Be smart. Make interesting content, then put it up on a cheap website, and tell everyone they can mirror it as much as they want to.
How do you get rewarded for the time you spent making the interesting content? Or do you have to do this only as a hobby and have a real paying job on the side?
What you are supporting is basically a return to the European Dark Ages, where the leaders operated in the dark without the people's knowledge, and the citizens were just pawns in their leader's games.
That is still largely how the world works, people in the US are just kept in the dark most of the time.
What is more relevant to all of this is whether you are able to decide on what is best for your nation. The reality is that diplomat spend years studying international politics at university, then they get a junior job where all they get to do is file reports which are assessed by their superiors. By the time they actually get to talk on behalf of their nation they have been playing the great game for a long time.
So the question is how much knowledge of international law, diplomacy and politics should someone need before they can hold someone doing the job to account? Should someone with no knowledge of these areas be able to second guess what their diplomats do? What qualifies a population who rely on Faux news for their knowledge of international affairs to judge how relations with foreign government should be conducted on a day to day level.
The way this should actually work is: You elect a government, they decide the aims on your behalf, the diplomats then try their best to make this happen by their own methods they have been learning over their entire life.
Or, you just try and dictate to the rest of the world how it should live entirely by your rules and everyone ignores you unless they need something. If they need something, they just lie then go back on the deal. This does not help you at all.
Diplomacy is a very complicated game, and one that is not suited to reactionary politicians at all.
I don't give a fuck about what happens outside US territory.
Yes, you do. You just do not know it. Every country in the world has become economically linked and the US is no different. You have in the past had more of the worlds natural resources in your domain so you had less need for diplomacy. Now more of the resources we need (ie - rare earths) are under China. This means playing nice with China even though they are screwing us by not allowing their currency to appreciate in value. If China did let its currency appreciate correctly US manufacturing might actually stand a chance of competing again. China will only ever let this happen if they get some sort of concession in return since we cannot really threaten force so it will require what is known as "soft touch diplomacy".
Secrecy of things like COICA (copyright/three-strike law) and ACTA (more copyright protection but on the global scale) that affect citizens is bullshit. It should be out in the open, not hidden, otherwise representative government Can Not work.
Some people say that a core idea representative democracy is that you elect a representative to act on your behalf because you think you trust the way he will act ahead of time. You do not know the ins and outs of why he makes an individual decision so all you can do is wait 4 years then judge the result.
If you were in a position to be as well informed about every decision your elected government makes on your behalf at the time they make it then maybe direct democracy would be a better system. In this case you would also have to vote on everything though and with a daily referendum this would get in the way of you doing anything else.
The truth is that the only thing publishing any of these cables does is screw up US diplomatic relations with the rest of the world and make you a total laughing stock of the countries that actually manage to keep this information secret. It will also make other countries much more cautious in US diplomats presence at probably leave you on the sidelines of more international decisions (ones that do not involve using military force anyway)
Trunk is dev, branches are stable. We haven't had much trouble with this set up at all.
I think the problem is that this does not really work when you have people all over the world trying to do different things on a huge base of code over different timescales. If everyone is working towards a single release date then this makes more sense as you can implement things like feature freezes.
In Kernel development though there can be people working on a refinement that will take a very long period of time so there will be several releases that go by in between. There will also be be people starting there development at random times with no real knowledge of what else is going on the Trunk.
The single Trunk for dev works well in companies where everyone sings from the same hymn sheet but is not so good for distributed development being contributed to from different developers at different times on different projects.
No single company would ever structure development like this as it is woefully inefficient in terms of man power but it does have other advantages since it is closer to an evolutionary process. Consider Linus as natural selection in action:)
Say I've hooked up my PC to a TV [wikipedia.org] and connected four Xbox 360 controllers through a USB hub. How many controllers does a typical major-label game designed for the PC support? One. Instead of adding shared-screen play, publishers expect players to buy four PCs, four monitors, and (more importantly) four copies of the game.
No, each player buy one copy and then takes their PC round mates house. Or they play over this amazing new invention you might have heard of, its called "The Internet".
The multiscreen playing thing on consoles, but it is a bit of joke since you can always glance across at your fellow players screen and cheat. This might not matter in driving games, but in shooters and things it removes any aspect of being crafty and sneaking up on people. I would certainly not say it should not be included, but I would like to see more console games support head to head play on different consoles since they are much cheaper to but 2 or 3 of and leave one at your mates house.
Yes, it is indeed pretty clear they're talking about graphics. It is also pretty clear that when they say "is holding back creative expression" and "holding back quality games", what they mean is that all their creative expression and quality work is going into making a game prettier. Which in turns means they have no idea how to make quality games.
