Pretty much the dictionary definition of culture is development of arts created with free public participation and unrestricted performance of derivative works. I don't know of any developed and many developing counties where this is a common case. Perhaps Netherlands is hosting the Pirate Bay, but I don't see any derivative works based on xvid torrents that they host.
I don't think anybody here is claiming that Microsoft monopoly killed open source alternatives in the 90s. In fact, their greatest downfall has been long delays in adjusting to new market demands. First seamless Internet access, then security, mobile devices, gaming consoles, netbooks... So far they have managed to squeeze early players such as Netscape and Palm out of the market by shear power of money and often illegal OEM licensing arrangements. But money alone can not kill open source and Microsoft has been losing whenever a decent OSS alternative does become available. Would you rather host a website on Redhat 5 or Windows 98 or for that matter even Vista? Can you justify purchasing and managing thousands of Office 2007 licenses for your company's casual word processing needs when you can just deploy Open Office?
It's also worth pointing out that laypeople didn't really hate IBM or AT&T when they dominated the market and many of today's market leaders like Intel, Google, Coca Cola, PG&E or iPods do not really inspire widespread distaste. Microsoft's PR problems extend far beyond their monopoly status and have to do more in their lack of vision and unwillingness to evolve even to improve their own bottom line.
Your TV starts in a second because its boot sequence is generally about as long as it takes to copy the firmware into RAM. Its hardware is fixed, the software doesn't have to go around poking for it, and its entire firmware is probably under a megabyte of code loaded directly from NOR flash.
Oh well, my computer is equipped with a hard drive that can probably copy around 128MB of "firmware" (kernel and working sets of running processes saved from last boot) within a second. Its hardware is fixed and I am willing to press some key if I upgrade it and need the OS to poke around for changes at boot. So where is the justification for degraded performance aside from programmers' laziness? Fast boot requires some clever thinking, but not more so than writing text to CGA with maximum possible speed but without now.
and not live under an oppressive government ( or government blessed monopolies )
You got to be kidding! If a business is failing and a government gives it $700bn cash to stay afloat, how is that not a monopoly? I would rather have a government-run ISP than government-run banking and airlines.
In a way, yes. Most of the world doesn't have access to penicillin, soap or velcro. Yet, if even a few students in each area have Internet access they have a chance to learn about these things and at least teach others how to minimize their chance of falling sick without soap or penicillin.
Like letting women drive and hold jobs, or letting men listen to music. The only purpose of a country is to treat its citizens right, and technological achievements do not mean zip if they are not applied for that purpose.
Which school classes exactly helped you in the real world? Had a need to solve a cubic equation at work lately? Your car wouldn't start without you knowing quantum physics. Lets face it, every day life and work need completely different skills, and not ones that can be measured by a test with point score. Even programming needs zero math skills.
Yes, a good school grade will get you into a good university and a good diploma might lend you a higher-paying jobs. But that is just an admission that our education system is essentially as good as a Madrassa where learning consists of memorizing Quran verses. If someone can get away with a life experience degree from a "quality non-accredited Internet-based college", I say more power to them.
Personally, I think she is entitled to her beliefs. She, her husband and all her five children have to live with them, but it's still better that way than the government deciding which fetus lives or dies. All I am asking is that I am allowed the same right to make these decisions for my family. I - thanks God! - never had to consider raising a child with Down's syndrome, but as I understand, it does not cause acute suffering and painful death. However, I am afraid that Palin wants to force my wife to have a baby with cystic fibrosis, or even a brain dead one like Terry Shivo. I find that artificially keeping these babies alive with medical technology only to have die in teens, when they are fully aware of what is happening, to be no less barbaric than Nazi medical experiments.
But in any case, pro-life vs pro-choice debate is just a smokescreen to distract people from the fact that the candidates will not do anything to actually make a difference in our own lives. If evangelical voters really believed that Obama was going to lower their taxes by 30%, they would elect him in a heartbeat. Likewise for liberals and McCain. But realistically, Obama will raise our taxes to pay for other people's healthcare and McCain to stay in Iraq for 100 years. So instead we go for the big drama, however unlikely it is to affect us personally. I mean, is it that difficult to put on a condom?
