Yes, that's a fair criticism. And to follow up on my GP, my reaction so far is very positive. I think I can finally switch away from 3.5, and happily. I keep looking for the bugs from the last attempt and they seem to be gone. The only issue I've found so far is a lack of default MP3 support in Amarok 2 (it didn't even prompt me for a codec install, but rather finished songs instantly as if I maintain a collection of thousands of 0-second-long MP3s).
The desktop is easily the most beautiful and elegant one I've seen, easily pulverizing Vista and matching OS X's easy-on-the-eyes appearance with an underlying utility I haven't encountered anywhere else. The Desktop folder plasmoids are rather innovative.
The question now is: Will Lessig be stupid enough to support Messiah Obama again in 4 years. Only time will tell.
Lessig is not a one-issue voter, despite his strong positions on copyright. His reasons
for supporting Obama in 2008 are available to read (and there's a video around, too), and they were not limited to copyright issues. They weren't even principally about copyright.
Lessig was most interested in Obama's foreign policy and how much better he thought it would be than the foreign policy of the people who brought us the Iraq War. Remember, Lessig is somewhat libertarian in his leanings, and a libertarian foreign policy would never have allowed for the Iraq War. The professor also liked Obama's pledge not to take money from corporate lobbyists, which is a major issue that Lessig seems to care about almost as much as copyright reform, if not more. Bad, one-sided policies that favor major industries are more or less guaranteed when those industries are allowed to line the pockets of the legislature, so one could argue that government reform is a precondition of good copyright policy. (Government reform is the goal of his Change Congress movement, which sadly I haven't heard much about lately.)
So even with a poor, one-sided copyright policy (and we certainly seem to be headed toward more of the same with Obama), it's the non-copyright shifts away from Bush era policies that seem to weigh with him more. If Lessig's positions are unchanged in 2012, and if the Republicans are unchanged in 2012, I'd be very surprised if Lessig backed anyone else but Obama.
Yes, I too miss those pre-2009 days when federal copyright policies were flexible and balanced the needs of the holder's rights with those of fair use, and didn't unfairly influence technology design or network policies.
Or... wait a minute. This is a bit of a stretch, but... could Hollywood have had an influence on the Republicans, too? I'm suddenly having weird, possibly errant memories of tough copyright regulation prior to January, and also prior to the Democrats taking congress in 2006. Surely that's not possible.
Annoyed as I've been at the incompleteness of the various distros' KDE offerings lately, I will dutifully try each release, including Jaunty, if only to see whether anything is horribly broken, and whether I can reliably work with a KDE 4 desktop.
Last time a Kubuntu came out they broke metadata, at least for JPEG images, so all the photos I manipulated in the shiny new Gwenview lost their dates, orientations, and so on. Not the end of the world, but it was an annoying bug.
I'm endlessly impressed by KDE's efforts, but the distros totally jumped the gun on the new architecture. The community (even most people in this crowd) totally grokked the idea of "4.0-as-API-freeze" but the distros throught 4.0 meant time to upgrade, and frankly they should have kept 3.5 as the default until the 4 series was truly ready. But again, I'll try it out. Amarok 2 is supposed to be a fantastic music player.
Hm... I got an "Interesting" mod. While the karma is appreciated, I have somehow failed to be "Funny." Let me ruin the joke by explaining it: you really shouldn't get information about Macs from a painfully staged Mac comment in a Microsoft ad. Da-dum-dum! Thank you.
Allow me to pose a question to you: If Apple is built entirely on hype rather than substance, then how did they manage to convert so many former Apple haters to their cause? Maybe, just maybe Apple has earned support from the market by making superior products.
I don't know. I was watching a TV ad this week, and a pretty technically savvy guy named Giampaolo said Macs are just about aesthetics, not computing power.
Very true. But while the concept products that Microsoft Research demos at these shows are the products of the future, judging from their track record they always will be. It just like with concept cars: they're the coolest things you've ever seen, and if they were on the market for a reasonable price they'd atomize every competitor. But they never, ever come to market. (Unless I'm mistaken and some of you "Jon Andertons" are typing comments on your living room Microsoft Surface units...)
