I could take a photo of me putting my wang between a pair of Cindi Lauper CDs and that wouldn't violate your hypothetical license.
You know, just his weekend I was a at a party, and I was saying to some people that, sooner or later, you can find any conceivable fetish on the internet.
And it's posted by "Michael Hunt (585391)", no less!
Too bad the [Firefox] logo is non-free and will never be checked into public CVS.
Hey, guess what? My signature, my slashdot username and password, and my likeness (i.e., picture),are also non-free and will never be checked into CVS. You can use the ideas in my Slashdot comments, but you can't sign them "orthogonal".
I may grant you a license to use my code -- or other ideas --, but I'm never going to grant you any license yo go around and sign my name to your work. And that's the whole issue here: the Firefox logo is not crucial to the compilation of Firefox code; nothing in the code reads any secret checksums steganographed into the logo.
But the logo is an essential imprimatur that declares a particular build to be an official build, with all that connotes -- such as a well founded belief that it represents the actual work of the official development team and is not likely to be a trojan exploit.
All that not having the logo in CVS deprives you of is bragging rights that aren't yours to claim.
Napster could start to increase market share in the more profitable business of selling monthly subscriptions, where customers can listen to -- but not own -- as many songs as they want each month for $9.95
Of course it's more profitable -- you're tied to the service by an umbilical cord, and as soon as you stop paying, you lose all access to the music, no matter how much you've paid up to that point!
There's a reason Americans are so big on the home buying thing: they don't want to pay rent for the rest of their lives.
Let's do some math: $10/month = $120/year = $1200/decade. So if after paying my 1200 bucks, I decide to stop subscribing -- or Napster goes out of business, then I have, let's do some more math: squat! No music for my money.
And of course, my subscription won't work at work -- my employer won't want the bandwidth cost of my streaming --, and it won't work on my portable, because it'll all be DRM'd streams.
If I want to listen without owning, there's this thing called radio. Since that's almost wholly dominated by Clear Channel Homogeneity, I re-phrase: Internet radio.
But no way will I subscribe to ephemeral music encumbered by Digital Restrictions Management.
Re:My Family.
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So please do not put down pet owners or say they are freaks. You may simply not understand the bond that people have with their animals. I know that I consider Cricket to be my son and when he gets a shot, he reaches for me just like any child would to their parent.
The twisty paths natural selection takes through "problem space" never ceases to amaze me.
Humans are neotenous apes: our maturity is delayed, our childhood prolonged, in order that we can take the years required to train our over-sized brains to modify our environment to our species's needs. That big brain is our only real strength as a species -- we are slower than lions, weaker than chimps, less robust than bears -- and that brain is only an advantage after years of education, years during which the juvenile human is essentially defenseless.
This extreme K-selected reproductive strategy -- K selection meaning that rather than produce many offspring requiring little or no parental investment (or "r-selection"), humans produce relatively few (although not as few as gorillas) offspring that require tremendous parental investment over a period of decades.
Clearly, humans unwilling or unable to make an investment in their offspring will have far fewer -- if any -- grandchildren: or in other words, lack of parental investment in a species requiring extreme K-selection will be severely penalized by natural selection. So humans evolution must either develop traits that encourage parental investment, or abandon K-selection and the big, slowly educated brain.
And so evolution has -- as usual -- taken a indirect course: parental investment per se may not seem all that fun, but what seems fulfilling to humans "just happens" to encourage parental investment: pair bonding between couples who become parents, a desire to have children and a family in the first place, a joy in the touch and smile of the child, the feeling of being needed when the child "gets a shot, [and] reaches for me just like any child".
What's even more amazing about the twisty paths adaptation takes is that these desires are so profoundly inculcated in humans (despite that big brain, it seems that we have more and more complex instincts than most other animals) that when we can't get the fulfillment that adaption has made us hunger for by having children of our own, we'll actually go so far as to adopt children.
Now think about that.
Adopting -- at least outside one's own family -- does nothing to propagate the adopter's genes. Indeed, adoption precludes using those same resources to contribute to a sibling's children -- who at least shares one-quarter of the adopter's genes --, or leaving the person with whom you're infertile, in the hopes that you'll be fertile with someone else. Adoption essentially means the extinction of your particular unique combination of genes -- the end of the branch that is you, after some three billion years -- with all those resources placed at the disposal of some entirely un-related gene line. It's a bizarre squandering of the efforts of your gene line over the three billion years of its refinement from the first proto-bateria through to your parents.
Now consider the parent poster: he doesn't support his sister's kids -- who share one-quarter of his genes. He doesn't adopt a child who is essentially a distance cousin, a member of his tribe. He doesn't even adopt a child from Brazil, a fellow human who at least shares 6 million years of evolution with him.
No, the parent poster adopts three canines -- members not of the same species, or even genus or order -- animals with which he has the same genetic affinity as with any placental mammal.
But that's what's so interesting -- he adopts these dogs not because they are genetically closely related to him, but because evolution has shaped him -- in a uniquely human way -- to need and desire the role of a parent, however he can get it. And evoluti
O Tempora, O Mores!
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[The 21st century's answer to Aristotle, Euripides and Sophocles] launched a social networking site for dogs, 8,000+ pooches have their own Web page on Dogster.com, complete with mug shots, personal stories and listings of likes and pet peeves.
Ha! Take that, Library of Alexandria!
Guess you don't look so special now, with your dusty old Greek plays and crap, huh?
Well, Media Player does have the ability to automatically update your WMA/MP3 files with tag info from the internet. So I guess it does already modify your files, if you enable that option (I think it is enabled by default, but you can turn it off during the install).
It is apparently enabled by default. I take great care to set up my mp3 tags "just so", using the excellent OSS MP3BookHelper.
I took my portable to work one day, and in order to charge the battery, I plugged it in as a USB drive and played my mp3s with Windows XP's Media Player.
Naturally, Media Player went out and started downloading supplementary information about the tracks being played, including a.jpeg of the album cover. Ok, more than I asked for, and I don't need Microsoft cataloging my music, but not terrible.
But then, once Media Player discovered that there were MP3s on the drive, it insisted on iterating over the entire 60GB drive, in order to make a "convenient" database of my mp3s. Now, recall, the whole point of using Media Payer had been to recharge the portable's battery via USB. Iterating over the entire drive, of course, ran down the battery faster than the USB current could recharge it.