Ah, the irony. If you already decided to use XML and HTTP to communicate to your database, what's the big deal in avoiding SOAP? On the other hand, if you actually care about efficiency, why would you want to send <myvalue>12345678</myvalue> instead of a 4 byte integer? Yes, you can still have open schema and a tool to generate a human readable representation, even XML. The difference is just that you don't have to repeat that schema 1000 times in your document. Even for Javascript apps, a minimalist form of JSON or even ASCII85 encoding strings can seriously cut down on overhead compared to XML.
That is why, in my case, game companies are losing competition with themselves a few years back. There are thousands more DOS through Windows 98 games that I can finish over my lifetime. Even a hundred of them at a time will only take negligible space on my upgraded 300GB Macbook Pro hard drive. Copy protection methods, including ones involving manuals, have been thoroughly researched, OCRed and cracked - no need to hunt for CDs or serial numbers. Parallels or DOSBox cover all my graphics needs without having to reboot to Bootcamp or worse be tied to a desktop. As for graphics, well - if the game took $100M to produce, how long do you think it will take me to get up to speed to play? With a wife and a kid, I would rather try something in magenta, cyan and white if it means I can actually play the damn thing.
I find much the same problems with Vista vs Windows 2000, except that, unlike games, there are many modern alternatives and most of them do not use DRM.
but the number of households with electricity and telephones has exploded since the turn of the 20th century (with little to no bitching to the effect of 'oh noes! our can't keep up with demand'
I guess you missed recent buzzwords like "local warming", "energy independence" or "rolling brownouts".
Fine, just do not pass laws requiring me to masturbate by the window or reveal embarrassing information during court proceedings. If somehow that's necessary, I sure hope there are rules and limits on public dissemination.
So, what is your point? Surely, the images of me doing various things at home are theoretically available to my neighbor with good binoculars, who happens to be watching at the right time. Does that mean that it should be also made available to two billion of my neighbors on Internet? If so, is it too much for me to ask that at least I am identified by initials rather than full name?
mythology that includes descriptions of an all-powerful, all-loving God that - oddly - still to this day likes to kill innocent children with lukemia and bolts of lighting.
While I have not really taken a position about this mythology, don't you think we share some responsibility for prolonging suffering of innocent children with medical science when recovery is long past plausible?
There's a big difference between a 4 year old shooting someone (they can barely speak properly, let alone make sense of what they're doing) and a 16 year old shooting someone.
Then why doesn't a 16 year old have different civil rights compared to a 4 year old? If someone is responsible enough for their actions to spend the rest of their life behind bars for a bad judgement that lasted for 5 minutes, they should be allowed the freedom to escape the circumstances that are driving them to such rage. For example, leave abusive parents, find a regular sexual partner of their choice, relax with a cigarette or a beer, stop going to school where the gang members congregate or move to another city. It also seems fair that those help accountable for following laws are allowed to vote for politicians that pass them.
Throughout most of human history, adulthood started from around 12 years of age. This is not such a terrible idea, but it must be done consistently or not at all. We can not first deny someone basic control of their lives and even the most intimate functions of their bodies and then turn around and hold them 100% responsible for what they do.
I can't wait to see what can be done with vibrating and location-sensing functions of the controller once I strap it on a little differently from usual.
If I do and I were to crash and become brain damaged, I'd be the first to say I was asking for it (assuming I was capable of that.) It's not like it would kill other people.
So you don't mind if you get a much lower priority medical help after such an accident? A neurosurgeon's time is better spent on those other people, whom you presumably do not want to deprive of a prompt surgery to repair an aneurism.
It's not so much about spying as what you do with the information. I can promote Islam or Communism right here on slashdot and, although NSA can probably hack into my account and get the contact info, I am not likely to be tortured and imprisoned. Neither are my comments blocked from the general public. On the other hand, discussing Falun Gong or Tibet independence from an olympic Internet cafe is likely to cause unpleasant consequences.
Did you instructor present at least one solid example of a bystander getting sued for rendering aid which can even remotely be considered reasonable given his/her skill set and circumstances? No, you should not do a tracheostomy with a swiss army knife if you are not a doctor, nurse or at least a veterinarian. And if you are taking 10 people on a 3 day rafting trip away from civilization, you will be expected to perform certain first aid competently. But applying a bandage on someone's non life-threatening cut would be quite legally safe.
