum' just 100 miles south in neighboring Ecuador). 'Jodio' could also stand for the past tense of 'joder' if there's an accent over the second o. If you're omitting the second 'd' in 'jodido,' it should be spelt "jodi'o" if you're trying to represent the vernacular -- just like writing "don'" for the slurred "don't".
"Ramera" means "whore."
"Pendejo" is actually a more complicated translation than just "asshole." It occupies a similar linguistic niche, but is at more of a 'damn' level of naughtiness -- you could get away with it in the more relaxed workplaces, or with relatives you're pretty close to, but not in front of Great Grandmother Carmen or in a job interview. Literal translation is tricky -- closest sense (from context) is 'dweeb,' 'loser,' 'suckwad,' 'pusmaggot,' and similar denigrations of eptitude or capacity.
In the same vein, "no tengo tiempo para tus pendejadas" scans to "I don't have time for your crap/shit", but that doesn't mean 'pendejo' means 'shit,' just that it fills the same linguistic niche.
gomi
mr. pedant today
That's very similar to what an ISP I worked for back in The Day did with its newsfroup expiry times: The expiry times were dynamically assigned by newsfroup volume, so (frinstance) alt.fan.karl-malden.nose or alt.sex.hello-kitty had 3-5 week retention, heavy-traffic (but still text) groups like talk.politics.guns got down to 1-2 weeks at the worst, and w4r3z/pr0n newsfroups (especially .iso and multimedia) had retention waaay down in the 'hours,' or sometimes 'minutes,' range.
Just a coincidence that the biggest diskspace hogs happened to be hot IP, really.
gomi
Voting is the privilege of citizens. If you are not a citizen, you dont get to vote.
Voting is neither a right (convicted felons cannot vote, not just noncitizens) nor a privilege, but rather a duty of the citizenry. The citizenry, of course, shirks its duties any chance it can.
Which in itself I consider partially a violation of my rights, in that I am being "taxed without adequate representation".
Oh, cry me a river, liberal. You want representation? Move back to the country you hold citizenship in.
Dont give me any "just become a citizen" crap. That doesn't address the injustice that I pay thousands of dollars a year in taxes, but I dont get any say in what gets done with them.
Well boo fucking hoo. You want a say, become a citizen. You don't want to become a citizen? Sorry, no say. You want to keep your original citizenship while leeching off government services (police, firefighting, highways, courts) without having to pay taxes to maintain them? Not here, buddy.
Not having representation (suffrage) is the cost of keeping your original citizenship. When you live in a country and use its public services, you pay taxes to maintain them. That's the deal. You want to alter or abolish those services, you have to vote -- and to that, you have to be a citizen. That's a separate, unrelated deal.
Of course, the government shouldn't be in the business of doing many, many of the things it does, and taxation levels at home (USA) and abroad are atrocious bordering on ludicrous, but hey, that's the welfare-state for you. I'm waiting for the Boomers to destroy Social Security so we can finally freaking get rid of it.
gomi
Oh, god, not the tired old Chinese Room argument again. That got refuted decades ago.
For those not in the know: The 'Chinese Room' thoughtexperiment goes like this. You put John Searle in a room with detailed instructions on how to use flash cards. You feed Japanese-language characters in one end. Searle, following the directions on the flash cards, produces Chinese characters as output. In effect, the room with Searle and the flash cards in it translates Japanese to Chinese.
Searle argues that, since he does not know Chinese nor Japanese, the room does not either. He extrapolates from there to say that a program that gives the appearance of consciousness cannot be considered conscious.
Which is bogus on its face, of course, even at the analogy level. Searle may not know Japanese or Chinese, but the algorithm Searle is executing certainly does. Searle is basically a transistor or processing unit in the scheme described above -- a component. I don't expect one of my neurons, or even my whole hippocampus, to contain my entire consciousness/self.
There's plenty of reasons to bag on the Kurzweil scenario. But you can't use the 'Chinese Room' thoughtexperiment to show a damn thing, because of its inherent bogosity.
gomi
A lot of people on the 'DeCSS is theft, not fair use' side seem to be missing an understanding of what 'Fair Use' is. 'Fair Use' applies to personal copies, not to distribution. Of course it would be illegal to start a movie theatre with your home videos and a big projector.