Then, to provide further "convenience", Media Player -- without so much as asking -- also rewrote the Mp3 tags I'd worked so hard to get the way I wanted them, adding proprietary Microsoft tags that didn't conform to the ID3 tag specification (the tag names were longer than four bytes, being prefixed with something like "MediaPlayer/"), and, worse (iirc) using its own judgment to rewrite some existing tags.
It's this sort of attitude on Microsoft's part -- that they are going to "help" me, whether I like it or not -- that more than anything else drives me away from using Microsoft products.
I have no problem whatsoever with treating everybody as a friend [for the purposes of sharing copyrighted materials via p2p] (yes, there are different 'levels' of friend, like all other friends.), and I have no trouble sharing with all my friends.
Great! Friends, I need to "borrow" $20.
Unfortunately, this time you'll have to share your own money, not an evil record company's money, and I don't actually plan to give it back to you.
I mean, as long as you can re-define "friends" to mean "people I've never met who share my musical tastes and my ethical blind spots", can't I be as intellectually (dis)honest and re-define "borrow" too?
(I am reminded of the Cowbirds in Walt Kelly's Pogo, socialist agitators whose motto was "To share! To share what others' have!")
I don't mean this as a troll, but it seems to me that if the US courts did something like this to a small business man (rather than to Satan), the slashdot crowd would be screaming about Ashcroft and free speech rights.
Two issues here: even an ACLU liberal like me won't argue that free speech is so absolute as to preclude laws against slander or libel. And most of us would be willing to have limits on threatening speech, although this is more subject to abuse.
The second issue is that "free speech" is very much an American idea. That's not to say that freedom is unknown in Europe, but Europe is far more willing to restrict speech that would (generally) be considered protected in the U.S. Germany, especially, is far more willing to subjugate free speech to social order, as a result of seeing the particular zeal with which certain very bad ideas were formerly so lovingly embraced by German listeners.
I'm referring, of course, to Germany's Nazi past: as a result, Germany law holds social order -- the protection of ideals of democratic government -- to be more important that a right to the exhortation of Nazi "hate speech", including not only speech in favor of Fascism but also Fascism's ugly underpinnings, such as racist and anti-Semitic speech, and minimization of Fascism's consequences, such as Holocaust denial.
Other European nations are also more leery of speech that is too stark a reminder of history, as we saw with France's restriction of eBay's sale of Nazi memorabilia. Britain, too, is less concerned about free speech, but limits speech less through hate-speech laws than through far easier to get judgments against libel and slander.
One of the strongest arguments of free speech advocates in the U.S. is that the best antidote to "bad" speech is not suppression, but instead the "free marketplace of ideas": "bad" speech is supposed to generate counter-arguments against what it advocates, allowing a free people to freely weigh both sides of the question and -- presumably -- end up even more strongly against the "bad" speech. (I keep using scare quotes around "bad" not because I'm a fan of hate speech, but because this argument for free speech presumes that it is up to each listener, and not a government, to determine in his own conscience what speech is "bad".)
I'm inclined to agree with this analysis, but furthermore, I can't see what alternative to it allows a people truly to be free, and I worry that suppression of hate speech in Europe -- and Germany in particular -- is just a tacit acknowledgement that these countries don't really believe that all the demons of their past have truly been put to rest, that they fear that Fascism might again prove irresistibly seductive if allowed to be advocated freely.
But I'm an American, not a European, and I have the luxury of living in a land that has never been touched by Fascism or Communist Statism, where Democracy -- however unevenly applied to minorities or women or the poor -- was at least the ideal to which we pledged ourselves. And of course, the U.S. has not been shy about restricting free speech in its colonial possessions, as a perusal of our laws in the Philippines or Cuba makes clear.
Lest we forget, not only Germany, but Italy, Portugal -- until 1974, and Spain -- until 1977 --, were Fascist, and Eastern Europe -- including East Germany -- languished under Communist Statism just as tyrannical until the 1990s. With that perspective, it's perhaps more understandable that Europeans feel they must -- to paraphrase the U.S. doctrine in Vietnam -- restrict freedom in order to save it.
The act of calling ANYTHING related to precise science "art" can not be anything but a mis(ab)used metaphore (sic)
The mathematician, contributor to the Manhattan Project -- and a founder of modern computing -- John von Neumann, considered by knowledgeable colleagues to have contributed to all fields of mathematics except topology and number theory, disagreed. Describing the qualities of a good mathematical proof, von Neumann wrote :
One also expects "elegance" in its "architectural," structural make-up. Ease of stating the problem, great difficulty in getting hold of it and in all attempts at approaching it, then again some very surprising twist by which the approach, or some part of the approach, becomes easy, etc. Also, if the deductions are lengthy or complicated, there should be some simple general principle involved, which "explains" the complications and detours, reduces the apparent arbitrariness to a few simple guiding motivations, etc. These criteria are clearly those of any creative art.... all this is much more akin to the atmosphere of art pure and simple than to that of the empirical sciences.
(John von Neumann as quoted in William Poundstone, Prisoner's Dilemma).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given von Neumann's seminal influence on computer programming, his description of a good mathematical proof reads to me very much like a qualities I expect to see in a good algorithm, function, or class when I'm reading or writing code. Foe me, elegance is always of first importance when I -- and I use the word consciously -- craft code: a function that does not flow, a class the instances of which cannot be used in an elegant and (at least from the user's point of view) transparent way, is almost always bad code, and illuminates a lack of understanding on the part of the coder.
Kludges are offensive, not because they don't work -- the only justification for a kludge, after all, is that if nothing else, it works -- but because they are indicative of a lack of craft, and because they indicate a lack of understanding, either on the part of the coder himself, or the on the part of framework/clases/language he is coding in or with. A kludge is bad because it is the pulled thread in the fabric of the program, a pulled thread that threatens or exposes a potential for further and MORE disastrous unravelling.
I work in the Network/System Admin team for an ISP. Our firm was recently bought by another company that has mandated that my team's desktops be switched over from Linux to Windows XP in the next few weeks.... We don't yet know if the company will provide us with tools such as Cygwin or Windows Services for UNIX but we won't be allowed to install random programs and may not have admin access.