There are many of us who think that a game maxing out the capabilities of recent graphic cards on the market is actually an essential for a quality game. Let you guys who haven't upgraded your gaming rig in 10 years play a cut down version sure, but I don't see why I should. You can then turn down all the graphics settings to make sure it runs under your DX9 hardware but we get to see a nicer image so get a slightly more immersive experience.
There are certainly other essentials for making a quality game (like playabilty, story, fun, a challenge, etc) but it taking advantage of new hardware is equally important. Otherwise all the games on the market would look no better than consoles even though PC hardware is now a world away. A top end I7 gaming rig is far more powerful hardware than any of the consoles, so PC games should try and use it to the max.
It is also worth noting that it is not just about making the game look prettier. There are things like destructible scenery and better physics that go a long way in many games. One of the things that I loved about Half-Life 2 when it came out was the water. The way it acted was so much truer in that than had been done in many games before. This would have been hard as hell on previous generations of hardware. Likewise for the gravity gun and the way you could get weird bounces of certain objects.
In the first Crysis there were things that really ate up CPU power. They must have been hard as hell to get looking half decent on hardware like the X-Box360. Anyone remember the weird spaceship style under water level? I could see my CPU usage go nuts when that started. The fact that you spent the whole level floating through something that seemed to have the consistency of soup was a damn nice touch and made you play differently. In many ways that was similar to the airbourne vehicle or tank levels for making the game more varied that just being stuck on two feet throughout.
I was looking for my old copy of Crysis recently to put my new 480 through it's paces.
The Sony music division should sue the Sony computer division for putting CD/DVD burners on their Vaio laptops.
They would, but the CD burners on VAIO laptops have a lifespan of amount 10 minutes before they break. Maybe this is a deliberate ploy so you cant use Sony Laptops for being an evil pirate:)
The Nazis specifically prosecuted and eliminated Jews, gays, lesbians, Roma, handicapped people and probably a slew of other groups that didn't fit into their world view, quite a difference if you ask me.
I am, however, saying that the association between the swastika and nothing but Nazi Germany is far from universal.
He also say in his post that most of the people making your argument would not wear one to walk down the street. So prove him wrong. Get a big swastika printed on a T-Shirt and wear it outside in a busy place. There is a very real chance that someone will just walk up and punch you in the face without waiting for your wonderful explanation about it being a religious symbol. Not that this is the behaviour I would choose since I abhor violence.
If you really want a laugh, put on your Swasika T-Shirt and then fly to Israel. You will be lucky if you are even allowed on a plane.
I know all about it being a religious symbol, but the problem is that about 70 years ago it was then used by dictator who tried to exterminate a large number of people just for being of the wrong descent or having the wrong political views. He utterly fucked over that symbol by adopting it so now when people see it (even those who know it as a religious symbol first), their first association is always with Nazi's. Now no doubt you disagree with this, but I do not believe you. I think you are just deluding yourself for the sake of argument.
I also think that we have a duty to remember that symbol and what is was bastardized into. Then we can remember the genocide it came to represent and make damn sure we never let that happen again. Yes we can do that without the symbol, but why should we since it is a very powerful association already. How do you choose a new symbol to represent Hitler's mass genocide?
If I was a server admin and I saw a player with that symbol enter my server, I would just ban you without waiting for an explanation. Not because I am ignorant of the symbols true meaning, but because to many, many people the symbol has taken on a meaning of the symbol of the people who tried to make sure they were never born and hence they now find it offensive. Yes, many Jews still find it a very offensive symbol. Now if you want to complain about this, then go complain to Hitler or whoever chose the symbol for the SS in the first place.
Incidentally, there is a charity moustache growing competition going on throughout November (Movember). Do you know how many people I have see trying to grow a Charlie Chaplin moustache? None, because too many people now also associate that with Hitler too and it has stopped being a comedy moustache as a result.
And judging by the number of Hindus on Slashdot today it must be very large religion indeed in the english speaking world. But it is not, so statistically most of you lying to prove a point. I have no way of knowing who is who so I am going to assume that the vast majority of people here are just being childish and risk you being the one exception who is actually a deeply committed Hindhu. Far more likely though is that you earned you slashdot award of "The Contradictor" by being a contrarian.
Hah! I'd love to see how this guy would do a physics or calculus paper...
When I studied Physics we had hardly any coursework. There was some but I don't remember it as I never did any. 80% of the course was based on reeling off mathematical proofs in exams.
In this type of course it would be just too easy to cheat so they force you to reel the proofs off under closed conditions with a limited supply of reference material (if any) provided.
I do remember when I was studying Physics though one of my house mates who was studying Sociology and Cultural Studies had to write an essay on Neil Stephenson and his book The Diamond Age. He had about as much interest in Science Fiction a I do in Sociology but he chose that book as he knew I had a copy. He also knew I liked the author.
