The point isn't that the administration has arrested anyone for it or made it illegal. The point is that they've taken the attitude that anyone who criticizes them must be unpatriotic or a lunatic. If they could get away with outlawing public dissent, they would, because they clearly tend that direction.
I don't get the fascination with this type of game.
You can fork out several hundred dollars to get a PS2, the game, the controller(s), etc... and still not really be learning to play a real instrument....or you can walk down to your local guitar center and buy a real start instrument and really learn how to play it.
The economy is a fluid, endlessly intertwined balancing act of factors.
People are well intentioned when they try to form unions or push for raising the minimum wage, but they don't realize that the full ripple effects of such changes ultimately come back and defeat any initial benefit they were intending, and in fact can do more damage and leave people in worse shape.
Example 1: Workers form a union out of a well-intentioned desire to make management pay more attention to their desires and get more bargaining power. But the union keeps growing and demanding more and more, becoming a self-interested political beast itself. Pretty soon the union and management are fighting while the workers are left out to dry again. Even worse, the union keeps demanding so much that the company ultimately can't make a profit, and the company goes broke and then everyone's completely out of work.
Example 2: People say we should raise the minimum wage. Okay, suppose we did it. Then people who were previously making 50 cents more than minimum wage would still demand to make 50 cents more than the new minimum wage, because they are more valuable employees and feel like they've "earned" it, right? And likewise up the economic ladder for people making $1 more, or $10 more, or $50 more per hour. when you raise the minimum wage, you actually raise everyone's wages the same. It doesn't make minimum wage earners less poor relative to everyone else -- it just shifts everyone up, resulting in a net reality change of zilch. It's just like trying to solve low SAT scores by rebasing the scoring so that stupid students score higher numbers -- it's artificial, and it doesn't mean the stupid students are really doing any better.
I think unions are well-intentioned but a bad idea. I think a better idea would be some kind of federal law limiting the ratio between how much the highest and lowest employees in a company are paid. A CEO is definitely not 10-million times more valuable to society (or to the company) than a janitor is, and so it's wrong that they should be paid 10-million times more. If a CEO is limited to earning 1000 times what the lowest-ranking employee earns, then if the CEO wants a raise, then the lowest-ranking employees in the company automatically get 1/1000th of that raise. That's not only economically effective, it's actually fair, too.
Baidupedia bars users from including any 'malicious evaluation of the current national system', any 'attack on government institutions', and prevents the 'promotion of a dispirited or negative view of life'.
That doesn't sound much different from the Bush administration's stance toward anyone who disagrees with them.
True enough, although I would never say no to my parents. Cleaning out their spyware is a very small return on their investment. You'll feel better for it too, unless you are a totally hopeless person.
Um, it's not a "small return" when you have to keep fixing their PC repeatedly every week or two and taking unreasonably long frustrating phone calls from them several times a week.
Caring for an inept user and their broken PC takes as much, if not more time, than caring for an infant.
iTunes and other music library apps generally work well as long as all the songs in your library were either downloaded from the built-in server or ripped from CD using that app.
The more difficult problem (that none of the apps solve well) is how to take an existing, huge music collection on disk and accurately import it into something like iTunes.
Example: I had thousands of MP3s I amassed while back in college, back before anyone preferred to use ID3 tags. Some of these were organized into folder hierarchies by album, artist, genre, etc. Others contained all of these attributes in just the filename, with varying syntax. Some of the files weren't in MP3 format (WMA was popular for a short while), and almost none of the files had attributes stored in the official metadata header of the file format. Some of the MP3s were probably corrupt because they'd been burnt and read off of questionable CD-R media a number of times. Some of the MP3s had lost vital info from the folder names or filenames due to length and character limitations of pre-Joliet CD-R formats.
Upon buying n iPod and getting iTunes installed, and realizing that iTunes (and most other music library apps) only know how to deal with ID3 tags (or equivalent), what I really found myself wishing for was a powerful set of smart features for importing the files I had and fleshing out the tags accurately.