.avi, .mpg, .asf, .mov, or what-have-you on a hard-drive or CD, as long as (and this is the tricky part) you don't redistribute.
It is, however, perfectly legal to transfer your videos from (say) NTSC to PAL format, or (by extension) a big-ass
DeCSS has the legal status of a VCR: it can be used to copy, but is mostly used to view. And the copying is absolutely legal, as long as the copies aren't redistributed. DeCSS wasn't developed by breaking trade secrets -- it was developed by clean reverse engineering.
Anyone copying movies and selling or otherwise distributing them without the copyright holder's blessing is a fair target for a suit, but that principle applies equally to VCRs and DeCSS.
Neither the people who invented the VCR, nor the person who developed DeCSS, are or should be liable for the criminal actions of others -- it's like holding a murder trial for Henry Ford on account of everyone who's been run over.
gomi
If it's just a color-changing plastic layer on the disc, it should be relatively trivial to abrade it away with one of those 'repair your scratched CDs' kit thingees.
Presto, replayable DVD.
gomi
If you had a TV antenna in Canada and a few thousand miles of antenna cable, and hooked it up to a TV set in Arizona, to watch the Canadian freely-available public TV stream, ads and all, would that be 'theft'?
No. Of course not. That's exactly what iCraveTV is doing -- they're not charging for it (except in the form of a frame with banner ads), and they're not modifying the content or even removing the TV ads. All it does is let you watch Canadian TV wherever you are. The signal is freely available. The MPAA is doing stupid things again, just as it has throughout its existence. IP doesn't even really enter into it.
gomi
last i heard, women were still making $.70 to a man's $1
You heard wrong, pal. Those numbers were originally derived by adding up total income for all US men and all US women. Guess what? There's a lot more male billionaires, and they throw off the average a LOT. If the stats were derived in a useful way (by comparing people in comparable jobs, say male v. female front-line tech support staff), you'd find that
(a) there's no discernible difference and
(b) that stat won't let gender feminists stir up paranoia and hatred in their constituency.
Why are there more male billionaires?
(a) making money took some time before the Internet. Women's rights are a pretty new concept, 20 to 50 years old depending on how strict your definitions get. Women haven't had time to amass ludicrous wealth in similar numbers.
(b) fewer women in high-tech, where the fast money is being made. this is changing right now, as you watch (PREDICTION: 10 years from now, today's junior high schoolers will be high-tech kings and queens, and in rougly proportionate numbers).
gomi
Well, if it'll help save your opinion of Slashdot, no-one modded me up. Anyone with Karma>25 gets an automagic +1 to their score.
But you go on thinking of yourself as a victim if it'll make you feel better. Or start packing heat. It's amazing what a suitable self-defense option can do in the face of violent jerkitude. And the beauty part is, you don't have to be gay, or even oppressed! All people are equally entitled to self-defense!
Hell, that's actually a good idea. I bet heavily arming and training the queer component of the most reactionary US states would do...interesting...things to assault stats. The thing to remember is that the violent jerks are the aberration, not the norm.
off to research Guns for Gays,
gomi
Just because some women aren't intimidated by the good ole boy network doesn't mean that everything's okay.
. It works for you and I; our responsibility doesn't extend any further than that. I'll raise my children to get over this sort of silly thing, and I expect other folks to do the same. The attitude/society that produces these sorts of things is already dying; it's nice and socially conscious of you to want to help it along with a few kicks, but it's not strictly necessary.
One of my mom's favorite proverbs is "El que se mete a Redentor muere crucificado," which translates to "Trying to be a Redeemer gets you crucified." Only took a few nasty experiences trying to help some Extremely Broken People to realize the truth behind that: the world fundamentally resents attempts to help or save it, and in general would rather be left alone.
These days, I keep my generous, charitable, and compassionate impulses for the people I love, my close friends and family. And I expect other people to turn to their close friends and family for help when they need it, and not to me.
gomi