On the night before his assignment was due in he came and asked me for some help. I proceeded to waffle on about the book based on the leading question he had been given regarding it. He sat there with his pad and took notes as I pointed out the sections of the book that were relevant to the question and gave some examples of the how the technological change (nanotechnology) in the book had changed the separate societies that are mentioned. It probably also helped that I was studying Physics so had some idea of nanotechnology.
After an hour or so he took his 1 or 2 sides of A4 notes and went upstairs to churn out an essay based on my ideas. He gained a first for that paper, and permanently changed my opinion of humanities subjects: Most of them are so easy to pass they should not even be taught in the same college as the sciences of engineering subjects, they are certainly not the same academic level and do not require the same amount of study. All they require is the ability to structure your ideas (or someone else's) into a well formed English essay.
Incidentally the guy who wrote that essay passed sociology and now works as a building site labourer. I failed physics and work as a lead software developer for a fairly small but very friendly company. I guess the employment market does not really value his sociology degree either.
and both the Gay Tony & whatever the biker one was called where both great content add ons for Grand theft auto.
The problem with both of these was that they were far too short. Compared to the original campaign they are a drop in the ocean only containing far less missions. There were 25 missions in the Ballad of Gay Tony compared to nearly 100 in the original game. Being that to buy them you end up paying close to the original value of the game you should get more missions, not less (including the saving they made on not developing or shipping a new game engine)
Not everyone needs a support contract, even if they're doing Serious Business. Indeed, if you're running tens of thousands of relatively cheap servers, those support contracts can be pretty expensive. (Not nearly as expensive as power and cooling, to be sure, but not entirely trivial either).
Just remember though, that if nobody buys RedHat licences then the company will go under and we lose the single biggest contributor to the Kernel.
I try and recommend buying RedHat to as many people as possible as they are a shining example of an open source centric company that freely gives back as much code as they are bound too by the GPL. They also do it in a timely manner unlike following the HTC route of delaying it by as long as possible to get the maximum competitive advantage but still prevent the slow wheels of justice from catching up. (HTC delay releasing their source by about 3 months so they remain in compliance with the GPL as far as any judge would be concerned but are crapping on the spirit of it)
If RedHat were driven under by CentOS then CentOS would disappear as well and it would not do the open source community any good whatsoever.
Redhats "support" is pretty bad if you don't get the super-ultra-deluxe package or whatever it is called. It's India based email support and often times they don't really understand the question, they just seize upon a couple of keywords and respond back with various kb articles on those keywords. Worthless IMO.
Is this RHEL support or are you talking about some other product?
I posted a support issue recently regarding some RHEL 3 servers I am stuck maintaining that run a legacy application. It was pretty much an edge case issue that I was experiencing but it was holding me up at the time. I posted it to the their forums and they did eventually post a response (from a RedHat employee) that solved the issue. It may have taken a week or two and I had worked around the problem by then anyway, but it was a much better and more thorough response than I expected.
It certainly was not someone throwing me a few links to some knowledge base articles as I had already thoroughly read this looking for a solution before I posted anything.
I had to run a control panel from the command line using sudo in order to make it keep my dual monitor preferences as recently as last year. Of course it didn't tell me that... it just reset to single monitor mode each reboot.
I find this quite annoying too. Especially as I know there is a perfectly good GUI that does exactly what I want for my graphics card.
Unfortunately they do not use this because it is the Nvidia settings tool that only works with the proprietary driver. Now I know that by using this I am using the closed source driver. I have been here often enough to have heard all the arguments against using it. I have made a choice to carry on using it as the open source ethos does not matter and I think the security risks are totally overrated on a single user desktop machine.
So Ubuntu should really give me the best tool for managing the proprietary display driver that it gave me an interface to install in the first place.
The ones who actually tortured people for the mere suspicion of supporting the wrong gang 2-3 years ago, or those who did it 65 years ago?
Nice post.
I would like to add that the European gang in question found themselves swinging at the end of a rope for their trouble. It also lead to the establishment of the Nuremburg Principles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Principles
But instead, the FSF is playing into the hands of the media companies by keeping things like VLC player out of the mainstream and attacking the only company with the same goals of ending DRM. Nice work FSF, this is seriously making me re-think my yearly donation...
This is the problem with an organisation who has a zealot as its founder: They tend to view compromise for the greater good as a bad thing so they end up marginalised.
In my opinion the most important thing in any disagreement is to try and meet the other side halfway. There will always be items you cannot possibly compromise on, but you often need to examine your own position and try and decide on some points that are more flexible.
If you are not able to do this and insist that all your points are inflexible then the chances of you winning any concessions from the opposing side pretty much drop to zero immediately.