Try installing this program: "Boss, I'm a professional. So is everybody else on the team. We've all been hired to do a job, a job that requires professional judgement and professional tools. (God know you tell us we're professionals using our judgment when it justifies denying us overtime.) Nevertheless, you're paying us good money to get a job done.
"But now you've decide after shelling out for our experience and our judgment, you're going to ignore it, and actually deny us the tools we tell you we require to perform our work at the level of quality you've come to expect.
"We know our jobs. We know the tools we need. We know how to procure and maintain our tools, so there's limit hidden costs here. So why the political decision to hamstring us?
"Boss, this is really confusing: is the company's goal to get the job done, or is it to produce memos detailing the how much micro-management it's possible to cram down people's throats before they become completely dispirited, unmotivated drones useless to themselves and their company?
"Or is that the point: to get us to quit so the company doesn't have to cop to down-sizing us?"
What kinds of changes in SELinux would be NOT welcome in mainstream Linux distros?
Well, I just downloaded and installed it.
One thing I don't like is all these damn -- ouch! the keyboard just shocked me! -- darn pop-ups.
Like every 10 minutes up pops a window, and there's John Ashcroft staring back at me, and he keeps calling me "Winston Smith" whoever the hell -- ouch!, ok, ok -- that is, and he's keeps telling me I'm broadcasting an IP address and a retinal pattern, or that I'll have to upgrade to the "Corporate Professional" version if I want add-ons like my 4th Amendment rights, or asking whether I'm an "outlawed homo-pervert" or do I qualify for the "fellow Christian Faith-Based Set-Asides" discount.
I dunno, are you sure this SELinux was built with the end-user in mind?
Zero damage done to "an innocent ISP". CIT aka Foonet are far from innocent of anything.
Yeah. Honestly, I thought about this when I originally wrote my comment. I briefly considered doing a little Googling to get some background on CIT, mainly because I know that part of the fun of Slashdot is there's always someone here who know much more -- about some subject, however esoteric --, and that someone inevitably comes along to challenge your assertions.
But then I remembered that I'm an American, and that in America everyone no matter how despicable, is innocent until proven guilty.
And that is the sense of "innocent" I was using -- particularly apropos when one considers it was the FBI which was involved.
And whatever CIT has done, no matter how bad, it's not bad enough for us to sacrifice our liberties so as to more easily punish CIT.
That's all nice and good, but as far as language is concerned, it doesn't wash.
As you probably realized, my grandparent post was a rather broad parody of a philosophical position that I think can be argued for but that I don't truly believe. (Although I do suspect that consciousness is more of a "good trick" than most people will allow.)
I have to disagree. I'm pretty sure the reason I see physical and emotional pain as being different is because they don't feel anything alike one another; they're so dissimilar from a phenomenological perspective as to be almost incomparable....I'm not doing science when I'm worrying about my feelings, and there's no reason I should be.
Ah I get it.
You're one of those people who believes that you're conscious!
I mean, actually conscious, as opposed to being a pre-programmed, deterministic zombie with the illusion of consciousness a thin veneer painted over the ad hoc, jury-rigged, machinery of your essentially robotic being.
Well!
I'll have you know that I'm self-aware enough to know that my "self" is a mere convenient illusion. I know I'm a zombie, an empty mask on a ballistic trajectory through the world, a trajectory determined aeons before my birth by chemical interactions in my ancestor's genes.
So who's being senationalistic (sic) now? There is nothing in TFA about the FBI being too incompetant (sic) to datamine on-site. Spare us, please.
According to the ISP's original notice, the FBI tried to access the data on site for several hours, before giving up and carting the servers to the FBI labs.
To get a search warrent (sic0 you have to have something to go on already.
You misspelled warrant.
Not to be a spelling Nazi but you also misspelled "have a prosecutor to go to or a friendly judge".
s/something/prosecutor s/on already/to or a friendly judge
Please don't let the myths you learned in civics class convince you that you don't have the best government that corporate money can -- and does -- buy.;)
The fact is, this story is old because the FBI has already started returning the equipment back as of yesterday. The FBI confiscated everything on the 14th. CIT's web site says:
02/23/2004 CIT re-establishes service.
Hey, look, I tried my best, by submitting this three days ago:
Maybe I should write more sensationalistic submissions?;) Or to be fair, maybe it's because I misspelled "confiscate". But aren't they supposed to be editors -- oh! never mind! Ah, I guess Chope needed the Karma more than I did.
But seriously folks, yeah, the FBI is returning the equipment now, but how much damage was done to an innocent ISP just because the FBI couldn't figure out how to do on-site data mining?
And if searching for evidence on a computer requires the FBI to physically cart the equipment to some distant lab, I guess we just write off any expectation that they'll be able to find data quickly in an emergency -- like, just off the top of my head here, for instance, wholly unlikely I'm sure, an imminent terrorist act?
Well, maybe a business got ruined, maybe the FBI can't scan data quickly enough to stop a terrorist crime in progress, but at least we all feel safer now that arch-criminal Tommy Chong is in jail.
Please ignore the above comment in favor of the corrected comment below; I must learn not to post after having three beers, as I tend to mismatch HTML tags.
As a bonus for your patience, I've added a few links that lend support for the idea that physical and emotional pain are similar.
Physical pain (like that of the burn victims) is one thing; emotional pain is something else entirely.
There was a recent study (posted here?) that suggests that both physical and emotional pain are produced by the same mechanisms in the brain.
When you think about this, it makes sense: why would the organism produce -- and "pay" both the additional R&D on a species level, and the additional "construction" costs on an individual level -- an entirely separate faculty rather than adapt on already at hand?
Not only that, the reason an organism feels physical pain, and the reason it feels emotional pain are pretty much the same: both serve to signal to the organism that its current activity, in its current environment, is detrimental to the organism. A burning pain in my finger tells me that either I should modify my activity -- by moving the finger --, or the environment -- by moving the stove-top the finger is touching.
Similarly, emotional pain -- feelings of guilt, or rejection, or etc., -- exist pretty much to tell me that I'm earning the ire of my fellows, and that my ancestors became my ancestors by virtue of not doing those ire-raising things. Those organisms that too often ignored pain, either physical or emotional, of course failed to become ancestors by virtue of that, and so the genes for ignoring pain tend not to have propagated as much as the genes for heeding pain.