Some things that really would have helped:
some way of flagging which files had been "accurately fixed up" versus which ones still need correcting
better filtering functionality (so you can select songs matching specific complex patterns... something as powerful as regular expression pattern matching on folder/filenames, but more user-friendly)
some way of combiniing that with some "auto-fill-out-the-ID3-tag-for-me" logic so that the app can map from folder/filename hierarchy/syntax directly to the ID3 tag attributes. Even better, the app should ship with some standard mapping "templates" that cover all the common ways people tend to use folder/filenames to store ID3-type attributes, so I don't have to build all the common mappings. Even better, the app should be able to look at a given file, figure out which scheme its using, auto-select the right template, and automatically map it to metadata
better bulk-editing functionality
some kind of smart CDDB-like lookup for MP3 files, so that even if I don't know who an MP3 is by, what it's called, or anything, it can be identified by hashing the file contents or analyzing the soundwave or some other smart method and then looking it up in an online database and filling out the ID3 for me
some better MP3-corruption-detection to weed out corrupt songs from my collection
Well, yes, but idiots like the people you describe don't count. We intelligent people should be purging them from the planet by launching them into space somewhere.
When you're driving down the road and you get hungry, how do you know there's a BurgerBell on the corner if not for the sign (which is clearly advertising)?
I don't consider a sign posted on their own property as advertising. It's only advertising if the sign is posted on someone else's property, or is taking up space on a printed page in a magazine I already paid for.
What about things you don't know exist, or things that are new? How do you know to "go out and seek" a cool gadget if you've never heard of it before? Or never knew that it was possible to do what that tool does?
Perhaps you have heard of this niffty new invention called "search engines". Again, I don't consider someone putting up their own web site to describe their own products as advertising. It's only advertising if they start plastering their crap all over everyone else's sites or paying to get artifically listed higher up in search results.
Your point is actually true in a more general sense.
In general, if people want something, they will seek it out for themselves.
People don't want or need to be advertised at in any way via any means. This applies to companies trying to sell products or services, religions trying to amass followers, or political activists trying to rally voters. It's all BS.
If I want something, I'll go seek it out for myself. Leave me the hell alone. It's not your place to constantly bother me.
Child porn is illegal. Google is the advertiser. The advertiser should be held responsible for advertising illegal things. Seems pretty straightforward to me, but maybe I'm missing some legitimate argument to the contrary.
What's wrong with holding an advertiser responsible for promoting illegal things? Doesn't the burden of responsibility ethically lie with the advertiser to ensure that advertisements submitted to their system aren't advertising illegal things? If NBC runs a TV commercial advertising child porn, shouldn't NBC be held responsible for negligence at the very least (for not bothering to check the content of the ad that was submitted)?
Yes, but that's only if you get caught. The data isn't being served up through a central, obvious web server. If the app is open-sourced and distributed along with the data feely around the internet, it will be near-impossible for anyone to shut all copies of it down.
The breakage fee is to cover the costs of breaking the legs of all those 50 year old women computerless women who have been pirating their music online.
The packaging fee is to cover the costs of disguising their steaming piles of shit as music.
The parent poster's GNU/Linux experience mirrors my own. Even Ubuntu is unnecessarily difficult to configure.
Installing programs (that aren't yet specifically built as a package for your distro, which is rarely the case when you're trying to install, say, the most recent released version of an app) is a nightmare.
Installing device drivers and configuring X for 3D graphics cards is a nightmare.
Installing printer drivers and having them actually work in all applications is a nightmare.
Hell, just trying to find device drivers for many common devices is a nightmare. Half the time they are available only as source code you have to merge into the kernal, or only as binaries packaged for Red Hat, and you can't get them to work harmoniously with your particular distribution.
Trying to get something like video file playback working is a total mess, because there are umpteen different competing video subsystems or libraries with different applications relying on different ones.
HOWTOs aren't an answer, because often the information you find in them isn't quite right for your given distribution, and it just fouls things up worse than before you started following the instructions, and of course the HOWTO provides no insight about how to roll back the changes if you encounter failure.
All the Linux zealots keep cheering the improved usability of the Linux desktops. It's bullshit. Users still can't easily install the right programs or drivers, get devices working fully and reliably, make sense of asinine library dependencies that make "DLL Hell" look like a walk in the park, or figure out how to get basic scenarios (such as video file playback) working on their desktop.
Usability is about more than pretty point-and-click eye candy. It's about making tasks easy to accomplish, not just for newbies, but for expert users, too. It's about saving people time and hassle. It's about simplifying and making consistent the inner workings and structure of the system so that there isn't so much to have to learn and figure out. It's about making things painfully obvious to users so that they don't have to form their own inaccurate guesses through expensive and risky trial and error.