My sister was withheld for 4 hours at an Israeli check point for questioning; her skin tone is slightly dark and could easily be mistaken for northern Muslim - even though she has a Danish passport, born by Danish parents and lived most of her life here.
Incidentally many Israeli's have fairly dark skin tone as well so it unlikely to be just her skin tone that set them off. What is her religious background though? This is far more likely flag you for special attention. Also, is her surname or firstname of arabic descent? If she has only lived there most of her life where was she born?
I am certainly not denying that if she was of Arabic descent she will be subject to tighter security since that is definitely the case. There are far more accurate ways of spotting arabic descendants than skin tone though.
The funny thing is, having flown EL AL from Canada to Israel, and to Europe, and then back to Israel. I didn't really notice the security(which is the mark of a good system). Not to mention they actually profile people who are probably going to be a threat, instead of the 87 year old grandmother with oxygen tanks.
My mate used to fly to Israel on El Al all the time from Britain. His way of amusing himself on the flight was to try and guess who the under cover armed officers on the plane were. Apparrently one would always be in the front couple of rows near the cabin so you did not have too many candidates to choose from.
Of course ultimately this is a business model question: Can we get content w/o charging on a per-copy basis. While it is easy to say that we had creative expression predating copyright; others reply that it was a different era. To those, I would suggest that the open source movement is a strong indicator that even today there are other ways for creative efforts to be compensated without the need for per copy charges.
It is worth remembering though that the open source movement depends on copyright laws. It relies on a licence that is only enforceable if the people who create open source software also hold the copyright.
If we do away with copyright or allow too many people to ride roughshod over it then companies might start doing the same.
People who really love a certain band, are the most likely to go out and download the bands entire discography for free. But they are also the group who would be most affected if that band went out of business. So they make a self-interested decision to buy the new album and keep the band working.
Only if they think that will happen. There are a great many people out there who think this will never happen since other people will carry on buying their favorites bands albums. Providing other people are doing the paying, they will always be able to download it for free. Like it or not there are people who fall into this camp.
That is why I call them freeloaders. They are not interested in what would happen if everyone did what they do. They are only interested in themselves and know that while other people pay to support their band they will reap the rewards.
These are the core of people we need laws to address since that is the only way to stop them doing what they like. Or we can simply resign ourselves to buying these people their music since it is too much effort to get the to cough up.
You assume that if piracy was impossible, that those who would pirate would buy. This isn't the case.
No, I assume that if piracy was impossible then a few extra people would buy, not all the people who pirate. But those few extra sales are lost revenue. This is far less lost revenue than the companies claim but it is still an amount greater than zero. So by enabling people to jailbreak he did cost MS some revenue, it is just argument about how much. Some poeple seem to think it is zero and that is certainly not the case.
The lost revenue to piracy stats are hopelessly inflated.
I agree that the stats are hopelessly inflated, and I even said so in my post.
Only if you ignore the people who would not have bought a copy until they played a pirated copy. Since the biggest pirates are also your biggest customers you can't crack down on one without cracking down on the other.
Interesting argument, but I think the number of people who fall in to this camp are fare fewer than the number of people in the "avoid paying for anything at all costs" camp that I was describing. You obviously have a better view of human nature than I do and neither of us have any figures to back either argument up.
Could you give me a source as to your 'fact'? My informal studies have indicated that the amount of money and profits for copyright materials such as movies and games are higher than they've ever been in the past, which would indicate that piracy is not an issue. As I know people who pirate, I asked them how many are doing so instead of buying a legit copy. Almost universally the answer was either
1) I'm pirating to test that it will run on my machine, but I'll be buying a legit copy if it does 2) Nah, I'm just checking it out to see what it's like. I'll put a few hours into it and then delete it. Maybe I'll buy it if it's really good.
In other words, 1) is either buying it or not buying it, but if it doesn't run and they don't buy it, the company is avoiding customer service costs and 2) is pirating and if they are suitably impressed, they will turn into a buyer. If they were preventing from 'piracy', they would never purchase the item in question.
I am not disputing that many people are like this, but I am saying that not everyone is like this.
There are some people who just refuse to pay for whatever they can and justify it to themselves morally by any tenuous argument they can come up with.
I would be interested to know how many people were in the 2nd option but still completed the game in your little study. These people are the ones I would count as the guys who should have made the buy it / leave it choice much sooner so were in fact just freeloaders justifying it to themselves any way they could.
Slashdot Mirror
Be smart. Make interesting content, then put it up on a cheap website, and tell everyone they can mirror it as much as they want to.
How do you get rewarded for the time you spent making the interesting content? Or do you have to do this only as a hobby and have a real paying job on the side?