Sounds like your first aid teacher is suffering from prejudices.
Well, they have been up for just two days. It took Google much more than $25 million in free dinners, heated toilet seats and employee shuttle service to get to their current state.
I don't know if their idea has merit. Personally, I don't like the 3 column result grid. But if you are one of the world's top software engineers and are taking a risk to work in a startup, wouldn't you expect to feel that you are appreciated? Those fruit bowls would be like $1/employee/day considering that not everyone will have one every day after the initial excitement period.
But I don't see a problem with a disabled voter getting assistance to do an infrequent task like voting rather than having a special purpose automated machine for that purpose. You can choose a volunteer from any organization of your choice for assistance, making the possibility that your vote will be tampered with or inappropriately disclosed rather remote. Lets spend those tax millions on optic nerve regeneration research rather than a machine that a blind person might use twice a year.
People also have a right not to void for a president that is black or female and so far that is what most people chose to do. Did Democratic party make a mistake of endorsing the most qualified candidates regardless?
Your right to vote has been judged so important as to be protected even at the cost of allowing women and children of our society to be ruled by rich white men for hundreds of years. Better exercise it responsibly. Would you really prefer Obama to disclose his medical records and effectively end the election based on what people will read or assume in McCain's?
Well, if I was dragged into appendix surgery without having appendicitis, it would also suck pretty badly and I would hope someone would bring a lawyer to get me out. On the other hand, if I was constantly hearing voices telling me to kill the doctor, watching TV, wearing shoes or watching a guy playing "die hard" would give me some unnecessary ideas. Not that your "looney bin" was great, but you would hate even the one fantastic for schizophrenics and suicidally depressed. You need a completely different clinic for hypnagogic hallucinations.
Faced with an onslaught of diseases, a fair portion of people aren't willing to even allow stem cells to be harvested from aborted fetuses.
I am, for one, not willing to allow it. Why create a possible conflict of interest for the patient or the doctor when there is already an abundant supply of embryonic stem cells from leftover embryos in fertility clinics? Those embryos are anyway destroyed, so there is no issue of protecting a potential life.
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Pretty much the dictionary definition of culture is development of arts created with free public participation and unrestricted performance of derivative works. I don't know of any developed and many developing counties where this is a common case. Perhaps Netherlands is hosting the Pirate Bay, but I don't see any derivative works based on xvid torrents that they host.
I don't think anybody here is claiming that Microsoft monopoly killed open source alternatives in the 90s. In fact, their greatest downfall has been long delays in adjusting to new market demands. First seamless Internet access, then security, mobile devices, gaming consoles, netbooks... So far they have managed to squeeze early players such as Netscape and Palm out of the market by shear power of money and often illegal OEM licensing arrangements. But money alone can not kill open source and Microsoft has been losing whenever a decent OSS alternative does become available. Would you rather host a website on Redhat 5 or Windows 98 or for that matter even Vista? Can you justify purchasing and managing thousands of Office 2007 licenses for your company's casual word processing needs when you can just deploy Open Office?
It's also worth pointing out that laypeople didn't really hate IBM or AT&T when they dominated the market and many of today's market leaders like Intel, Google, Coca Cola, PG&E or iPods do not really inspire widespread distaste. Microsoft's PR problems extend far beyond their monopoly status and have to do more in their lack of vision and unwillingness to evolve even to improve their own bottom line.
Your TV starts in a second because its boot sequence is generally about as long as it takes to copy the firmware into RAM. Its hardware is fixed, the software doesn't have to go around poking for it, and its entire firmware is probably under a megabyte of code loaded directly from NOR flash.
Oh well, my computer is equipped with a hard drive that can probably copy around 128MB of "firmware" (kernel and working sets of running processes saved from last boot) within a second. Its hardware is fixed and I am willing to press some key if I upgrade it and need the OS to poke around for changes at boot. So where is the justification for degraded performance aside from programmers' laziness? Fast boot requires some clever thinking, but not more so than writing text to CGA with maximum possible speed but without now.
and not live under an oppressive government ( or government blessed monopolies )
You got to be kidding! If a business is failing and a government gives it $700bn cash to stay afloat, how is that not a monopoly? I would rather have a government-run ISP than government-run banking and airlines.
