Oh right, I misunderstood. "If you disagree with me, you're a cheat." Now I understand your position.
I seriously don't know why I bother responding to ACs. The chances of them contributing anything worthwhile to the conversation aren't worth the effort.
Sony, for reasons I don't quite understand but are entirely up to them, seems unhappy about putting the publicly-available-and-not-competitively-relevant source code on their website
Probably because they don't want the bad press of an open source group claiming that Sony needs to open source all their source code if there's even one bit of GPL code sitting on the same media.
I know that's not what the GPL says, but it hasn't stopped certain companies (*cough* MySQL AB *cough*) from chasing after people waving that interpretation. After being in a company that was stung by MySQL, I'd give the same advice to anyone I talked to as well. Don't use GPL code unless you're willing to either: a) Open source everything you write b) Go to court to defend your interpretation of the GPL, because there's some real dicks out there (ab)using it.
Asimov doesn't state the how, but the ability to alter moods and memory at will are being worked on right as we speak. Hell just look up some of the Japanese research that lets you control people like a remote control car and that's old news
Controlling another body mechanically is entirely different from permanently manipulating peoples' impressions, emotions and opinions. Unless you're aware of any successful research into mind control drugs, no, we don't know how to do that.
machines can duplicate Mule's ability so it's not 'mystical' in nature, it really is just something we don't understand
Neither's the force. Mitochlorians! It's all biological.
Unlike The Force which can let a meatbag of a couple dozen kilos stop the forward momentum of starship the size of a city that we blatantly know is impossible unless our understanding of reality is totally skewed.
Hell, that's easy to explain. Assuming the ship in question has retro-rockets or some other means of negating its own momentum, all the Force user has to do is activate them remotely. We can do that already with garage door openers. It's just endowing a character with those abilities without the encumbrance of machinery, right?
'm willing to forgive that the way I forgive FTL
Which is really when we come to the crux of the issue. You're ready to make allowances for stuff you like, but not for stuff you don't.
In other news, a petty vandal has been refused entry, after stating his intent to "paint the town red". I wonder how long until the DHS outlaws metaphors.
Asimov's Foundation series though I'd firmly put into science fiction. Asimov never pulls magical answers out of his ass, it might be a fantastical extrapolation of known or theorized phenomena but its not just random bs
How are the Mule's abilities more scientifically-based than "the Force"?
I think your sarcasm emitter is broken. Why would you think I treat words differently based on their age?
If someone used it incorrectly - "Get jiggly wit it", for example - I probably would, as it conveys a different meaning, and I'd have to enquire as to what they really meant. That's the whole problem - if someone has to reply with "what did you mean?" then you did a bad job of communicating.
If by "ancient and venerable" you mean a little over a decade. And I correct the speaker now, when I understand him, because when he's drifted into unintelligibility due to lack of understanding of the language he uses, it's too late.
Bear in mind, that they weren't actually defined in that order.
"Third World" was the first to be coined, by a French historian. It came from a time when everything was being seen through the lens of the Cold War. He was drawing attention to the fact that there were actually a large number of countries that were being totally ignored by the simplistic dichotomy of Capitalism vs Communism. First and Second worlds were coined retrospectively. Incidentally, I wouldn't say that "undeveloped" is part of the definition; it just so happened that most of the neutral countries were underdeveloped (because neither bloc put any effort into recruiting countries with minimal resource).
I disagree that it was used as a ranking, although the positions of "First" and "Second" obviously display the prejudices of those doing the labelling. "Third World" is more a recognition of an excluded middle, the same way it was used in the "Third Way" political movement.
If you treat words as not having meaning, you lose the ability to communicate. You'll end up with a thousand synonyms for "shit", and be unable to communicate complex concepts. Language tends towards the pejorative. Think of how many words we have for something being undesirable - "shit", "sucks", "blows", "gay", "lame", "dumb", "retarded" - just a few off the top of my head. Their use as pejorative makes their literal meaning only accessibly by contextual analysis - and that makes it harder to communicate. To the point now that it's difficult to explain the concept of something interfering with the development of another thing using the word "retard", without some PC-nutjob jumping all over you for discriminating against the disabled.
That either you support anthropogenic climate change, or are against all the things it lists.
Mountaintop removal mining...
