That adage is totally irrelevant here, because no data is being hidden, and there is no handwaving to distract from the real numbers: they are given up front. No one is claiming they are poised to take over the market over the next year, or anything stupid like that. It's just a little pat on the back, that says "hey, word is spreading that our product is in fact getting better, and more people like it". Kudos to them.
Save your adages and sarcasm for statments like "In a massive upset in browser market share, Thunderbird has surged ahead with a 33% increase in usage."
spam is a real problem and filtering is not the solution.
And what is a real solution? If you say legislation, I'll just laugh.
if your[sic] going to get a false positive why filter?
What do you recommend for people who's time is too costly to read everything at the insanely high noise/signal ration? Stop using email? You talk about false positives like they happen all the time... do you have any idea how low the false positive rate is for a good filtering system? You might as well say that no-one should use mail, because your letter might get lost en-route... that's probably a hell of a lot more likely than any normal user hitting real problems with a good filter.
Unless you routinely send emails with subjects like "GET VIAGRA CHEAP NOW!!!" to 1,000 of your closest friends, you probably have nothing to worry about. But even if you do: it's always the recipient's choice whether or not to accept communications. Do you tell all of your friends to read all spam snail-mail, on the off-chance you send them a letter that they might mistake for a credit-card offer? Do you tell them to listen to every telemarketer pitch, in case it's you calling but you are slow to notice that they picked up, and call them by their last name? If so, do they listen? Why should spam be any different?
You're describing a naive, trust-or-don't approach to the "evil bit" suggested, which is stupid. All a system like the bulk marker would do is add more information to use to improve an existing filtering system, with baysian analysis, whitelisting, etc.
Clearly, there are many people willing to risk false positives to filter out the crap, so why shouldn't a system which helps them at no risk to those who don't filter be implemented?
As someone pointed out... if this is voluntary, why should anyone upset about the idea of others choosing to filter their own mail?
So, even in the unlikely chance that SCO was able to demonstrate a violation of their copyrights, their actions might be against distributors, and they would have no right of action against the rest of us.
Sadly, this is not so cut-and-dry. Under one interpretation of copyright law (very popular with the content providers), you create an actionable copy every time you load something into RAM. Thus, it's conceivable that SCO could make a case that every time your computer boots Linux, you are violating their copyright. Not too likely, perhaps, but less far-fetched than some of the claims that they have already made.
I mean, that's almost as bad as if there were some sort of confederation of semi-independent regions (let's call them "states") somewhere, and there were some kind of directive (let's call it a "law", or maybe a "constitutional ammendment") that some "states" could be forced to adopt just because some group of people, or most of the other "states", thought it was a good idea.
I'm not sure where you are getting "unelected" from, but the idea that you are pretty much stuck with what the majority wants even if you don't like it, is basically central to the entire concept of democracy.
They've been illegally deprived of the money from the second sale.
Sorry, wrong. You are make a huge assumption here, which is that there would have been a second sale. I stopped buying CDs almost as soon as I started (well before mp3 availability). Why? Most had only one or two songs I liked, and they were way too expensive to justify the modest amount of music listening I do. In addition, I found that I tired of pop songs very quickly, so it didn't make sense to buy if I wouldn't be listening to it at all in a year. So I stuck to listening to the radio, or not listening to music at all, except for the occasional very good CD, which I bought.
Now, I have a reasonably-sized mp3 collection, including many songs which I occasionally enjoy listening to, but would *never* have purchased. My buying patterns have not changed at all -- I still buy CDs that I genuinely like; I don't just find the whole album in mp3 format.
Yes, it's possible, even likely, that widespread availability of free mp3s can have some of the effect that you describe. But if you think every copied song is a lost sale, you have swallowed far too much of the RIAA's propaganda.
I'm sorry, but that's all your viewpoint comes down to.
Don't forget that in a sense it's unfair to the huge majority to spend half your resources on a couple individuals who can't really use the thing to begin with.