So if physical pain and emotional pain exists to do the same thing -- essentially behavior modification -- and if evidence exists that they are produced by the same structures in the brain, why do we tend to take for granted that they are not the same things?
Part of the reason, of course, is that emotional pain can last far longer than (many forms of) physical pain. My guess is that this is partly because emotional behaviors -- such as social awkwardness or shyness -- are resistant to change, and part -- as with grief -- is due to reinforcement by memory. I'll further guess that this reinforcement by memory is to some degree an "unintended" side effect of the greater precision of human memory.
Why are certain social behaviors resistant to change? Probably this is also an evolutionary adaptation -- research on pecking order in primates suggests that there are genetic components to social dominance hierarchies (proximally mediated by hormones, so that changes in hormone level by human researchers can subvert the hierarchy). Why is it adaptive to reinforce the social hierarchy even to the point of making the subordinates feel "bad"? Because feeling bad is preferable to challenging the hierarchy and literally having your head torn off. A geek who asks a girl who's "out of his league" for a date may only risk being laughed at today, but his reluctance may stem from an ancestor whose penalty for flirting with her might well have been death at the hands of the alpha male.
But I also suspect that the main reason that we see physical and emotional pain as being different is that we see emotional pain as uniquely human, something that separates us from "the animals". This desire for separation from "animals" (scare quotes because, of course, humans are a kind of animal and not an image of God) seems to be a strongly engrained trait at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition -- as is the traditional Judeo-Christian belief in mind-body dualism. Since we know that animals feel physical pain but are less informed about the animals' psychological worlds, it perhaps predictable that we would see emotional pain
Physical pain (like that of the burn victims) is one thing; emotional pain is something else entirely. reason an organism feels physical pain, and the reason it feels emotional pain are pretty much the same: both serve to signal to the organism that its current activity, in its current environment, is detrimental to the organism. A burning pain in my finger tells me that either I should modify my activity -- by moving the finger --, or the the environment -- by moving the stove-top the finger is touching.
Similarly, emotional pain -- feelings of guilt, or rejection, or etc., -- exist pretty much to tell me that I'm earning the ire of my fellows, and that my ancestors became my ancestors by virtue of not doing those ire-raising things. Those organisms that too often ignored pain, either physical or emotional, of course failed to become ancestors by virtue of that, and so the genes for ignoring pain tend not to have propagated as much as the genes for heeding pain.
So if physical pain and emotional pain exists to do the same thing -- essentially behavior modification -- and if evidence exists that they are produced by the same structures in the brain, why do we tend to take for granted that they are not the same things?
Part of the reason, of course, is that emotional pain can last far longer than (many forms of) physical pain. My guess is that this is partly because emotional behaviors -- such as social awkwardness or shyness -- are resistant to change, and part -- as with grief -- is due to reinforcement by memory. I'll further guess that this reinforcement by memory is to some degree an "unintended" side effect of the greater precision of human memory.
Why are certain social behaviors resistant to change? Probably this is also an evolutionary adaptation -- research on pecking order in primates suggests that there are genetic components to social dominance hierarchies (proximally mediated by hormones, so that changes in hormone level by human researchers can subvert the hierarchy). Why is it adaptive to reinforce the social hierarchy even to the point of making the subordinates feel "bad"? Because feeling bad is preferable to challenging the hierarchy and literally having your head torn off. A geek who asks a girl who's "out of his league" for a date may only risk being laughed at today, but his reluctance may stem from an ancestor whose penalty for flirting with her might well have been death at the hands of the alpha male.
But I also suspect that the main reason that we see physical and emotional pain as being different is that we see emotional pain as uniquely human, something that separates us from "the animals". This desire for separation from "animals" (scare quotes because, of course, humans are a kind of animal and not an image of God) seems to be a strongly engrained trait at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition -- as is the traditional Judeo-Christian belief in mind-body dualism. Since we know that animals feel physical pain but are less informed about the animals' psychological worlds, it perhaps predictable that we would see emotional pain as uniquely human and thus unconnected with "animalistic" physical pain, a malady of some uniquely human "soul" rather than the mundane -- literally mundane, earthly -- body.
But both Judeo-Christian dualisms -- soul/body and human/animal -- are found to have less and less justification the more we learn about the brain and its genetic basis; I think the dichotomy of "physical" and "emotional" pain will similarly go away as we learn more about how the brain constructs pain.
For a reasonable fee [Smithsonian Folkways] will burn and send you a nicely labeled and packaged CD-R of any of the recordings in their catalog
Folkways is a legendary label, and I'm happy to say I have a few Fokways CDs (Woody Guthrie -- and given the present administration, I appreciate all the more "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill").
I'd love to buy more, but frankly, at 19.95 for CDR, it's a bit pricier than I can bear, especially considering that the CDRs being copies the original albums that predate the LP -- Long Playing album --, tend to be brief.
I'd rather see my money go to the Smithsonian that to RIIA plutocrats any day, so I wish they could find a better price point. At $5 per album, they'd see a lot of business form me. At $10, I'd be willing to take a chance, given Folkways's reputation. At $20 per, I have to consider saving three bucks and getting a two-CD Gilbert & Sullivan opera at 78s2CD.
What if a family member had a heart attack or something,
Having had a heart attack when I was at home alone, I'm not sure I'd be alive today were it not for 911.
So there's no way I'm going to rely on VOIP without 911 service.
And given the additional possibility of broadband outages, I'm going to take the safer road, and just keep my traditional landline.
(Oh, by the way, if you're calling 911 about your own ill-health, try to make this clear to the 911 operator up-front. After being asked "is this a police or fire emergency", and being transferred (!), I got an operator who, after my initial description of my problem -- something along the lines of "I'm very short of breath and I think I'm having a heart attack" -- asked, "does the subject have a history of asthma?" I had to explain -- while struggling to breath through the crushing pain in my chest -- that, first the "subject" was me, and second, I didn't have a lot of breath or strength to devote to chatting about possible diagnoses, could they please just send an ambulance now? (I knew had to conserve my strength for my upcoming crawl to the door.))
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I could take a photo of me putting my wang between a pair of Cindi Lauper CDs and that wouldn't violate your hypothetical license.