These days, I think it is perfectly reasonable for the electoral college to be removed completely.
Republicans need to lose an election because of electoral votes but win in the popular vote. Once that happens, the remaining 50% of the country will agree with you and the Electoral College will be no more. Right now only one party got burned in recent memory, so only half the electorate harbors any distain for the EC.
It's also good to see that this time around, politics seems to be irrelevant to the core debate. The principal credible criticisms of Obama have been coming from ostensibly "liberal" sources (not surprising, since the most die-hard conservatives among us are still caught up in inane mid-decade partisanship - questions of whether the president is a Muslim, or has a valid US birth certificate, or will take away your guns and re-educate you as a socialist). The left wing seems content to substantively criticise "their own" leader, which I think entirely contradicts the GP's assertion that it's dangerous to criticise "the chosen one."
I haven't been optimistic for a while, but that speaks very well for the future of these debates. If the left had let this sort of thing slide and made the vacuous argument that it's OK as long as their own party does it, we'd be back in the bad old days of pointless partisan bickering. This is a far cry from the 2000 election when Republicans everywhere decided recounts of disputed close elections had become spontaneously illegal.
in the theatre where I watched the first screening of Star Wars: Episode I, there was a standing ovation after the movie was over.
Later I realized there was a standing ovation BECAUSE the movie was over.
Even the giant robots smacking each other more, or in unexpected ways, wouldn't help it. The problem is that they weren't all that well-rendered when they got moving. When they really got fighting and transforming they became big CGI blurs. Supposedly photorealistic, but I think they fell short. Morgan Fox really was the best part of the movie.
Agreed. I'm annoyed about some of these Bushisms, and skeptical that Obama (or anyone) can fix the economic crisis. And I have a lot of complaints about the administration's abuse of the state secrets privledge and support of domestic wiretapping, but...
Have you seen our foreign policy lately?
The United States is looking like a real global player again. Obama's made kind, respectful statements to the Iranian people (who are a lot nicer than their government). This week he visited Turkey and said that we're not a fundamentalist Christian nation, but a nation of laws and ideals. He even complimented the secular traditions of Turkey since Attaturk, an important thing to emphasize when hard-liners are intent on destroying those traditions. And it was just announced that Cuban Americans are going to be allowed to visit their families more frequently, indicating that we're finally getting over a 40-year-old dispute that's got us nowhere.
As much as we need to be critical of the missteps like that described in TFA, the most important development of the past 60 days is that the chest-beating approach to foreign policy is dying. Welcome back to the world.
you assume the Obama DOJ is looking to continue the program, rather than simply support the Defense of AT&T.
Yes, and there are deeper currents to this that are also worth considering. While we should not stop criticizing moves like this no matter who is in the White House, I've been wondering if this and related moves (like the continued abuse of the state secrets privledge) are really designed to avoid setting a precedent. Specifically, the precedent of not defending previous administrations. Because, you know, current administrations have a habit of becoming previous administrations after a few years, and if every incoming president legally screws the people who just left, that would tend to cause productivity problems.
All of which is beside the point from the citizen's perspective. It's our responsibility to tell these people that even if we voted for them, we think their actions suck. I'm pleased to see that so much of the opposition to the White House is coming from the political left. Nods to the posters above who mentioned giving to the EFF. I've been giving monthly for a while now. Do you?
(A preemptive response for those who say the EFF never accomplishes anything is on their website.)
It's sad. Anyone who implemented an ActiveX intranet site failed to grasp the real promise of the Web. It's standards-based and potentially client agnostic, as well as extremely flexible, but a ton of businesses missed the point and wrote inflexible client-specific apps anyway.