Which isn't a major contributor to climate change
The radiation given off by the occasional nuclear clusterfuck
Which has nothing to do with climate change
The pollution given off by coal-fired power plants
That one I'll give you as both affecting health and contributing to climate change - and yet, you don't need to support climate change to want to endorse renewable energy.
It's officially a third world country in terms of press freedom now
No, it's pretty much the definition of a first world country. The term "third world" has pretty much lost all meaning after the end of the Cold War. At best, it's a vague synonym for "undeveloped country'. At worst, it's nothing but a pejorative.
Instead, the general model is to be phony, to say things and do things and adopt mannerisms as part of putting on a show in order to impress people, win their approval, present a front of conformity to be counted as "one of them" ("them" being whatever sub-culture they subscribe to)
What, you mean like posting about how only stupid, dysfunctional people like Facebook on Slashdot?
I'm dubious about the effectiveness of pushing CO2 reductions as a means of controlling global warming (due to international politics as much as science), and yet I strongly push for renewable technologies for many of the reasons listed there - sustainability and energy independence chief among them.
Even of those claims made there, a good half of them are irrelevant to CO2 reductions. Healthy children? CO2 isn't a pollutant, it's not going to make your children sick. Livable cities? Again, smog, not caused by CO2. Clean air, water - again, not CO2. Green jobs? Depends on how many other jobs are lost in the process. Preserve rainforests? Rainforest deforestation is being scaled down for entirely different reasons than global warming. The amount of CO2 released from old forest destruction is a very minor contributor. CO2 sequestering might result in more trees being planted, but probably not rainforests - their trees aren't the best suited for that task.
What does their attention to detail have to do with their domineering attitude?
Apple's products are all "our way or the highway", and use lock-in to try and keep people in their eco-system. It's stuff like that that the OP was complaining about, not the quality of their products.
What they could do is provide the same sort of "reviewed application" market that Apple does, but as an option (as I believe Apple should).
The nice thing about the Android mindset, is that this can be done. Anyone who wants to can setup such a service. If there isn't such a service, then it's just a demonstration that there isn't sufficient demand for such a service - at least, there's not sufficient demand to cover the additional expense of such a marketplace. It's a very free-market approach.
Personal opinion is fine, but by what criteria do you divide Star Wars out from Science Fiction? Because it has mental powers? That eliminates whole swathes of sci-fi - Anne McCaffrey's Talent/Hive series, Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, Julian May's Pliocene Exile, Asimov's Foundation series, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, etc.
Star Wars is generally considered Sci-Fi because it deals with advanced technology (light sabres, deathstars, space ships) and the mental powers it shows have an (in-universe) scientific basis, rather than a mystical one.
In my experience, I find people who try and put it in the fantasy category do so because of an elitist attitude towards science-fiction, that deplores anything popular. It's the fact that Star Wars is popular, rather than any element inherent to the stories, that drives them to try and fit it into the fantasy genre.
Ok, so Twitter refuses the opportunity to self-censor, and the Indian government gets its ISPs to block Twitter due to lack of censorship. Oh look, we're back where we started. No, Twitter doesn't operate on infrastructure in every country, but it needs the co-operation of that infrastructure. And governments all around the world have started being a bit heavy-handed when it comes to the whole "neutral infrastructure" issue.
So your solution would be, instead of Indians having a partially-censored network, you want Twitter to voluntarily fully censor the network for them. Whose side are you on again?
The vast majority of the time, new laws do not need to be passed. As the body of legislation builds up, there should be fewer and fewer edge-cases requiring legislation, with exceptions for massive, game-changing developments (such as the explosion of internet availability).
A congress that did nothing except in exceptional circumstances would be a net gain over one that passes unneeded legislation the majority of the time, and passes kneejerk laws in response to exceptional events, so they can get back to the usual business of rubberstamping corporate lobbyist legislation.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure you read that thread straight? The AC I responded to was not the OP, and my first response was not a semantic argument.
Oh right, I misunderstood. "If you disagree with me, you're a cheat." Now I understand your position.
I seriously don't know why I bother responding to ACs. The chances of them contributing anything worthwhile to the conversation aren't worth the effort.
Of course, using GPL software is free for all, with no restrictions whatsoever.