In a way, yes. Most of the world doesn't have access to penicillin, soap or velcro. Yet, if even a few students in each area have Internet access they have a chance to learn about these things and at least teach others how to minimize their chance of falling sick without soap or penicillin.
Like letting women drive and hold jobs, or letting men listen to music. The only purpose of a country is to treat its citizens right, and technological achievements do not mean zip if they are not applied for that purpose.
Which school classes exactly helped you in the real world? Had a need to solve a cubic equation at work lately? Your car wouldn't start without you knowing quantum physics. Lets face it, every day life and work need completely different skills, and not ones that can be measured by a test with point score. Even programming needs zero math skills.
Yes, a good school grade will get you into a good university and a good diploma might lend you a higher-paying jobs. But that is just an admission that our education system is essentially as good as a Madrassa where learning consists of memorizing Quran verses. If someone can get away with a life experience degree from a "quality non-accredited Internet-based college", I say more power to them.
Personally, I think she is entitled to her beliefs. She, her husband and all her five children have to live with them, but it's still better that way than the government deciding which fetus lives or dies. All I am asking is that I am allowed the same right to make these decisions for my family. I - thanks God! - never had to consider raising a child with Down's syndrome, but as I understand, it does not cause acute suffering and painful death. However, I am afraid that Palin wants to force my wife to have a baby with cystic fibrosis, or even a brain dead one like Terry Shivo. I find that artificially keeping these babies alive with medical technology only to have die in teens, when they are fully aware of what is happening, to be no less barbaric than Nazi medical experiments.
But in any case, pro-life vs pro-choice debate is just a smokescreen to distract people from the fact that the candidates will not do anything to actually make a difference in our own lives. If evangelical voters really believed that Obama was going to lower their taxes by 30%, they would elect him in a heartbeat. Likewise for liberals and McCain. But realistically, Obama will raise our taxes to pay for other people's healthcare and McCain to stay in Iraq for 100 years. So instead we go for the big drama, however unlikely it is to affect us personally. I mean, is it that difficult to put on a condom?
Ah, the irony. If you already decided to use XML and HTTP to communicate to your database, what's the big deal in avoiding SOAP? On the other hand, if you actually care about efficiency, why would you want to send <myvalue>12345678</myvalue> instead of a 4 byte integer? Yes, you can still have open schema and a tool to generate a human readable representation, even XML. The difference is just that you don't have to repeat that schema 1000 times in your document. Even for Javascript apps, a minimalist form of JSON or even ASCII85 encoding strings can seriously cut down on overhead compared to XML.
That is why, in my case, game companies are losing competition with themselves a few years back. There are thousands more DOS through Windows 98 games that I can finish over my lifetime. Even a hundred of them at a time will only take negligible space on my upgraded 300GB Macbook Pro hard drive. Copy protection methods, including ones involving manuals, have been thoroughly researched, OCRed and cracked - no need to hunt for CDs or serial numbers. Parallels or DOSBox cover all my graphics needs without having to reboot to Bootcamp or worse be tied to a desktop. As for graphics, well - if the game took $100M to produce, how long do you think it will take me to get up to speed to play? With a wife and a kid, I would rather try something in magenta, cyan and white if it means I can actually play the damn thing.
I find much the same problems with Vista vs Windows 2000, except that, unlike games, there are many modern alternatives and most of them do not use DRM.
but the number of households with electricity and telephones has exploded since the turn of the 20th century (with little to no bitching to the effect of 'oh noes! our can't keep up with demand'
I guess you missed recent buzzwords like "local warming", "energy independence" or "rolling brownouts".
Why should I care who is abusing me - my government or my neighbors - when I am still getting screwed?
Fine, just do not pass laws requiring me to masturbate by the window or reveal embarrassing information during court proceedings. If somehow that's necessary, I sure hope there are rules and limits on public dissemination.
So, what is your point? Surely, the images of me doing various things at home are theoretically available to my neighbor with good binoculars, who happens to be watching at the right time. Does that mean that it should be also made available to two billion of my neighbors on Internet? If so, is it too much for me to ask that at least I am identified by initials rather than full name?
mythology that includes descriptions of an all-powerful, all-loving God that - oddly - still to this day likes to kill innocent children with lukemia and bolts of lighting.