What you are supporting is basically a return to the European Dark Ages, where the leaders operated in the dark without the people's knowledge, and the citizens were just pawns in their leader's games.
That is still largely how the world works, people in the US are just kept in the dark most of the time.
What is more relevant to all of this is whether you are able to decide on what is best for your nation. The reality is that diplomat spend years studying international politics at university, then they get a junior job where all they get to do is file reports which are assessed by their superiors. By the time they actually get to talk on behalf of their nation they have been playing the great game for a long time.
So the question is how much knowledge of international law, diplomacy and politics should someone need before they can hold someone doing the job to account? Should someone with no knowledge of these areas be able to second guess what their diplomats do? What qualifies a population who rely on Faux news for their knowledge of international affairs to judge how relations with foreign government should be conducted on a day to day level.
The way this should actually work is: You elect a government, they decide the aims on your behalf, the diplomats then try their best to make this happen by their own methods they have been learning over their entire life.
Or, you just try and dictate to the rest of the world how it should live entirely by your rules and everyone ignores you unless they need something. If they need something, they just lie then go back on the deal. This does not help you at all.
Diplomacy is a very complicated game, and one that is not suited to reactionary politicians at all.
I don't give a fuck about what happens outside US territory.
Yes, you do. You just do not know it. Every country in the world has become economically linked and the US is no different. You have in the past had more of the worlds natural resources in your domain so you had less need for diplomacy. Now more of the resources we need (ie - rare earths) are under China. This means playing nice with China even though they are screwing us by not allowing their currency to appreciate in value. If China did let its currency appreciate correctly US manufacturing might actually stand a chance of competing again. China will only ever let this happen if they get some sort of concession in return since we cannot really threaten force so it will require what is known as "soft touch diplomacy".
Secrecy of things like COICA (copyright/three-strike law) and ACTA (more copyright protection but on the global scale) that affect citizens is bullshit. It should be out in the open, not hidden, otherwise representative government Can Not work.
Some people say that a core idea representative democracy is that you elect a representative to act on your behalf because you think you trust the way he will act ahead of time. You do not know the ins and outs of why he makes an individual decision so all you can do is wait 4 years then judge the result.
If you were in a position to be as well informed about every decision your elected government makes on your behalf at the time they make it then maybe direct democracy would be a better system. In this case you would also have to vote on everything though and with a daily referendum this would get in the way of you doing anything else.
The truth is that the only thing publishing any of these cables does is screw up US diplomatic relations with the rest of the world and make you a total laughing stock of the countries that actually manage to keep this information secret. It will also make other countries much more cautious in US diplomats presence at probably leave you on the sidelines of more international decisions (ones that do not involve using military force anyway)
Trunk is dev, branches are stable. We haven't had much trouble with this set up at all.
I think the problem is that this does not really work when you have people all over the world trying to do different things on a huge base of code over different timescales. If everyone is working towards a single release date then this makes more sense as you can implement things like feature freezes.
In Kernel development though there can be people working on a refinement that will take a very long period of time so there will be several releases that go by in between. There will also be be people starting there development at random times with no real knowledge of what else is going on the Trunk.
The single Trunk for dev works well in companies where everyone sings from the same hymn sheet but is not so good for distributed development being contributed to from different developers at different times on different projects.
No single company would ever structure development like this as it is woefully inefficient in terms of man power but it does have other advantages since it is closer to an evolutionary process. Consider Linus as natural selection in action :)
Say I've hooked up my PC to a TV [wikipedia.org] and connected four Xbox 360 controllers through a USB hub. How many controllers does a typical major-label game designed for the PC support? One. Instead of adding shared-screen play, publishers expect players to buy four PCs, four monitors, and (more importantly) four copies of the game.
No, each player buy one copy and then takes their PC round mates house. Or they play over this amazing new invention you might have heard of, its called "The Internet".
The multiscreen playing thing on consoles, but it is a bit of joke since you can always glance across at your fellow players screen and cheat. This might not matter in driving games, but in shooters and things it removes any aspect of being crafty and sneaking up on people. I would certainly not say it should not be included, but I would like to see more console games support head to head play on different consoles since they are much cheaper to but 2 or 3 of and leave one at your mates house.
Yes, it is indeed pretty clear they're talking about graphics. It is also pretty clear that when they say "is holding back creative expression" and "holding back quality games", what they mean is that all their creative expression and quality work is going into making a game prettier. Which in turns means they have no idea how to make quality games.
There are many of us who think that a game maxing out the capabilities of recent graphic cards on the market is actually an essential for a quality game. Let you guys who haven't upgraded your gaming rig in 10 years play a cut down version sure, but I don't see why I should. You can then turn down all the graphics settings to make sure it runs under your DX9 hardware but we get to see a nicer image so get a slightly more immersive experience.