I worked at a company that implemented an ActiveX-based app around 1999. At the time we had to remove Netscape from all workstations everywhere and get people using IE5. This struck me as very fishy, since even though I liked IE much more than the Netscape versions of the time I understood the benefits of implementing a web app as opposed to a Windows-specific app. And I wasn't even a web developer at the time. The resulting complications started fairly quickly: when Windows 98 Second Edition came out we discovered that the site didn't work with the new and improved (non-removable, non-downgradeable) IE6. People everywhere in the company were having problems using the ActiveX app because the API had changed. In other words, we'd have been better off with a Windows-specific app.
Too late to lament now, I suppose. The damage is done.
I first encountered Firefly on DVD, years after it was canned. And I wondered, how could such a completely original sci-fi show that's so fun to watch fail to achieve great success? Then I remembered that I was discovering it on DVD years after it was canned, and the answer presented itself. Fox needs to learn how to schedule (consistently!) and promote.
It's true: definitely do not approach Fringe hoping to find originality. The fun of Fringe is that it fills the X-Files niche nicely (and the Alias niche, I should add, in case the strong female lead agent didn't seem vaguely familiar), and it does it with memorable characters. Walter in particular is a weekly joy. The show also seems to have set up a nicely planned story arc of the kind only JJ Abrams seems to be able to pull off.
I smell a good cost/benefit analysis brewing. How much money would you lose by not selling a product in a state as large as Texas? How much would you save by eliminating Texas as a location in which a patent troll could file suit against you for infringement? Sure, if you were sued elsewhere you would still have to spend millions on litigation, but if your liklihood of a successful defense is greater sans Texas, might it be worthwhile?
I used an anecdote once, and it was like TOTALLY reliable. Besides, I read a study in O magazine that said that 4 out of 5 statistics are completely made up.
I know this guy who says it's really more like 4.5 out of 5.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that's a fair criticism. And to follow up on my GP, my reaction so far is very positive. I think I can finally switch away from 3.5, and happily. I keep looking for the bugs from the last attempt and they seem to be gone. The only issue I've found so far is a lack of default MP3 support in Amarok 2 (it didn't even prompt me for a codec install, but rather finished songs instantly as if I maintain a collection of thousands of 0-second-long MP3s).
The desktop is easily the most beautiful and elegant one I've seen, easily pulverizing Vista and matching OS X's easy-on-the-eyes appearance with an underlying utility I haven't encountered anywhere else. The Desktop folder plasmoids are rather innovative.
The question now is: Will Lessig be stupid enough to support Messiah Obama again in 4 years. Only time will tell.
Lessig is not a one-issue voter, despite his strong positions on copyright. His reasons for supporting Obama in 2008 are available to read (and there's a video around, too), and they were not limited to copyright issues. They weren't even principally about copyright.
Lessig was most interested in Obama's foreign policy and how much better he thought it would be than the foreign policy of the people who brought us the Iraq War. Remember, Lessig is somewhat libertarian in his leanings, and a libertarian foreign policy would never have allowed for the Iraq War. The professor also liked Obama's pledge not to take money from corporate lobbyists, which is a major issue that Lessig seems to care about almost as much as copyright reform, if not more. Bad, one-sided policies that favor major industries are more or less guaranteed when those industries are allowed to line the pockets of the legislature, so one could argue that government reform is a precondition of good copyright policy. (Government reform is the goal of his Change Congress movement, which sadly I haven't heard much about lately.)
So even with a poor, one-sided copyright policy (and we certainly seem to be headed toward more of the same with Obama), it's the non-copyright shifts away from Bush era policies that seem to weigh with him more. If Lessig's positions are unchanged in 2012, and if the Republicans are unchanged in 2012, I'd be very surprised if Lessig backed anyone else but Obama.
Republicans=gas and oil. Democrats=Hollywood
Yes, I too miss those pre-2009 days when federal copyright policies were flexible and balanced the needs of the holder's rights with those of fair use, and didn't unfairly influence technology design or network policies.
Or ... wait a minute. This is a bit of a stretch, but ... could Hollywood have had an influence on the Republicans, too? I'm suddenly having weird, possibly errant memories of tough copyright regulation prior to January, and also prior to the Democrats taking congress in 2006. Surely that's not possible.