I'm sick of Linux and FOSS zealots claiming that something is easy to use just because mountains of documentation are available for it. Something is by definition not easy to use if you have to learn a lot of unintuitive stuff about it before using it to perform basic tasks.
If someone has to go buy a "Linux for dummies" book, or has to read a lengthy technical HOWTO document, or has to go post questions in user forums, to understand how the system works and to accomplish basic tasks, then the system is by definition unusable.
GNU/Linux systems in general are a complete disastrous mess of chaos. If the grand experiment that is GNU/Linux has proven anything, it's that top-down design is absolutely necessary when it comes to something as technically complex as software.
The point isn't to notify the owner (or concerned nearby citizens) of a theft in progress. The point is to function as a deterrent to thieves.
Given a choice between a car with an armed alarm and a car without an alarm, a thief will bust into the car without an alarm every time. Their thought process is, "I want to draw the least attention to myself and go with the lowest risk as possible."
Car alarms only work because some people still don't have them. If everyone had one, there'd be no weaker targets to attract thieves, and it would be the same as if no one at all had an alarm.
Microsoft has very firmly stayed out of the "we make our own hardware" market as long as they've been around, because they see the software as the profitable part. They've never strayed from that approach. I doubt they would even be remotely interested in buying Sony.
Now, getting Sony to stop making its own console and instead be a licensed manufacturer of XBOX 720 consoles... I could see Microsoft liking that.
"Captcha" techniques aren't bulletproof. If someone can automate all but the "captcha test" part of the posting process, then someone can sit and repeatedly answer the captcha test and still post spam pretty efficiently.
The only truly effective way to stop this crap is to require a certain amount of time to elapse before being able to post another post, like the way Slashdot does it, and to implement some kind of moderation+filtering system so the crap can be all be modded down by vigilant users. Combine that with a couple other requirements (you must have a user account to post, and new users can't post for the first 48 hours), and you'll easily sqaush the spam problem.
Slashdot Mirror
The point isn't that the administration has arrested anyone for it or made it illegal. The point is that they've taken the attitude that anyone who criticizes them must be unpatriotic or a lunatic. If they could get away with outlawing public dissent, they would, because they clearly tend that direction.
I don't get the fascination with this type of game.
...or you can walk down to your local guitar center and buy a real start instrument and really learn how to play it.
You can fork out several hundred dollars to get a PS2, the game, the controller(s), etc... and still not really be learning to play a real instrument.
Hrmm.
The economy is a fluid, endlessly intertwined balancing act of factors.
People are well intentioned when they try to form unions or push for raising the minimum wage, but they don't realize that the full ripple effects of such changes ultimately come back and defeat any initial benefit they were intending, and in fact can do more damage and leave people in worse shape.
Example 1: Workers form a union out of a well-intentioned desire to make management pay more attention to their desires and get more bargaining power. But the union keeps growing and demanding more and more, becoming a self-interested political beast itself. Pretty soon the union and management are fighting while the workers are left out to dry again. Even worse, the union keeps demanding so much that the company ultimately can't make a profit, and the company goes broke and then everyone's completely out of work.
Example 2: People say we should raise the minimum wage. Okay, suppose we did it. Then people who were previously making 50 cents more than minimum wage would still demand to make 50 cents more than the new minimum wage, because they are more valuable employees and feel like they've "earned" it, right? And likewise up the economic ladder for people making $1 more, or $10 more, or $50 more per hour. when you raise the minimum wage, you actually raise everyone's wages the same. It doesn't make minimum wage earners less poor relative to everyone else -- it just shifts everyone up, resulting in a net reality change of zilch. It's just like trying to solve low SAT scores by rebasing the scoring so that stupid students score higher numbers -- it's artificial, and it doesn't mean the stupid students are really doing any better.
I think unions are well-intentioned but a bad idea. I think a better idea would be some kind of federal law limiting the ratio between how much the highest and lowest employees in a company are paid. A CEO is definitely not 10-million times more valuable to society (or to the company) than a janitor is, and so it's wrong that they should be paid 10-million times more. If a CEO is limited to earning 1000 times what the lowest-ranking employee earns, then if the CEO wants a raise, then the lowest-ranking employees in the company automatically get 1/1000th of that raise. That's not only economically effective, it's actually fair, too.