You know, just his weekend I was a at a party, and I was saying to some people that, sooner or later, you can find any conceivable fetish on the internet.
And it's posted by "Michael Hunt (585391)", no less!
Thanks for justifying my optimism!
Too bad the [Firefox] logo is non-free and will never be checked into public CVS.
Hey, guess what? My signature, my slashdot username and password, and my likeness (i.e., picture),are also non-free and will never be checked into CVS. You can use the ideas in my Slashdot comments, but you can't sign them "orthogonal".
I may grant you a license to use my code -- or other ideas --, but I'm never going to grant you any license yo go around and sign my name to your work. And that's the whole issue here: the Firefox logo is not crucial to the compilation of Firefox code; nothing in the code reads any secret checksums steganographed into the logo.
But the logo is an essential imprimatur that declares a particular build to be an official build, with all that connotes -- such as a well founded belief that it represents the actual work of the official development team and is not likely to be a trojan exploit.
All that not having the logo in CVS deprives you of is bragging rights that aren't yours to claim.
Napster could start to increase market share in the more profitable business of selling monthly subscriptions, where customers can listen to -- but not own -- as many songs as they want each month for $9.95
Of course it's more profitable -- you're tied to the service by an umbilical cord, and as soon as you stop paying, you lose all access to the music, no matter how much you've paid up to that point!
There's a reason Americans are so big on the home buying thing: they don't want to pay rent for the rest of their lives.
Let's do some math: $10/month = $120/year = $1200/decade. So if after paying my 1200 bucks, I decide to stop subscribing -- or Napster goes out of business, then I have, let's do some more math: squat! No music for my money.
And of course, my subscription won't work at work -- my employer won't want the bandwidth cost of my streaming --, and it won't work on my portable, because it'll all be DRM'd streams.
If I want to listen without owning, there's this thing called radio. Since that's almost wholly dominated by Clear Channel Homogeneity, I re-phrase: Internet radio.
But no way will I subscribe to ephemeral music encumbered by Digital Restrictions Management.
So please do not put down pet owners or say they are freaks. You may simply not understand the bond that people have with their animals. I know that I consider Cricket to be my son and when he gets a shot, he reaches for me just like any child would to their parent.
The twisty paths natural selection takes through "problem space" never ceases to amaze me.
Humans are neotenous apes: our maturity is delayed, our childhood prolonged, in order that we can take the years required to train our over-sized brains to modify our environment to our species's needs. That big brain is our only real strength as a species -- we are slower than lions, weaker than chimps, less robust than bears -- and that brain is only an advantage after years of education, years during which the juvenile human is essentially defenseless.
This extreme K-selected reproductive strategy -- K selection meaning that rather than produce many offspring requiring little or no parental investment (or "r-selection"), humans produce relatively few (although not as few as gorillas) offspring that require tremendous parental investment over a period of decades.
Clearly, humans unwilling or unable to make an investment in their offspring will have far fewer -- if any -- grandchildren: or in other words, lack of parental investment in a species requiring extreme K-selection will be severely penalized by natural selection. So humans evolution must either develop traits that encourage parental investment, or abandon K-selection and the big, slowly educated brain.
And so evolution has -- as usual -- taken a indirect course: parental investment per se may not seem all that fun, but what seems fulfilling to humans "just happens" to encourage parental investment: pair bonding between couples who become parents, a desire to have children and a family in the first place, a joy in the touch and smile of the child, the feeling of being needed when the child "gets a shot, [and] reaches for me just like any child".
What's even more amazing about the twisty paths adaptation takes is that these desires are so profoundly inculcated in humans (despite that big brain, it seems that we have more and more complex instincts than most other animals) that when we can't get the fulfillment that adaption has made us hunger for by having children of our own, we'll actually go so far as to adopt children.
Now think about that.
Adopting -- at least outside one's own family -- does nothing to propagate the adopter's genes. Indeed, adoption precludes using those same resources to contribute to a sibling's children -- who at least shares one-quarter of the adopter's genes --, or leaving the person with whom you're infertile, in the hopes that you'll be fertile with someone else. Adoption essentially means the extinction of your particular unique combination of genes -- the end of the branch that is you, after some three billion years -- with all those resources placed at the disposal of some entirely un-related gene line. It's a bizarre squandering of the efforts of your gene line over the three billion years of its refinement from the first proto-bateria through to your parents.
Now consider the parent poster: he doesn't support his sister's kids -- who share one-quarter of his genes. He doesn't adopt a child who is essentially a distance cousin, a member of his tribe. He doesn't even adopt a child from Brazil, a fellow human who at least shares 6 million years of evolution with him.
No, the parent poster adopts three canines -- members not of the same species, or even genus or order -- animals with which he has the same genetic affinity as with any placental mammal.
But that's what's so interesting -- he adopts these dogs not because they are genetically closely related to him, but because evolution has shaped him -- in a uniquely human way -- to need and desire the role of a parent, however he can get it. And evoluti
[The 21st century's answer to Aristotle, Euripides and Sophocles] launched a social networking site for dogs, 8,000+ pooches have their own Web page on Dogster.com, complete with mug shots, personal stories and listings of likes and pet peeves.
Ha! Take that, Library of Alexandria!
Guess you don't look so special now, with your dusty old Greek plays and crap, huh?
It does this by sending actual code over the network.
Nothin' to worry about here!
I "can'tse" any way this could develop into a security hole bigger than the goatse guy's famous anus.
This reverses years of tradition -- Microsoft is supposed to steal its "innovations" from from PARC, not the other way around.
And doesn't this sound like what goes way too wrong in Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, or an Iain Banks novel?
They found Waldo? Or did they find Carmen Sandiego?
They found the WMDs, Osama bin Laden, and Jimmy Hoffa, thereby justifying Bush's Mars mission plans even to the neo-cons.
The 4th Amendment, however, is still missing, and presumed Ashcrofted.
Well, Media Player does have the ability to automatically update your WMA/MP3 files with tag info from the internet. So I guess it does already modify your files, if you enable that option (I think it is enabled by default, but you can turn it off during the install).
.jpeg of the album cover. Ok, more than I asked for, and I don't need Microsoft cataloging my music, but not terrible.