There are certainly other essentials for making a quality game (like playabilty, story, fun, a challenge, etc) but it taking advantage of new hardware is equally important. Otherwise all the games on the market would look no better than consoles even though PC hardware is now a world away. A top end I7 gaming rig is far more powerful hardware than any of the consoles, so PC games should try and use it to the max.
It is also worth noting that it is not just about making the game look prettier. There are things like destructible scenery and better physics that go a long way in many games. One of the things that I loved about Half-Life 2 when it came out was the water. The way it acted was so much truer in that than had been done in many games before. This would have been hard as hell on previous generations of hardware. Likewise for the gravity gun and the way you could get weird bounces of certain objects.
In the first Crysis there were things that really ate up CPU power. They must have been hard as hell to get looking half decent on hardware like the X-Box360. Anyone remember the weird spaceship style under water level? I could see my CPU usage go nuts when that started. The fact that you spent the whole level floating through something that seemed to have the consistency of soup was a damn nice touch and made you play differently. In many ways that was similar to the airbourne vehicle or tank levels for making the game more varied that just being stuck on two feet throughout.
I was looking for my old copy of Crysis recently to put my new 480 through it's paces.
1) They don't give me dizziness and headache from the camera movement
It's called motion sickness, and if a game gives you that then it must be pretty immersive.
The Sony music division should sue the Sony computer division for putting CD/DVD burners on their Vaio laptops.
They would, but the CD burners on VAIO laptops have a lifespan of amount 10 minutes before they break. Maybe this is a deliberate ploy so you cant use Sony Laptops for being an evil pirate :)
The Nazis specifically prosecuted and eliminated Jews, gays, lesbians, Roma, handicapped people and probably a slew of other groups that didn't fit into their world view, quite a difference if you ask me.
By the way, the Nazis started with german communists first: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/dachau.html
I am, however, saying that the association between the swastika and nothing but Nazi Germany is far from universal.
He also say in his post that most of the people making your argument would not wear one to walk down the street. So prove him wrong. Get a big swastika printed on a T-Shirt and wear it outside in a busy place. There is a very real chance that someone will just walk up and punch you in the face without waiting for your wonderful explanation about it being a religious symbol. Not that this is the behaviour I would choose since I abhor violence.
If you really want a laugh, put on your Swasika T-Shirt and then fly to Israel. You will be lucky if you are even allowed on a plane.
I know all about it being a religious symbol, but the problem is that about 70 years ago it was then used by dictator who tried to exterminate a large number of people just for being of the wrong descent or having the wrong political views. He utterly fucked over that symbol by adopting it so now when people see it (even those who know it as a religious symbol first), their first association is always with Nazi's. Now no doubt you disagree with this, but I do not believe you. I think you are just deluding yourself for the sake of argument.
I also think that we have a duty to remember that symbol and what is was bastardized into. Then we can remember the genocide it came to represent and make damn sure we never let that happen again. Yes we can do that without the symbol, but why should we since it is a very powerful association already. How do you choose a new symbol to represent Hitler's mass genocide?
If I was a server admin and I saw a player with that symbol enter my server, I would just ban you without waiting for an explanation. Not because I am ignorant of the symbols true meaning, but because to many, many people the symbol has taken on a meaning of the symbol of the people who tried to make sure they were never born and hence they now find it offensive. Yes, many Jews still find it a very offensive symbol. Now if you want to complain about this, then go complain to Hitler or whoever chose the symbol for the SS in the first place.
Incidentally, there is a charity moustache growing competition going on throughout November (Movember). Do you know how many people I have see trying to grow a Charlie Chaplin moustache? None, because too many people now also associate that with Hitler too and it has stopped being a comedy moustache as a result.
And judging by the number of Hindus on Slashdot today it must be very large religion indeed in the english speaking world. But it is not, so statistically most of you lying to prove a point. I have no way of knowing who is who so I am going to assume that the vast majority of people here are just being childish and risk you being the one exception who is actually a deeply committed Hindhu. Far more likely though is that you earned you slashdot award of "The Contradictor" by being a contrarian.
There's no reason to assume that the person writing the essay knew nothing about the course or the book, either.
Not sure about the rest of the course but I know he never actually read the book.
Hah! I'd love to see how this guy would do a physics or calculus paper...
When I studied Physics we had hardly any coursework. There was some but I don't remember it as I never did any. 80% of the course was based on reeling off mathematical proofs in exams.
In this type of course it would be just too easy to cheat so they force you to reel the proofs off under closed conditions with a limited supply of reference material (if any) provided.