I'm a developer. I use software libraries, and yes, they ship with the code. Stop being a semantic Nazi
Don't prepare and distribute derivative works of GPL code unless you're willing to comply with the terms of the GPL.
And you are prepared to go to court to defend your interpretation of what a "derivative work" is.
Sony, for reasons I don't quite understand but are entirely up to them, seems unhappy about putting the publicly-available-and-not-competitively-relevant source code on their website
Probably because they don't want the bad press of an open source group claiming that Sony needs to open source all their source code if there's even one bit of GPL code sitting on the same media.
I know that's not what the GPL says, but it hasn't stopped certain companies (*cough* MySQL AB *cough*) from chasing after people waving that interpretation. After being in a company that was stung by MySQL, I'd give the same advice to anyone I talked to as well. Don't use GPL code unless you're willing to either:
a) Open source everything you write
b) Go to court to defend your interpretation of the GPL, because there's some real dicks out there (ab)using it.
Asimov doesn't state the how, but the ability to alter moods and memory at will are being worked on right as we speak. Hell just look up some of the Japanese research that lets you control people like a remote control car and that's old news
Controlling another body mechanically is entirely different from permanently manipulating peoples' impressions, emotions and opinions. Unless you're aware of any successful research into mind control drugs, no, we don't know how to do that.
machines can duplicate Mule's ability so it's not 'mystical' in nature, it really is just something we don't understand
Neither's the force. Mitochlorians! It's all biological.
Unlike The Force which can let a meatbag of a couple dozen kilos stop the forward momentum of starship the size of a city that we blatantly know is impossible unless our understanding of reality is totally skewed.
Hell, that's easy to explain. Assuming the ship in question has retro-rockets or some other means of negating its own momentum, all the Force user has to do is activate them remotely. We can do that already with garage door openers. It's just endowing a character with those abilities without the encumbrance of machinery, right?
'm willing to forgive that the way I forgive FTL
Which is really when we come to the crux of the issue. You're ready to make allowances for stuff you like, but not for stuff you don't.
It was a +3 Nerdslayer dagger
In other news, a petty vandal has been refused entry, after stating his intent to "paint the town red". I wonder how long until the DHS outlaws metaphors.
Asimov's Foundation series though I'd firmly put into science fiction. Asimov never pulls magical answers out of his ass, it might be a fantastical extrapolation of known or theorized phenomena but its not just random bs
How are the Mule's abilities more scientifically-based than "the Force"?
Yeah, but then it decided to go up against the Romans...
I think your sarcasm emitter is broken. Why would you think I treat words differently based on their age?
If someone used it incorrectly - "Get jiggly wit it", for example - I probably would, as it conveys a different meaning, and I'd have to enquire as to what they really meant. That's the whole problem - if someone has to reply with "what did you mean?" then you did a bad job of communicating.
If by "ancient and venerable" you mean a little over a decade. And I correct the speaker now, when I understand him, because when he's drifted into unintelligibility due to lack of understanding of the language he uses, it's too late.
Bear in mind, that they weren't actually defined in that order.
"Third World" was the first to be coined, by a French historian. It came from a time when everything was being seen through the lens of the Cold War. He was drawing attention to the fact that there were actually a large number of countries that were being totally ignored by the simplistic dichotomy of Capitalism vs Communism. First and Second worlds were coined retrospectively. Incidentally, I wouldn't say that "undeveloped" is part of the definition; it just so happened that most of the neutral countries were underdeveloped (because neither bloc put any effort into recruiting countries with minimal resource).
I disagree that it was used as a ranking, although the positions of "First" and "Second" obviously display the prejudices of those doing the labelling. "Third World" is more a recognition of an excluded middle, the same way it was used in the "Third Way" political movement.
Language changes, but words have meaning.
If you treat words as not having meaning, you lose the ability to communicate. You'll end up with a thousand synonyms for "shit", and be unable to communicate complex concepts. Language tends towards the pejorative. Think of how many words we have for something being undesirable - "shit", "sucks", "blows", "gay", "lame", "dumb", "retarded" - just a few off the top of my head. Their use as pejorative makes their literal meaning only accessibly by contextual analysis - and that makes it harder to communicate. To the point now that it's difficult to explain the concept of something interfering with the development of another thing using the word "retard", without some PC-nutjob jumping all over you for discriminating against the disabled.