It is apparently enabled by default. I take great care to set up my mp3 tags "just so", using the excellent OSS MP3BookHelper.
I took my portable to work one day, and in order to charge the battery, I plugged it in as a USB drive and played my mp3s with Windows XP's Media Player.
Naturally, Media Player went out and started downloading supplementary information about the tracks being played, including a
But then, once Media Player discovered that there were MP3s on the drive, it insisted on iterating over the entire 60GB drive, in order to make a "convenient" database of my mp3s. Now, recall, the whole point of using Media Payer had been to recharge the portable's battery via USB. Iterating over the entire drive, of course, ran down the battery faster than the USB current could recharge it.
Then, to provide further "convenience", Media Player -- without so much as asking -- also rewrote the Mp3 tags I'd worked so hard to get the way I wanted them, adding proprietary Microsoft tags that didn't conform to the ID3 tag specification (the tag names were longer than four bytes, being prefixed with something like "MediaPlayer/"), and, worse (iirc) using its own judgment to rewrite some existing tags.
It's this sort of attitude on Microsoft's part -- that they are going to "help" me, whether I like it or not -- that more than anything else drives me away from using Microsoft products.
I have no problem whatsoever with treating everybody as a friend [for the purposes of sharing copyrighted materials via p2p] (yes, there are different 'levels' of friend, like all other friends.), and I have no trouble sharing with all my friends.
Great! Friends, I need to "borrow" $20.
Unfortunately, this time you'll have to share your own money, not an evil record company's money, and I don't actually plan to give it back to you.
I mean, as long as you can re-define "friends" to mean "people I've never met who share my musical tastes and my ethical blind spots", can't I be as intellectually (dis)honest and re-define "borrow" too?
(I am reminded of the Cowbirds in Walt Kelly's Pogo, socialist agitators whose motto was "To share! To share what others' have!")
I don't mean this as a troll, but it seems to me that if the US courts did something like this to a small business man (rather than to Satan), the slashdot crowd would be screaming about Ashcroft and free speech rights.
Two issues here: even an ACLU liberal like me won't argue that free speech is so absolute as to preclude laws against slander or libel. And most of us would be willing to have limits on threatening speech, although this is more subject to abuse.
The second issue is that "free speech" is very much an American idea. That's not to say that freedom is unknown in Europe, but Europe is far more willing to restrict speech that would (generally) be considered protected in the U.S. Germany, especially, is far more willing to subjugate free speech to social order, as a result of seeing the particular zeal with which certain very bad ideas were formerly so lovingly embraced by German listeners.
I'm referring, of course, to Germany's Nazi past: as a result, Germany law holds social order -- the protection of ideals of democratic government -- to be more important that a right to the exhortation of Nazi "hate speech", including not only speech in favor of Fascism but also Fascism's ugly underpinnings, such as racist and anti-Semitic speech, and minimization of Fascism's consequences, such as Holocaust denial.
Other European nations are also more leery of speech that is too stark a reminder of history, as we saw with France's restriction of eBay's sale of Nazi memorabilia. Britain, too, is less concerned about free speech, but limits speech less through hate-speech laws than through far easier to get judgments against libel and slander.
One of the strongest arguments of free speech advocates in the U.S. is that the best antidote to "bad" speech is not suppression, but instead the "free marketplace of ideas": "bad" speech is supposed to generate counter-arguments against what it advocates, allowing a free people to freely weigh both sides of the question and -- presumably -- end up even more strongly against the "bad" speech. (I keep using scare quotes around "bad" not because I'm a fan of hate speech, but because this argument for free speech presumes that it is up to each listener, and not a government, to determine in his own conscience what speech is "bad".)
I'm inclined to agree with this analysis, but furthermore, I can't see what alternative to it allows a people truly to be free, and I worry that suppression of hate speech in Europe -- and Germany in particular -- is just a tacit acknowledgement that these countries don't really believe that all the demons of their past have truly been put to rest, that they fear that Fascism might again prove irresistibly seductive if allowed to be advocated freely.
But I'm an American, not a European, and I have the luxury of living in a land that has never been touched by Fascism or Communist Statism, where Democracy -- however unevenly applied to minorities or women or the poor -- was at least the ideal to which we pledged ourselves. And of course, the U.S. has not been shy about restricting free speech in its colonial possessions, as a perusal of our laws in the Philippines or Cuba makes clear.
Lest we forget, not only Germany, but Italy, Portugal -- until 1974, and Spain -- until 1977 --, were Fascist, and Eastern Europe -- including East Germany -- languished under Communist Statism just as tyrannical until the 1990s. With that perspective, it's perhaps more understandable that Europeans feel they must -- to paraphrase the U.S. doctrine in Vietnam -- restrict freedom in order to save it.
The mathematician, contributor to the Manhattan Project -- and a founder of modern computing -- John von Neumann, considered by knowledgeable colleagues to have contributed to all fields of mathematics except topology and number theory, disagreed. Describing the qualities of a good mathematical proof, von Neumann wrote : (John von Neumann as quoted in William Poundstone, Prisoner's Dilemma).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given von Neumann's seminal influence on computer programming, his description of a good mathematical proof reads to me very much like a qualities I expect to see in a good algorithm, function, or class when I'm reading or writing code. Foe me, elegance is always of first importance when I -- and I use the word consciously -- craft code: a function that does not flow, a class the instances of which cannot be used in an elegant and (at least from the user's point of view) transparent way, is almost always bad code, and illuminates a lack of understanding on the part of the coder.
Kludges are offensive, not because they don't work -- the only justification for a kludge, after all, is that if nothing else, it works -- but because they are indicative of a lack of craft, and because they indicate a lack of understanding, either on the part of the coder himself, or the on the part of framework/clases/language he is coding in or with. A kludge is bad because it is the pulled thread in the fabric of the program, a pulled thread that threatens or exposes a potential for further and MORE disastrous unravelling.
Remember, it is dead, so anything goes. I've gotten one to live a little longer by banging it.
;)
I'm sure she enjoyed your banging her too.
Hello? He FLED AWAY FROM a communist country.
There's an old -- ironically enough -- Russian proverb, that goes like this:
"Choose your enemies well, for you will become like them."