Baidupedia bars users from including any 'malicious evaluation of the current national system', any 'attack on government institutions', and prevents the 'promotion of a dispirited or negative view of life'.
That doesn't sound much different from the Bush administration's stance toward anyone who disagrees with them.
what sort of things would you as fellow comp sci geeks like to see in a Historic Computer exhibit?
Booth babes, of course.
True enough, although I would never say no to my parents. Cleaning out their spyware is a very small return on their investment. You'll feel better for it too, unless you are a totally hopeless person.
Um, it's not a "small return" when you have to keep fixing their PC repeatedly every week or two and taking unreasonably long frustrating phone calls from them several times a week.
Caring for an inept user and their broken PC takes as much, if not more time, than caring for an infant.
Most writing I've seen tends to have a high fluff-to-content ratio. It appears to stem from insecure writers' attempts to sound sophisticated.
Writing is supposed to be about communicating as clearly as possible, so teach your students to be concise.
iTunes and other music library apps generally work well as long as all the songs in your library were either downloaded from the built-in server or ripped from CD using that app.
The more difficult problem (that none of the apps solve well) is how to take an existing, huge music collection on disk and accurately import it into something like iTunes.
Example: I had thousands of MP3s I amassed while back in college, back before anyone preferred to use ID3 tags. Some of these were organized into folder hierarchies by album, artist, genre, etc. Others contained all of these attributes in just the filename, with varying syntax. Some of the files weren't in MP3 format (WMA was popular for a short while), and almost none of the files had attributes stored in the official metadata header of the file format. Some of the MP3s were probably corrupt because they'd been burnt and read off of questionable CD-R media a number of times. Some of the MP3s had lost vital info from the folder names or filenames due to length and character limitations of pre-Joliet CD-R formats.
Upon buying n iPod and getting iTunes installed, and realizing that iTunes (and most other music library apps) only know how to deal with ID3 tags (or equivalent), what I really found myself wishing for was a powerful set of smart features for importing the files I had and fleshing out the tags accurately.
Some things that really would have helped:
Hah! At least I caught the reference. "+1 Funny"
Well, yes, but idiots like the people you describe don't count. We intelligent people should be purging them from the planet by launching them into space somewhere.
When you're driving down the road and you get hungry, how do you know there's a BurgerBell on the corner if not for the sign (which is clearly advertising)?
I don't consider a sign posted on their own property as advertising. It's only advertising if the sign is posted on someone else's property, or is taking up space on a printed page in a magazine I already paid for.
What about things you don't know exist, or things that are new? How do you know to "go out and seek" a cool gadget if you've never heard of it before? Or never knew that it was possible to do what that tool does?
Perhaps you have heard of this niffty new invention called "search engines". Again, I don't consider someone putting up their own web site to describe their own products as advertising. It's only advertising if they start plastering their crap all over everyone else's sites or paying to get artifically listed higher up in search results.
Your point is actually true in a more general sense.
In general, if people want something, they will seek it out for themselves.
People don't want or need to be advertised at in any way via any means. This applies to companies trying to sell products or services, religions trying to amass followers, or political activists trying to rally voters. It's all BS.
If I want something, I'll go seek it out for myself. Leave me the hell alone. It's not your place to constantly bother me.
You think that's bad? Thanks to spam blockers, my dick is only one inch long.
Child porn is illegal. Google is the advertiser. The advertiser should be held responsible for advertising illegal things. Seems pretty straightforward to me, but maybe I'm missing some legitimate argument to the contrary.
What's wrong with holding an advertiser responsible for promoting illegal things? Doesn't the burden of responsibility ethically lie with the advertiser to ensure that advertisements submitted to their system aren't advertising illegal things? If NBC runs a TV commercial advertising child porn, shouldn't NBC be held responsible for negligence at the very least (for not bothering to check the content of the ad that was submitted)?
Yes, but that's only if you get caught. The data isn't being served up through a central, obvious web server. If the app is open-sourced and distributed along with the data feely around the internet, it will be near-impossible for anyone to shut all copies of it down.
Did you not read the original post?