What false dichotomy.
That either you support anthropogenic climate change, or are against all the things it lists.
Mountaintop removal mining ...
Which isn't a major contributor to climate change
The radiation given off by the occasional nuclear clusterfuck
Which has nothing to do with climate change
The pollution given off by coal-fired power plants
That one I'll give you as both affecting health and contributing to climate change - and yet, you don't need to support climate change to want to endorse renewable energy.
It's officially a third world country in terms of press freedom now
No, it's pretty much the definition of a first world country. The term "third world" has pretty much lost all meaning after the end of the Cold War. At best, it's a vague synonym for "undeveloped country'. At worst, it's nothing but a pejorative.
Instead, the general model is to be phony, to say things and do things and adopt mannerisms as part of putting on a show in order to impress people, win their approval, present a front of conformity to be counted as "one of them" ("them" being whatever sub-culture they subscribe to)
What, you mean like posting about how only stupid, dysfunctional people like Facebook on Slashdot?
Not to mention it's apparently a self-selected, self-reported "study" aimed at girls who read a technology magazine.
Yay, a false dichotomy in cartoon form.
I'm dubious about the effectiveness of pushing CO2 reductions as a means of controlling global warming (due to international politics as much as science), and yet I strongly push for renewable technologies for many of the reasons listed there - sustainability and energy independence chief among them.
Even of those claims made there, a good half of them are irrelevant to CO2 reductions. Healthy children? CO2 isn't a pollutant, it's not going to make your children sick. Livable cities? Again, smog, not caused by CO2. Clean air, water - again, not CO2. Green jobs? Depends on how many other jobs are lost in the process. Preserve rainforests? Rainforest deforestation is being scaled down for entirely different reasons than global warming. The amount of CO2 released from old forest destruction is a very minor contributor. CO2 sequestering might result in more trees being planted, but probably not rainforests - their trees aren't the best suited for that task.
What does their attention to detail have to do with their domineering attitude?
Apple's products are all "our way or the highway", and use lock-in to try and keep people in their eco-system. It's stuff like that that the OP was complaining about, not the quality of their products.
What they could do is provide the same sort of "reviewed application" market that Apple does, but as an option (as I believe Apple should).
The nice thing about the Android mindset, is that this can be done. Anyone who wants to can setup such a service. If there isn't such a service, then it's just a demonstration that there isn't sufficient demand for such a service - at least, there's not sufficient demand to cover the additional expense of such a marketplace. It's a very free-market approach.
Personal opinion is fine, but by what criteria do you divide Star Wars out from Science Fiction? Because it has mental powers? That eliminates whole swathes of sci-fi - Anne McCaffrey's Talent/Hive series, Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, Julian May's Pliocene Exile, Asimov's Foundation series, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, etc.
Star Wars is generally considered Sci-Fi because it deals with advanced technology (light sabres, deathstars, space ships) and the mental powers it shows have an (in-universe) scientific basis, rather than a mystical one.
In my experience, I find people who try and put it in the fantasy category do so because of an elitist attitude towards science-fiction, that deplores anything popular. It's the fact that Star Wars is popular, rather than any element inherent to the stories, that drives them to try and fit it into the fantasy genre.
Which is a subgenre of science fiction.
Ok, so Twitter refuses the opportunity to self-censor, and the Indian government gets its ISPs to block Twitter due to lack of censorship. Oh look, we're back where we started. No, Twitter doesn't operate on infrastructure in every country, but it needs the co-operation of that infrastructure. And governments all around the world have started being a bit heavy-handed when it comes to the whole "neutral infrastructure" issue.
So your solution would be, instead of Indians having a partially-censored network, you want Twitter to voluntarily fully censor the network for them. Whose side are you on again?
You say that like it's a bad thing.
The vast majority of the time, new laws do not need to be passed. As the body of legislation builds up, there should be fewer and fewer edge-cases requiring legislation, with exceptions for massive, game-changing developments (such as the explosion of internet availability).
A congress that did nothing except in exceptional circumstances would be a net gain over one that passes unneeded legislation the majority of the time, and passes kneejerk laws in response to exceptional events, so they can get back to the usual business of rubberstamping corporate lobbyist legislation.