I work in the Network/System Admin team for an ISP. Our firm was recently bought by another company that has mandated that my team's desktops be switched over from Linux to Windows XP in the next few weeks.... We don't yet know if the company will provide us with tools such as Cygwin or Windows Services for UNIX but we won't be allowed to install random programs and may not have admin access.
Try installing this program: "Boss, I'm a professional. So is everybody else on the team. We've all been hired to do a job, a job that requires professional judgement and professional tools. (God know you tell us we're professionals using our judgment when it justifies denying us overtime.) Nevertheless, you're paying us good money to get a job done.
"But now you've decide after shelling out for our experience and our judgment, you're going to ignore it, and actually deny us the tools we tell you we require to perform our work at the level of quality you've come to expect.
"We know our jobs. We know the tools we need. We know how to procure and maintain our tools, so there's limit hidden costs here. So why the political decision to hamstring us?
"Boss, this is really confusing: is the company's goal to get the job done, or is it to produce memos detailing the how much micro-management it's possible to cram down people's throats before they become completely dispirited, unmotivated drones useless to themselves and their company?
"Or is that the point: to get us to quit so the company doesn't have to cop to down-sizing us?"
What kinds of changes in SELinux would be NOT welcome in mainstream Linux distros?
Well, I just downloaded and installed it.
One thing I don't like is all these damn -- ouch! the keyboard just shocked me! -- darn pop-ups.
Like every 10 minutes up pops a window, and there's John Ashcroft staring back at me, and he keeps calling me "Winston Smith" whoever the hell -- ouch!, ok, ok -- that is, and he's keeps telling me I'm broadcasting an IP address and a retinal pattern, or that I'll have to upgrade to the "Corporate Professional" version if I want add-ons like my 4th Amendment rights, or asking whether I'm an "outlawed homo-pervert" or do I qualify for the "fellow Christian Faith-Based Set-Asides" discount.
I dunno, are you sure this SELinux was built with the end-user in mind?
Zero damage done to "an innocent ISP". CIT aka Foonet are far from innocent of anything.
Yeah. Honestly, I thought about this when I originally wrote my comment. I briefly considered doing a little Googling to get some background on CIT, mainly because I know that part of the fun of Slashdot is there's always someone here who know much more -- about some subject, however esoteric --, and that someone inevitably comes along to challenge your assertions.
But then I remembered that I'm an American, and that in America everyone no matter how despicable, is innocent until proven guilty.
And that is the sense of "innocent" I was using -- particularly apropos when one considers it was the FBI which was involved.
And whatever CIT has done, no matter how bad, it's not bad enough for us to sacrifice our liberties so as to more easily punish CIT.
That's all nice and good, but as far as language is concerned, it doesn't wash.
As you probably realized, my grandparent post was a rather broad parody of a philosophical position that I think can be argued for but that I don't truly believe. (Although I do suspect that consciousness is more of a "good trick" than most people will allow.)
I have to disagree. I'm pretty sure the reason I see physical and emotional pain as being different is because they don't feel anything alike one another; they're so dissimilar from a phenomenological perspective as to be almost incomparable. ...I'm not doing science when I'm worrying about my feelings, and there's no reason I should be.
Ah I get it.
You're one of those people who believes that you're conscious!
I mean, actually conscious, as opposed to being a pre-programmed, deterministic zombie with the illusion of consciousness a thin veneer painted over the ad hoc, jury-rigged, machinery of your essentially robotic being.
Well!
I'll have you know that I'm self-aware enough to know that my "self" is a mere convenient illusion. I know I'm a zombie, an empty mask on a ballistic trajectory through the world, a trajectory determined aeons before my birth by chemical interactions in my ancestor's genes.
So there!
So who's being senationalistic (sic) now? There is nothing in TFA about the FBI being too incompetant (sic) to datamine on-site. Spare us, please.
According to the ISP's original notice, the FBI tried to access the data on site for several hours, before giving up and carting the servers to the FBI labs.
To get a search warrent (sic0 you have to have something to go on already.
;)
You misspelled warr a nt.
Not to be a spelling Nazi but you also misspelled "have a prosecutor to go to or a friendly judge".
s/something/prosecutor
s/on already/to or a friendly judge
Please don't let the myths you learned in civics class convince you that you don't have the best government that corporate money can -- and does -- buy.
02/23/2004 CIT re-establishes service.
Hey, look, I tried my best, by submitting this three days ago:
2004-02-21 09:18:16 FBI confisticates (sic) ISP's servers: "more efficie (articles,usa) (rejected)
and it was rejected in about thirty minutes.
Maybe I should write more sensationalistic submissions?
But seriously folks, yeah, the FBI is returning the equipment now, but how much damage was done to an innocent ISP just because the FBI couldn't figure out how to do on-site data mining?
And if searching for evidence on a computer requires the FBI to physically cart the equipment to some distant lab, I guess we just write off any expectation that they'll be able to find data quickly in an emergency -- like, just off the top of my head here, for instance, wholly unlikely I'm sure, an imminent terrorist act?
Well, maybe a business got ruined, maybe the FBI can't scan data quickly enough to stop a terrorist crime in progress, but at least we all feel safer now that arch-criminal Tommy Chong is in jail.
Please ignore the above comment in favor of the corrected comment below; I must learn not to post after having three beers, as I tend to mismatch HTML tags.
As a bonus for your patience, I've added a few links that lend support for the idea that physical and emotional pain are similar.
Physical pain (like that of the burn victims) is one thing; emotional pain is something else entirely.
There was a recent study (posted here?) that suggests that both physical and emotional pain are produced by the same mechanisms in the brain.
When you think about this, it makes sense: why would the organism produce -- and "pay" both the additional R&D on a species level, and the additional "construction" costs on an individual level -- an entirely separate faculty rather than adapt on already at hand?
Not only that, the reason an organism feels physical pain, and the reason it feels emotional pain are pretty much the same: both serve to signal to the organism that its current activity, in its current environment, is detrimental to the organism. A burning pain in my finger tells me that either I should modify my activity -- by moving the finger --, or the environment -- by moving the stove-top the finger is touching.
Similarly, emotional pain -- feelings of guilt, or rejection, or etc., -- exist pretty much to tell me that I'm earning the ire of my fellows, and that my ancestors became my ancestors by virtue of not doing those ire-raising things. Those organisms that too often ignored pain, either physical or emotional, of course failed to become ancestors by virtue of that, and so the genes for ignoring pain tend not to have propagated as much as the genes for heeding pain.