First, there are a whole hell of a lot more than "a couple" blind/vision-impared people (no, it's not 8%, but it's not a handful either). Regardless of the number though, it's extremely significant to those people. The fact that you don't give a damn how difficult their life is, just because it won't make a significant difference to your bottom line, is unfeeling and reprehensible.
As for your claim that they can't really use the internet, all I can say is: No shit, Sherlock. They can't really use a lot of it because thousands of people like you don't care enough to make it usable. Your attempt to rationalize away your bigotry is only that: a rationalization. It doesn't make you right, and it doesn't make your views any less disturbing.
In Safari, Command-Clicking on the page title brings up a menu of each directory below your current location on the site. It's home, up, and everything in between, all in one click.
You tell them to shut up and go away and they do neither?
It's more you threw them out, and they came back again and again and again and again and again after being told to stay away the first time.
What you are talking about is more about harrasment, which there are already perfectly good laws against. But that is not a fair description of the case:
Mr. Hamidi... offered to -- and did -- remove from his mailing list any recipient who so wished
Intel the company didn't recieve these emails; its employees did, so Intel the company can't ask him to stop sending them, which undermines your argument.
If Intel didn't want to deliver his emails, they could have filtered them, but they didn't. There's no reason for them to have a legal recourse to punish someone for using a service they chose to offer, as it was intended to be used.
Which right exactly did we give up? Would that be the right to sue someone and win, because they talked to you and you didn't like it?
Think of what a terrible precedent this would set... Imagine that you have a faithful servant. You instruct him to let any callers into the foyer, so you can meet with them, and decide whether or not you want to talk with them further. Now, imagine that someone comes to visit, asks to be let in, and are escorted to the foyer. You listen to them for a minute, then throw them out and sue for trespassing.
It's absurd, because, indirectly, you let them in. No judge or jury in the world would call that trespassing. Now call the servent POP/SMTP, and your visitors E-mail, and you see why this ruling makes sense.
On the surface, this is really nothing alike. On one hand, we have a company making sex toys, with a name sounding like a company that makes underwear. (I'll grant there could be some overlap, but they are basically distinct industries). On the other hand, we have a real-time strategy game with a very similar name to an established family of RTS games.
Any judge who found that there wasn't a possibilty of confusion ("Sweet, Blizzard released a new *Craft game!") would have to be insane.
It's very convenient, don't you think, that all of these secrets have been leaked? Giving the perfect basis for believing that anything of real importance must likewise have discovered.
Almost as if that's what they want us to believe.
Excuse me, I've just remembered I need to make a bigger foil hat.
They can just treat their employees as they plan to treat their users: as would-be criminals. IIRC, Palladium is supposed implement intrinsic document permissions, so they can set up all their memos to be unprintable and unforwardable.
Sure, there will still be ways to leak the info, but once Palladium is here it will be much more difficult. And in our society, no-one will consider a human solution to security issues when they can just slap more DRM on them instead.
When was the last time that a speedbump to the lineup significantly raised the prices of any of Apples computers? It basically always just replaces the last top-of-the-line with a faster cpu, but basically the same configuration and price.
Try coming back when you have a clue, instead of just FUD.
While I wish that all the parent were is funny, this is probably closer to the truth of what many companies will do than any of us would like.
It's incredibly easy to encrypt something without actually adding much, if any, security. It's just too easy to do wrong, and if all someone cares about is paying lip service to the law, then it will be done wrong in many, many companies.
It isn't that the Mozilla team
couldn't keep the Firebird name - it's that they
shouldn't. It isn't that anyone will confuse
a web browser with a RDBMS, it's that it's a
completely unnecessary risk that anyone could.
What are you talking about; there is no risk of confusion, as you said yourself, which is exactly what makes this so stupid. There is, as another poster pointed out, little more chance of the two being confused as there is of confusion with the car. Anyone who does confuse them is too stupid to use a browser, much less a DMBS
It's about essential respect in the open source community.