The application (data and program) will all be stored on a CD or DVD, and it should be able to be run locally.
The breakage fee is to cover the costs of breaking the legs of all those 50 year old women computerless women who have been pirating their music online.
The packaging fee is to cover the costs of disguising their steaming piles of shit as music.
It all adds up...
Absolutely right! Moderators, mod parent WAY up!
This will only change if all you idiots will stop buying buggy unfinished games!
As long as you keep buying beta-quality stuff, and the companies keep making their sales and profit goals, they'll keep doing it.
Duh.
The parent poster's GNU/Linux experience mirrors my own. Even Ubuntu is unnecessarily difficult to configure.
Installing programs (that aren't yet specifically built as a package for your distro, which is rarely the case when you're trying to install, say, the most recent released version of an app) is a nightmare.
Installing device drivers and configuring X for 3D graphics cards is a nightmare.
Installing printer drivers and having them actually work in all applications is a nightmare.
Hell, just trying to find device drivers for many common devices is a nightmare. Half the time they are available only as source code you have to merge into the kernal, or only as binaries packaged for Red Hat, and you can't get them to work harmoniously with your particular distribution.
Trying to get something like video file playback working is a total mess, because there are umpteen different competing video subsystems or libraries with different applications relying on different ones.
HOWTOs aren't an answer, because often the information you find in them isn't quite right for your given distribution, and it just fouls things up worse than before you started following the instructions, and of course the HOWTO provides no insight about how to roll back the changes if you encounter failure.
All the Linux zealots keep cheering the improved usability of the Linux desktops. It's bullshit. Users still can't easily install the right programs or drivers, get devices working fully and reliably, make sense of asinine library dependencies that make "DLL Hell" look like a walk in the park, or figure out how to get basic scenarios (such as video file playback) working on their desktop.
Usability is about more than pretty point-and-click eye candy. It's about making tasks easy to accomplish, not just for newbies, but for expert users, too. It's about saving people time and hassle. It's about simplifying and making consistent the inner workings and structure of the system so that there isn't so much to have to learn and figure out. It's about making things painfully obvious to users so that they don't have to form their own inaccurate guesses through expensive and risky trial and error.
I'm sick of Linux and FOSS zealots claiming that something is easy to use just because mountains of documentation are available for it. Something is by definition not easy to use if you have to learn a lot of unintuitive stuff about it before using it to perform basic tasks.
If someone has to go buy a "Linux for dummies" book, or has to read a lengthy technical HOWTO document, or has to go post questions in user forums, to understand how the system works and to accomplish basic tasks, then the system is by definition unusable.
GNU/Linux systems in general are a complete disastrous mess of chaos. If the grand experiment that is GNU/Linux has proven anything, it's that top-down design is absolutely necessary when it comes to something as technically complex as software.
Voice of experience here... glasses definitely aren't an enhancement to one's social life.
It had a successful flight but it ran off the end of the runway.
It's not a bug, it's a feature!
You don't understand the point of car alarms.
The point isn't to notify the owner (or concerned nearby citizens) of a theft in progress. The point is to function as a deterrent to thieves.
Given a choice between a car with an armed alarm and a car without an alarm, a thief will bust into the car without an alarm every time. Their thought process is, "I want to draw the least attention to myself and go with the lowest risk as possible."
Car alarms only work because some people still don't have them. If everyone had one, there'd be no weaker targets to attract thieves, and it would be the same as if no one at all had an alarm.
Microsoft has very firmly stayed out of the "we make our own hardware" market as long as they've been around, because they see the software as the profitable part. They've never strayed from that approach. I doubt they would even be remotely interested in buying Sony.
Now, getting Sony to stop making its own console and instead be a licensed manufacturer of XBOX 720 consoles... I could see Microsoft liking that.
"Captcha" techniques aren't bulletproof. If someone can automate all but the "captcha test" part of the posting process, then someone can sit and repeatedly answer the captcha test and still post spam pretty efficiently.
The only truly effective way to stop this crap is to require a certain amount of time to elapse before being able to post another post, like the way Slashdot does it, and to implement some kind of moderation+filtering system so the crap can be all be modded down by vigilant users. Combine that with a couple other requirements (you must have a user account to post, and new users can't post for the first 48 hours), and you'll easily sqaush the spam problem.