Annoyed as I've been at the incompleteness of the various distros' KDE offerings lately, I will dutifully try each release, including Jaunty, if only to see whether anything is horribly broken, and whether I can reliably work with a KDE 4 desktop.
Last time a Kubuntu came out they broke metadata, at least for JPEG images, so all the photos I manipulated in the shiny new Gwenview lost their dates, orientations, and so on. Not the end of the world, but it was an annoying bug.
I'm endlessly impressed by KDE's efforts, but the distros totally jumped the gun on the new architecture. The community (even most people in this crowd) totally grokked the idea of "4.0-as-API-freeze" but the distros throught 4.0 meant time to upgrade, and frankly they should have kept 3.5 as the default until the 4 series was truly ready. But again, I'll try it out. Amarok 2 is supposed to be a fantastic music player.
This is extremely bad news for lazy students everywhere. Won't someone please think of the plagiarists? :)
A guide for the uninitiated:
http://www.samkass.com/theories/RPSSL.html
Google it and you'll find a link to a clip from an episode of the Big Bang Theory that features RPSSL. Essential viewing. :)
Is that due to the bandwidth demands of downloading an entire building
Hmmm ... someone's never heard of torrents. :)
Now that's laughably interesting. :)
Hm ... I got an "Interesting" mod. While the karma is appreciated, I have somehow failed to be "Funny." Let me ruin the joke by explaining it: you really shouldn't get information about Macs from a painfully staged Mac comment in a Microsoft ad. Da-dum-dum! Thank you.
Allow me to pose a question to you: If Apple is built entirely on hype rather than substance, then how did they manage to convert so many former Apple haters to their cause? Maybe, just maybe Apple has earned support from the market by making superior products.
I don't know. I was watching a TV ad this week, and a pretty technically savvy guy named Giampaolo said Macs are just about aesthetics, not computing power.
Very true. But while the concept products that Microsoft Research demos at these shows are the products of the future, judging from their track record they always will be. It just like with concept cars: they're the coolest things you've ever seen, and if they were on the market for a reasonable price they'd atomize every competitor. But they never, ever come to market. (Unless I'm mistaken and some of you "Jon Andertons" are typing comments on your living room Microsoft Surface units ...)
These days, I think it is perfectly reasonable for the electoral college to be removed completely.
Republicans need to lose an election because of electoral votes but win in the popular vote. Once that happens, the remaining 50% of the country will agree with you and the Electoral College will be no more. Right now only one party got burned in recent memory, so only half the electorate harbors any distain for the EC.
It's also good to see that this time around, politics seems to be irrelevant to the core debate. The principal credible criticisms of Obama have been coming from ostensibly "liberal" sources (not surprising, since the most die-hard conservatives among us are still caught up in inane mid-decade partisanship - questions of whether the president is a Muslim, or has a valid US birth certificate, or will take away your guns and re-educate you as a socialist). The left wing seems content to substantively criticise "their own" leader, which I think entirely contradicts the GP's assertion that it's dangerous to criticise "the chosen one."
I haven't been optimistic for a while, but that speaks very well for the future of these debates. If the left had let this sort of thing slide and made the vacuous argument that it's OK as long as their own party does it, we'd be back in the bad old days of pointless partisan bickering. This is a far cry from the 2000 election when Republicans everywhere decided recounts of disputed close elections had become spontaneously illegal.
Slashdot thread, Brannon Braga version: The threads are de-evolving into lizards! We've got to stop this before they spray us with venom!
in the theatre where I watched the first screening of Star Wars: Episode I, there was a standing ovation after the movie was over. Later I realized there was a standing ovation BECAUSE the movie was over.
Meesa saw same thing!
Even the giant robots smacking each other more, or in unexpected ways, wouldn't help it. The problem is that they weren't all that well-rendered when they got moving. When they really got fighting and transforming they became big CGI blurs. Supposedly photorealistic, but I think they fell short. Morgan Fox really was the best part of the movie.