I definitely agree: this is all about how the people behind this campaign have demonstrated a total lack of even basic respect for anyone else. Nasty emails and posts all over make them look like spoiled children, not people who should be taken seriously. I wouldn't be surprised if people are less likely to give this system any consideration, since most people would prefer software written by professionals to software written by children.
Go read about how Hyatt, who's isn't even involved with the project anymore, was mailbombed to the tune of hundreds of messages per day. Then come tell us about how these vandals have the moral high-ground.
When we see a handheld device that runs at 2Ghz (or equivalent speeds at a different frequency) and has a 17" screen on it, then it will be post-pc era.
No, when we see that, it will be an era with 50GHz desktops with 40" screens. It's only when desktops have no major advantage over handhelds that we will see a post-PC era.
How do the "major" ISPs know that the site they block is not simply something that embarases the AG? They can't either. Why? Because looking at kiddie porn is a Federal Offense
One word: lynx
Re:The meaning of Profeesional Engineer in Texas
on
Are Programmers Engineers?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
until someone dies nothing will change.
You mean people like those killed in the widely studied Therac-25
accidents in the late 1980's? Or the US soldiers killed because of a software failure in the Patriot
Missle defense system in 1991?
I know that Apple probably has good reason not to make the various beta releases of Safari available to the public
But they are still making beta's available to the public, just not every single beta. I imagine that their public beta releases (which seem to be based on more or less completing a new feature) will stay steady, just like they have been so far, and just like the X11 betas.
Far too many people here are confusing the seeding program with the public betas, and blowing this way out of proportion.
I'm talking about all the "jump-on-the-translucent-bandwagon" stuff being crap, not Apple machines. I generally like Apple's designs quite a bit, and find them very high-quality. What I hate is the concept of taking a case, using the exact same blocky design that's always been used, but making it out of cheap translucent plastic, and thinking it's now magically cooler.
Heck, even when it's not cheap plastic it's usually horribly ugly. The early USB ZIP drive that's the same old design but in translucent blue is a perfect example.
Saved Apple? That's absurd! Everyone knows Apple is teetering on the edge of ruin, and will be folding any day now... Haven't you been reading the news for the past 10 years?
The real issue is that so many of the products the original poster is refering to are crap. There was a definite mentality that if someone took a random product and replaced its case with a cheap, pastel, translucent plastic case, it would instantly become cool.
I agree with the original poster... the sooner that fad dies, the better. There's more to stylish design than translucent plastic, and blindly applying an idea to everything you can get your hands on because someone else did it successfully is just another form of conformity
Slashdot Mirror
"lies, damn lies, and statistics."
That adage is totally irrelevant here, because no data is being hidden, and there is no handwaving to distract from the real numbers: they are given up front. No one is claiming they are poised to take over the market over the next year, or anything stupid like that. It's just a little pat on the back, that says "hey, word is spreading that our product is in fact getting better, and more people like it". Kudos to them.
Save your adages and sarcasm for statments like "In a massive upset in browser market share, Thunderbird has surged ahead with a 33% increase in usage."
spam is a real problem and filtering is not the solution.
And what is a real solution? If you say legislation, I'll just laugh.
if your[sic] going to get a false positive why filter?
What do you recommend for people who's time is too costly to read everything at the insanely high noise/signal ration? Stop using email? You talk about false positives like they happen all the time... do you have any idea how low the false positive rate is for a good filtering system? You might as well say that no-one should use mail, because your letter might get lost en-route... that's probably a hell of a lot more likely than any normal user hitting real problems with a good filter.
Unless you routinely send emails with subjects like "GET VIAGRA CHEAP NOW!!!" to 1,000 of your closest friends, you probably have nothing to worry about. But even if you do: it's always the recipient's choice whether or not to accept communications. Do you tell all of your friends to read all spam snail-mail, on the off-chance you send them a letter that they might mistake for a credit-card offer? Do you tell them to listen to every telemarketer pitch, in case it's you calling but you are slow to notice that they picked up, and call them by their last name? If so, do they listen? Why should spam be any different?