So if physical pain and emotional pain exists to do the same thing -- essentially behavior modification -- and if evidence exists that they are produced by the same structures in the brain, why do we tend to take for granted that they are not the same things?
Part of the reason, of course, is that emotional pain can last far longer than (many forms of) physical pain. My guess is that this is partly because emotional behaviors -- such as social awkwardness or shyness -- are resistant to change, and part -- as with grief -- is due to reinforcement by memory. I'll further guess that this reinforcement by memory is to some degree an "unintended" side effect of the greater precision of human memory.
Why are certain social behaviors resistant to change? Probably this is also an evolutionary adaptation -- research on pecking order in primates suggests that there are genetic components to social dominance hierarchies (proximally mediated by hormones, so that changes in hormone level by human researchers can subvert the hierarchy). Why is it adaptive to reinforce the social hierarchy even to the point of making the subordinates feel "bad"? Because feeling bad is preferable to challenging the hierarchy and literally having your head torn off. A geek who asks a girl who's "out of his league" for a date may only risk being laughed at today, but his reluctance may stem from an ancestor whose penalty for flirting with her might well have been death at the hands of the alpha male.
But I also suspect that the main reason that we see physical and emotional pain as being different is that we see emotional pain as uniquely human, something that separates us from "the animals". This desire for separation from "animals" (scare quotes because, of course, humans are a kind of animal and not an image of God) seems to be a strongly engrained trait at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition -- as is the traditional Judeo-Christian belief in mind-body dualism. Since we know that animals feel physical pain but are less informed about the animals' psychological worlds, it perhaps predictable that we would see emotional pain
Physical pain (like that of the burn victims) is one thing; emotional pain is something else entirely. reason an organism feels physical pain, and the reason it feels emotional pain are pretty much the same: both serve to signal to the organism that its current activity, in its current environment, is detrimental to the organism. A burning pain in my finger tells me that either I should modify my activity -- by moving the finger --, or the the environment -- by moving the stove-top the finger is touching.
Similarly, emotional pain -- feelings of guilt, or rejection, or etc., -- exist pretty much to tell me that I'm earning the ire of my fellows, and that my ancestors became my ancestors by virtue of not doing those ire-raising things. Those organisms that too often ignored pain, either physical or emotional, of course failed to become ancestors by virtue of that, and so the genes for ignoring pain tend not to have propagated as much as the genes for heeding pain.
So if physical pain and emotional pain exists to do the same thing -- essentially behavior modification -- and if evidence exists that they are produced by the same structures in the brain, why do we tend to take for granted that they are not the same things?
Part of the reason, of course, is that emotional pain can last far longer than (many forms of) physical pain. My guess is that this is partly because emotional behaviors -- such as social awkwardness or shyness -- are resistant to change, and part -- as with grief -- is due to reinforcement by memory. I'll further guess that this reinforcement by memory is to some degree an "unintended" side effect of the greater precision of human memory.
Why are certain social behaviors resistant to change? Probably this is also an evolutionary adaptation -- research on pecking order in primates suggests that there are genetic components to social dominance hierarchies (proximally mediated by hormones, so that changes in hormone level by human researchers can subvert the hierarchy). Why is it adaptive to reinforce the social hierarchy even to the point of making the subordinates feel "bad"? Because feeling bad is preferable to challenging the hierarchy and literally having your head torn off. A geek who asks a girl who's "out of his league" for a date may only risk being laughed at today, but his reluctance may stem from an ancestor whose penalty for flirting with her might well have been death at the hands of the alpha male.
But I also suspect that the main reason that we see physical and emotional pain as being different is that we see emotional pain as uniquely human, something that separates us from "the animals". This desire for separation from "animals" (scare quotes because, of course, humans are a kind of animal and not an image of God) seems to be a strongly engrained trait at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition -- as is the traditional Judeo-Christian belief in mind-body dualism. Since we know that animals feel physical pain but are less informed about the animals' psychological worlds, it perhaps predictable that we would see emotional pain as uniquely human and thus unconnected with "animalistic" physical pain, a malady of some uniquely human "soul" rather than the mundane -- literally mundane, earthly -- body.
But both Judeo-Christian dualisms -- soul/body and human/animal -- are found to have less and less justification the more we learn about the brain and its genetic basis; I think the dichotomy of "physical" and "emotional" pain will similarly go away as we learn more about how the brain constructs pain.
For a reasonable fee [Smithsonian Folkways] will burn and send you a nicely labeled and packaged CD-R of any of the recordings in their catalog
Folkways is a legendary label, and I'm happy to say I have a few Fokways CDs (Woody Guthrie -- and given the present administration, I appreciate all the more "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill").
I'd love to buy more, but frankly, at 19.95 for CDR, it's a bit pricier than I can bear, especially considering that the CDRs being copies the original albums that predate the LP -- Long Playing album --, tend to be brief.
I'd rather see my money go to the Smithsonian that to RIIA plutocrats any day, so I wish they could find a better price point. At $5 per album, they'd see a lot of business form me. At $10, I'd be willing to take a chance, given Folkways's reputation. At $20 per, I have to consider saving three bucks and getting a two-CD Gilbert & Sullivan opera at 78s2CD.
What if a family member had a heart attack or something,
Having had a heart attack when I was at home alone, I'm not sure I'd be alive today were it not for 911.
So there's no way I'm going to rely on VOIP without 911 service.
And given the additional possibility of broadband outages, I'm going to take the safer road, and just keep my traditional landline.
(Oh, by the way, if you're calling 911 about your own ill-health, try to make this clear to the 911 operator up-front. After being asked "is this a police or fire emergency", and being transferred (!), I got an operator who, after my initial description of my problem -- something along the lines of "I'm very short of breath and I think I'm having a heart attack" -- asked, "does the subject have a history of asthma?" I had to explain -- while struggling to breath through the crushing pain in my chest -- that, first the "subject" was me, and second, I didn't have a lot of breath or strength to devote to chatting about possible diagnoses, could they please just send an ambulance now? (I knew had to conserve my strength for my upcoming crawl to the door.))