Agreed. I'm annoyed about some of these Bushisms, and skeptical that Obama (or anyone) can fix the economic crisis. And I have a lot of complaints about the administration's abuse of the state secrets privledge and support of domestic wiretapping, but ...
Have you seen our foreign policy lately?
The United States is looking like a real global player again. Obama's made kind, respectful statements to the Iranian people (who are a lot nicer than their government). This week he visited Turkey and said that we're not a fundamentalist Christian nation, but a nation of laws and ideals. He even complimented the secular traditions of Turkey since Attaturk, an important thing to emphasize when hard-liners are intent on destroying those traditions. And it was just announced that Cuban Americans are going to be allowed to visit their families more frequently, indicating that we're finally getting over a 40-year-old dispute that's got us nowhere.
As much as we need to be critical of the missteps like that described in TFA, the most important development of the past 60 days is that the chest-beating approach to foreign policy is dying. Welcome back to the world.
you assume the Obama DOJ is looking to continue the program, rather than simply support the Defense of AT&T.
Yes, and there are deeper currents to this that are also worth considering. While we should not stop criticizing moves like this no matter who is in the White House, I've been wondering if this and related moves (like the continued abuse of the state secrets privledge) are really designed to avoid setting a precedent. Specifically, the precedent of not defending previous administrations. Because, you know, current administrations have a habit of becoming previous administrations after a few years, and if every incoming president legally screws the people who just left, that would tend to cause productivity problems.
All of which is beside the point from the citizen's perspective. It's our responsibility to tell these people that even if we voted for them, we think their actions suck. I'm pleased to see that so much of the opposition to the White House is coming from the political left. Nods to the posters above who mentioned giving to the EFF. I've been giving monthly for a while now. Do you?
(A preemptive response for those who say the EFF never accomplishes anything is on their website.)
If it takes gouging out everyone's eyes to stop the terrists, then that's what we'll have to do.
It's sad. Anyone who implemented an ActiveX intranet site failed to grasp the real promise of the Web. It's standards-based and potentially client agnostic, as well as extremely flexible, but a ton of businesses missed the point and wrote inflexible client-specific apps anyway.
I worked at a company that implemented an ActiveX-based app around 1999. At the time we had to remove Netscape from all workstations everywhere and get people using IE5. This struck me as very fishy, since even though I liked IE much more than the Netscape versions of the time I understood the benefits of implementing a web app as opposed to a Windows-specific app. And I wasn't even a web developer at the time. The resulting complications started fairly quickly: when Windows 98 Second Edition came out we discovered that the site didn't work with the new and improved (non-removable, non-downgradeable) IE6. People everywhere in the company were having problems using the ActiveX app because the API had changed. In other words, we'd have been better off with a Windows-specific app.
Too late to lament now, I suppose. The damage is done.
I first encountered Firefly on DVD, years after it was canned. And I wondered, how could such a completely original sci-fi show that's so fun to watch fail to achieve great success? Then I remembered that I was discovering it on DVD years after it was canned, and the answer presented itself. Fox needs to learn how to schedule (consistently!) and promote.
It's true: definitely do not approach Fringe hoping to find originality. The fun of Fringe is that it fills the X-Files niche nicely (and the Alias niche, I should add, in case the strong female lead agent didn't seem vaguely familiar), and it does it with memorable characters. Walter in particular is a weekly joy. The show also seems to have set up a nicely planned story arc of the kind only JJ Abrams seems to be able to pull off.
I smell a good cost/benefit analysis brewing. How much money would you lose by not selling a product in a state as large as Texas? How much would you save by eliminating Texas as a location in which a patent troll could file suit against you for infringement? Sure, if you were sued elsewhere you would still have to spend millions on litigation, but if your liklihood of a successful defense is greater sans Texas, might it be worthwhile?
I used an anecdote once, and it was like TOTALLY reliable. Besides, I read a study in O magazine that said that 4 out of 5 statistics are completely made up.
I know this guy who says it's really more like 4.5 out of 5.
WHOOOSH
I was following this discussion of bash, sh, csh and tcsh perfectly well, but now I'm lost. What shell are you talking about?