You're describing a naive, trust-or-don't approach to the "evil bit" suggested, which is stupid. All a system like the bulk marker would do is add more information to use to improve an existing filtering system, with baysian analysis, whitelisting, etc.
Clearly, there are many people willing to risk false positives to filter out the crap, so why shouldn't a system which helps them at no risk to those who don't filter be implemented?
As someone pointed out... if this is voluntary, why should anyone upset about the idea of others choosing to filter their own mail?
So, even in the unlikely chance that SCO was able to demonstrate a violation of their copyrights, their actions might be against distributors, and they would have no right of action against the rest of us.
Sadly, this is not so cut-and-dry. Under one interpretation of copyright law (very popular with the content providers), you create an actionable copy every time you load something into RAM. Thus, it's conceivable that SCO could make a case that every time your computer boots Linux, you are violating their copyright. Not too likely, perhaps, but less far-fetched than some of the claims that they have already made.
I mean, that's almost as bad as if there were some sort of confederation of semi-independent regions (let's call them "states") somewhere, and there were some kind of directive (let's call it a "law", or maybe a "constitutional ammendment") that some "states" could be forced to adopt just because some group of people, or most of the other "states", thought it was a good idea.
I'm not sure where you are getting "unelected" from, but the idea that you are pretty much stuck with what the majority wants even if you don't like it, is basically central to the entire concept of democracy.
They've been illegally deprived of the money from the second sale.
Sorry, wrong. You are make a huge assumption here, which is that there would have been a second sale. I stopped buying CDs almost as soon as I started (well before mp3 availability). Why? Most had only one or two songs I liked, and they were way too expensive to justify the modest amount of music listening I do. In addition, I found that I tired of pop songs very quickly, so it didn't make sense to buy if I wouldn't be listening to it at all in a year. So I stuck to listening to the radio, or not listening to music at all, except for the occasional very good CD, which I bought.
Now, I have a reasonably-sized mp3 collection, including many songs which I occasionally enjoy listening to, but would *never* have purchased. My buying patterns have not changed at all -- I still buy CDs that I genuinely like; I don't just find the whole album in mp3 format.
Yes, it's possible, even likely, that widespread availability of free mp3s can have some of the effect that you describe. But if you think every copied song is a lost sale, you have swallowed far too much of the RIAA's propaganda.
I'm sorry, but that's all your viewpoint comes down to.
First, there are a whole hell of a lot more than "a couple" blind/vision-impared people (no, it's not 8%, but it's not a handful either). Regardless of the number though, it's extremely significant to those people. The fact that you don't give a damn how difficult their life is, just because it won't make a significant difference to your bottom line, is unfeeling and reprehensible.
As for your claim that they can't really use the internet, all I can say is: No shit, Sherlock. They can't really use a lot of it because thousands of people like you don't care enough to make it usable. Your attempt to rationalize away your bigotry is only that: a rationalization. It doesn't make you right, and it doesn't make your views any less disturbing.
In Safari, Command-Clicking on the page title brings up a menu of each directory below your current location on the site. It's home, up, and everything in between, all in one click.
You tell them to shut up and go away and they do neither?
It's more you threw them out, and they came back again and again and again and again and again after being told to stay away the first time.
What you are talking about is more about harrasment, which there are already perfectly good laws against. But that is not a fair description of the case:
Intel the company didn't recieve these emails; its employees did, so Intel the company can't ask him to stop sending them, which undermines your argument.
If Intel didn't want to deliver his emails, they could have filtered them, but they didn't. There's no reason for them to have a legal recourse to punish someone for using a service they chose to offer, as it was intended to be used.
Which right exactly did we give up? Would that be the right to sue someone and win, because they talked to you and you didn't like it?
Think of what a terrible precedent this would set... Imagine that you have a faithful servant. You instruct him to let any callers into the foyer, so you can meet with them, and decide whether or not you want to talk with them further. Now, imagine that someone comes to visit, asks to be let in, and are escorted to the foyer. You listen to them for a minute, then throw them out and sue for trespassing.