I do remember when I was studying Physics though one of my house mates who was studying Sociology and Cultural Studies had to write an essay on Neil Stephenson and his book The Diamond Age. He had about as much interest in Science Fiction a I do in Sociology but he chose that book as he knew I had a copy. He also knew I liked the author.
On the night before his assignment was due in he came and asked me for some help. I proceeded to waffle on about the book based on the leading question he had been given regarding it. He sat there with his pad and took notes as I pointed out the sections of the book that were relevant to the question and gave some examples of the how the technological change (nanotechnology) in the book had changed the separate societies that are mentioned. It probably also helped that I was studying Physics so had some idea of nanotechnology.
After an hour or so he took his 1 or 2 sides of A4 notes and went upstairs to churn out an essay based on my ideas. He gained a first for that paper, and permanently changed my opinion of humanities subjects: Most of them are so easy to pass they should not even be taught in the same college as the sciences of engineering subjects, they are certainly not the same academic level and do not require the same amount of study. All they require is the ability to structure your ideas (or someone else's) into a well formed English essay.
Incidentally the guy who wrote that essay passed sociology and now works as a building site labourer. I failed physics and work as a lead software developer for a fairly small but very friendly company. I guess the employment market does not really value his sociology degree either.
and both the Gay Tony & whatever the biker one was called where both great content add ons for Grand theft auto.
The problem with both of these was that they were far too short. Compared to the original campaign they are a drop in the ocean only containing far less missions. There were 25 missions in the Ballad of Gay Tony compared to nearly 100 in the original game. Being that to buy them you end up paying close to the original value of the game you should get more missions, not less (including the saving they made on not developing or shipping a new game engine)
Not everyone needs a support contract, even if they're doing Serious Business. Indeed, if you're running tens of thousands of relatively cheap servers, those support contracts can be pretty expensive. (Not nearly as expensive as power and cooling, to be sure, but not entirely trivial either).
Just remember though, that if nobody buys RedHat licences then the company will go under and we lose the single biggest contributor to the Kernel.
I try and recommend buying RedHat to as many people as possible as they are a shining example of an open source centric company that freely gives back as much code as they are bound too by the GPL. They also do it in a timely manner unlike following the HTC route of delaying it by as long as possible to get the maximum competitive advantage but still prevent the slow wheels of justice from catching up. (HTC delay releasing their source by about 3 months so they remain in compliance with the GPL as far as any judge would be concerned but are crapping on the spirit of it)
If RedHat were driven under by CentOS then CentOS would disappear as well and it would not do the open source community any good whatsoever.
Redhats "support" is pretty bad if you don't get the super-ultra-deluxe package or whatever it is called. It's India based email support and often times they don't really understand the question, they just seize upon a couple of keywords and respond back with various kb articles on those keywords. Worthless IMO.
Is this RHEL support or are you talking about some other product?
I posted a support issue recently regarding some RHEL 3 servers I am stuck maintaining that run a legacy application. It was pretty much an edge case issue that I was experiencing but it was holding me up at the time. I posted it to the their forums and they did eventually post a response (from a RedHat employee) that solved the issue. It may have taken a week or two and I had worked around the problem by then anyway, but it was a much better and more thorough response than I expected.
It certainly was not someone throwing me a few links to some knowledge base articles as I had already thoroughly read this looking for a solution before I posted anything.
I had to run a control panel from the command line using sudo in order to make it keep my dual monitor preferences as recently as last year. Of course it didn't tell me that... it just reset to single monitor mode each reboot.
I find this quite annoying too. Especially as I know there is a perfectly good GUI that does exactly what I want for my graphics card.
Unfortunately they do not use this because it is the Nvidia settings tool that only works with the proprietary driver. Now I know that by using this I am using the closed source driver. I have been here often enough to have heard all the arguments against using it. I have made a choice to carry on using it as the open source ethos does not matter and I think the security risks are totally overrated on a single user desktop machine.
So Ubuntu should really give me the best tool for managing the proprietary display driver that it gave me an interface to install in the first place.
The ones who actually tortured people for the mere suspicion of supporting the wrong gang 2-3 years ago, or those who did it 65 years ago?
Nice post.
I would like to add that the European gang in question found themselves swinging at the end of a rope for their trouble. It also lead to the establishment of the Nuremburg Principles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Principles
While we will allow al-awlaki to say what he wants, we also have targeted him for assassination.
Not sure why this is being modded funny, its actually true. He is the first US citizen to find himself on the US death list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki
But instead, the FSF is playing into the hands of the media companies by keeping things like VLC player out of the mainstream and attacking the only company with the same goals of ending DRM. Nice work FSF, this is seriously making me re-think my yearly donation...
This is the problem with an organisation who has a zealot as its founder: They tend to view compromise for the greater good as a bad thing so they end up marginalised.