While I have not really taken a position about this mythology, don't you think we share some responsibility for prolonging suffering of innocent children with medical science when recovery is long past plausible?
There's a big difference between a 4 year old shooting someone (they can barely speak properly, let alone make sense of what they're doing) and a 16 year old shooting someone.
Then why doesn't a 16 year old have different civil rights compared to a 4 year old? If someone is responsible enough for their actions to spend the rest of their life behind bars for a bad judgement that lasted for 5 minutes, they should be allowed the freedom to escape the circumstances that are driving them to such rage. For example, leave abusive parents, find a regular sexual partner of their choice, relax with a cigarette or a beer, stop going to school where the gang members congregate or move to another city. It also seems fair that those help accountable for following laws are allowed to vote for politicians that pass them.
Throughout most of human history, adulthood started from around 12 years of age. This is not such a terrible idea, but it must be done consistently or not at all. We can not first deny someone basic control of their lives and even the most intimate functions of their bodies and then turn around and hold them 100% responsible for what they do.
I can't wait to see what can be done with vibrating and location-sensing functions of the controller once I strap it on a little differently from usual.
If I do and I were to crash and become brain damaged, I'd be the first to say I was asking for it (assuming I was capable of that.) It's not like it would kill other people.
So you don't mind if you get a much lower priority medical help after such an accident? A neurosurgeon's time is better spent on those other people, whom you presumably do not want to deprive of a prompt surgery to repair an aneurism.
It's not so much about spying as what you do with the information. I can promote Islam or Communism right here on slashdot and, although NSA can probably hack into my account and get the contact info, I am not likely to be tortured and imprisoned. Neither are my comments blocked from the general public. On the other hand, discussing Falun Gong or Tibet independence from an olympic Internet cafe is likely to cause unpleasant consequences.
Did you instructor present at least one solid example of a bystander getting sued for rendering aid which can even remotely be considered reasonable given his/her skill set and circumstances? No, you should not do a tracheostomy with a swiss army knife if you are not a doctor, nurse or at least a veterinarian. And if you are taking 10 people on a 3 day rafting trip away from civilization, you will be expected to perform certain first aid competently. But applying a bandage on someone's non life-threatening cut would be quite legally safe.
Sounds like your first aid teacher is suffering from prejudices.
Well, they have been up for just two days. It took Google much more than $25 million in free dinners, heated toilet seats and employee shuttle service to get to their current state.
I don't know if their idea has merit. Personally, I don't like the 3 column result grid. But if you are one of the world's top software engineers and are taking a risk to work in a startup, wouldn't you expect to feel that you are appreciated? Those fruit bowls would be like $1/employee/day considering that not everyone will have one every day after the initial excitement period.
But I don't see a problem with a disabled voter getting assistance to do an infrequent task like voting rather than having a special purpose automated machine for that purpose. You can choose a volunteer from any organization of your choice for assistance, making the possibility that your vote will be tampered with or inappropriately disclosed rather remote. Lets spend those tax millions on optic nerve regeneration research rather than a machine that a blind person might use twice a year.
People also have a right not to void for a president that is black or female and so far that is what most people chose to do. Did Democratic party make a mistake of endorsing the most qualified candidates regardless?
Your right to vote has been judged so important as to be protected even at the cost of allowing women and children of our society to be ruled by rich white men for hundreds of years. Better exercise it responsibly. Would you really prefer Obama to disclose his medical records and effectively end the election based on what people will read or assume in McCain's?
Well, if I was dragged into appendix surgery without having appendicitis, it would also suck pretty badly and I would hope someone would bring a lawyer to get me out. On the other hand, if I was constantly hearing voices telling me to kill the doctor, watching TV, wearing shoes or watching a guy playing "die hard" would give me some unnecessary ideas. Not that your "looney bin" was great, but you would hate even the one fantastic for schizophrenics and suicidally depressed. You need a completely different clinic for hypnagogic hallucinations.
Faced with an onslaught of diseases, a fair portion of people aren't willing to even allow stem cells to be harvested from aborted fetuses.
I am, for one, not willing to allow it. Why create a possible conflict of interest for the patient or the doctor when there is already an abundant supply of embryonic stem cells from leftover embryos in fertility clinics? Those embryos are anyway destroyed, so there is no issue of protecting a potential life.