It's absurd, because, indirectly, you let them in. No judge or jury in the world would call that trespassing. Now call the servent POP/SMTP, and your visitors E-mail, and you see why this ruling makes sense.
On the surface, this is really nothing alike. On one hand, we have a company making sex toys, with a name sounding like a company that makes underwear. (I'll grant there could be some overlap, but they are basically distinct industries). On the other hand, we have a real-time strategy game with a very similar name to an established family of RTS games.
Any judge who found that there wasn't a possibilty of confusion ("Sweet, Blizzard released a new *Craft game!") would have to be insane.
It's very convenient, don't you think, that all of these secrets have been leaked? Giving the perfect basis for believing that anything of real importance must likewise have discovered.
Almost as if that's what they want us to believe.
Excuse me, I've just remembered I need to make a bigger foil hat.
They can just treat their employees as they plan to treat their users: as would-be criminals. IIRC, Palladium is supposed implement intrinsic document permissions, so they can set up all their memos to be unprintable and unforwardable.
Sure, there will still be ways to leak the info, but once Palladium is here it will be much more difficult. And in our society, no-one will consider a human solution to security issues when they can just slap more DRM on them instead.
When was the last time that a speedbump to the lineup significantly raised the prices of any of Apples computers? It basically always just replaces the last top-of-the-line with a faster cpu, but basically the same configuration and price.
Try coming back when you have a clue, instead of just FUD.
While I wish that all the parent were is funny, this is probably closer to the truth of what many companies will do than any of us would like.
It's incredibly easy to encrypt something without actually adding much, if any, security. It's just too easy to do wrong, and if all someone cares about is paying lip service to the law, then it will be done wrong in many, many companies.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I didn't see anything that would keep people from:
So how is this any worse than having the CD?
It isn't that the Mozilla team couldn't keep the Firebird name - it's that they shouldn't. It isn't that anyone will confuse a web browser with a RDBMS, it's that it's a completely unnecessary risk that anyone could.
What are you talking about; there is no risk of confusion, as you said yourself, which is exactly what makes this so stupid. There is, as another poster pointed out, little more chance of the two being confused as there is of confusion with the car. Anyone who does confuse them is too stupid to use a browser, much less a DMBS
It's about essential respect in the open source community.
I definitely agree: this is all about how the people behind this campaign have demonstrated a total lack of even basic respect for anyone else. Nasty emails and posts all over make them look like spoiled children, not people who should be taken seriously. I wouldn't be surprised if people are less likely to give this system any consideration, since most people would prefer software written by professionals to software written by children.
Go read about how Hyatt, who's isn't even involved with the project anymore, was mailbombed to the tune of hundreds of messages per day. Then come tell us about how these vandals have the moral high-ground.
When we see a handheld device that runs at 2Ghz (or equivalent speeds at a different frequency) and has a 17" screen on it, then it will be post-pc era. No, when we see that, it will be an era with 50GHz desktops with 40" screens. It's only when desktops have no major advantage over handhelds that we will see a post-PC era.
One word: lynx
You mean people like those killed in the widely studied Therac-25 accidents in the late 1980's? Or the US soldiers killed because of a software failure in the Patriot Missle defense system in 1991?
But they are still making beta's available to the public, just not every single beta. I imagine that their public beta releases (which seem to be based on more or less completing a new feature) will stay steady, just like they have been so far, and just like the X11 betas.
Far too many people here are confusing the seeding program with the public betas, and blowing this way out of proportion.
Heck, even when it's not cheap plastic it's usually horribly ugly. The early USB ZIP drive that's the same old design but in translucent blue is a perfect example.
Saved Apple? That's absurd! Everyone knows Apple is teetering on the edge of ruin, and will be folding any day now... Haven't you been reading the news for the past 10 years?
I agree with the original poster... the sooner that fad dies, the better. There's more to stylish design than translucent plastic, and blindly applying an idea to everything you can get your hands on because someone else did it successfully is just another form of conformity
So that would be... one for each of the 52 states?