In my opinion the most important thing in any disagreement is to try and meet the other side halfway. There will always be items you cannot possibly compromise on, but you often need to examine your own position and try and decide on some points that are more flexible.
If you are not able to do this and insist that all your points are inflexible then the chances of you winning any concessions from the opposing side pretty much drop to zero immediately.
My sister was withheld for 4 hours at an Israeli check point for questioning; her skin tone is slightly dark and could easily be mistaken for northern Muslim - even though she has a Danish passport, born by Danish parents and lived most of her life here.
Incidentally many Israeli's have fairly dark skin tone as well so it unlikely to be just her skin tone that set them off. What is her religious background though? This is far more likely flag you for special attention. Also, is her surname or firstname of arabic descent? If she has only lived there most of her life where was she born?
I am certainly not denying that if she was of Arabic descent she will be subject to tighter security since that is definitely the case. There are far more accurate ways of spotting arabic descendants than skin tone though.
The funny thing is, having flown EL AL from Canada to Israel, and to Europe, and then back to Israel. I didn't really notice the security(which is the mark of a good system). Not to mention they actually profile people who are probably going to be a threat, instead of the 87 year old grandmother with oxygen tanks.
My mate used to fly to Israel on El Al all the time from Britain. His way of amusing himself on the flight was to try and guess who the under cover armed officers on the plane were. Apparrently one would always be in the front couple of rows near the cabin so you did not have too many candidates to choose from.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Al
Of course ultimately this is a business model question: Can we get content w/o charging on a per-copy basis. While it is easy to say that we had creative expression predating copyright; others reply that it was a different era. To those, I would suggest that the open source movement is a strong indicator that even today there are other ways for creative efforts to be compensated without the need for per copy charges.
It is worth remembering though that the open source movement depends on copyright laws. It relies on a licence that is only enforceable if the people who create open source software also hold the copyright.
If we do away with copyright or allow too many people to ride roughshod over it then companies might start doing the same.
People who really love a certain band, are the most likely to go out and download the bands entire discography for free. But they are also the group who would be most affected if that band went out of business. So they make a self-interested decision to buy the new album and keep the band working.
Only if they think that will happen. There are a great many people out there who think this will never happen since other people will carry on buying their favorites bands albums. Providing other people are doing the paying, they will always be able to download it for free. Like it or not there are people who fall into this camp.
That is why I call them freeloaders. They are not interested in what would happen if everyone did what they do. They are only interested in themselves and know that while other people pay to support their band they will reap the rewards.
These are the core of people we need laws to address since that is the only way to stop them doing what they like. Or we can simply resign ourselves to buying these people their music since it is too much effort to get the to cough up.
You assume that if piracy was impossible, that those who would pirate would buy. This isn't the case.
No, I assume that if piracy was impossible then a few extra people would buy, not all the people who pirate. But those few extra sales are lost revenue. This is far less lost revenue than the companies claim but it is still an amount greater than zero. So by enabling people to jailbreak he did cost MS some revenue, it is just argument about how much. Some poeple seem to think it is zero and that is certainly not the case.
The lost revenue to piracy stats are hopelessly inflated.
I agree that the stats are hopelessly inflated, and I even said so in my post.
Only if you ignore the people who would not have bought a copy until they played a pirated copy. Since the biggest pirates are also your biggest customers you can't crack down on one without cracking down on the other.
Interesting argument, but I think the number of people who fall in to this camp are fare fewer than the number of people in the "avoid paying for anything at all costs" camp that I was describing. You obviously have a better view of human nature than I do and neither of us have any figures to back either argument up.
Could you give me a source as to your 'fact'? My informal studies have indicated that the amount of money and profits for copyright materials such as movies and games are higher than they've ever been in the past, which would indicate that piracy is not an issue. As I know people who pirate, I asked them how many are doing so instead of buying a legit copy. Almost universally the answer was either
1) I'm pirating to test that it will run on my machine, but I'll be buying a legit copy if it does
2) Nah, I'm just checking it out to see what it's like. I'll put a few hours into it and then delete it. Maybe I'll buy it if it's really good.
In other words, 1) is either buying it or not buying it, but if it doesn't run and they don't buy it, the company is avoiding customer service costs and 2) is pirating and if they are suitably impressed, they will turn into a buyer. If they were preventing from 'piracy', they would never purchase the item in question.
I am not disputing that many people are like this, but I am saying that not everyone is like this.
There are some people who just refuse to pay for whatever they can and justify it to themselves morally by any tenuous argument they can come up with.
I would be interested to know how many people were in the 2nd option but still completed the game in your little study. These people are the ones I would count as the guys who should have made the buy it / leave it choice much sooner so were in fact just freeloaders justifying it to themselves any way they could.