it seems to me that for a news orginization that promotes open source, there would be some sort of mentality that information should be free, to everyone, at the same same time, in the same context, etc.
I can see how you might think that, but it's not true. In point of fact, the average Slashdot user believes that only other people's information (or music, or movies, or software, or news stories) should be free.
How's this for a troll? Get bent. You have posted exactly three comments to Slashdot. Two of them have been directed at me, and both of them have been personal attacks. If you don't have something constructive to add-- which you evidently haven't since January 28, 2002, then what say you get the hell off my back?
I don't know where this idea comes from that just because you are a business it means that you can do whatever you want, including infringing upon rights guaranteed by the government.
You know, if you're such an advocate of free speech, there's at least a chance that you know what it means, right? So you know that the notion of free speech-- as a literal right, not as a principle-- is embodied in the first amendment to the Constitution. Right? And you know, therefore, that the first amendment defines what your right to free speech actually is. Right?
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
See the important part right up there in front? "Congress shall make no law." (Surely one of the most beautiful phrases ever uttered in the English language, by the way. Right up there with "We the people.") It doesn't say "AOL shall make no acceptable use policy." AOL is a private company, not a public agency of the government.
Now, let's talk about your comparison to the KKK. You said,
The KKK and the NOI can publicly advertise their unwanted speech because the First Amendment protects them.
Let's get more specific about this. The first amendment doesn't give anybody a right or the permission to do anything. It merely puts a restriction on what the government can do. So instead of saying that the KKK and the NOI can advertise because the first amendment protects them, it's more accurate to say that Congress cannot prevent the KKK or the NOI from advertising because the first amendment protects them. This distinction is important, as you'll soon see.
They cannot be barred from advertising in newspapers...
By Congress? No. The KKK cannot be barred by act of Congress from advertising in newspapers. Can an individual newspaper refuse to run a KKK ad? Yes. The first amendment doesn't apply here. The first amendment doesn't say, "The New York Times ad sales department shall make no business decision abridging the freedom of speech." The first amendment, if I may personify, doesn't give a damn what The New York Times ad sales department does.
The same thing applies to the bit about billboards and the bit about open forums. Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, and that includes billboards and the Internet.
But spammers don't have these rights?
Yes, they do. Spammers, just like you, me, and the KKK, have the right to speak their minds in whatever medium and on whatever message without Congress getting in their way. The first amendment guarantees that. Since, however, AOL is not Congress, the first amendment does not apply to this situation, and the spammers' right to free speech is not being abridged.
There's a *lot* less mouse movement... As I said, there's really going to be a point where moving the mouse barely a centimetre outweighs being able to just fling it at the top of the screen... The single Mac menu is a pain because it is only present on the primary screen, so if your cursor is on another screen it's got a *long* way to go...
Usability is not defined by mouse mileage, nor by differences of tenths of a second. Sorry.
I think you'd find a menu pallette that popped up under the mouse cursor with a single click - paticularly if implemented as a pie menu - would be significantly faster that the Mac's single menu bar.
Marking menus. Sure, it's okay for selecting from one of, say, six choices. But the menu bar is hierarchical in nature: under the File menu you have these items, and under the Edit menu you have these, and so on. Marking menus don't work well for that.
There is a point at which having to move the mouse only a tiny distance outweighs having an infinitely high target.
Not really. I'm sure you're getting at speed here, and how much of a pain it is to drag the mouse all that way to the top of the screen, but if speed is your criteria then hotkeys will always win the race. They're incredibly fast-- instantaneous-- but they're also incredibly user-hostile.
There are other examples where the Mac's single menu bar is not the best solution as well, such as multiple monitors, or very high resolutions.
Actually, in both of those cases the single menu bar is the best solution, due to that "infinite height" property I mentioned.
Face it, I'm going around the system, which is what this discussion was all about.
Who made the music? Who paid them to make it? Who, and this is the most important part of all, owns the copyright on it? You're not using the system in the same sense that a petty thief doesn't use the cash register. You're stealing, dude.
Taking it from whom?
From the copyright holders. The people who have the legally granted exclusive right to sell you a copy.
Just because the RIAA would like me to give them money doesn't mean I'm stealing if I don't.
Oh, dear sweet Lord Jesus. How do you respond to somebody who confesses to the act and then says, "No, I'm not?" You're a thief, dude. An amoral thief. If there's any justice in the world, your hard drive will crash and you'll lose all that music you've worked so hard for so long to steal.
Oh, you most definitely are using the system. You are listening to music produced by artists and distributed by record companies. You are just doing it illegally.
This is the copying of IP we're talking about here. The equivilent of cheating at a video game, or descrambling cable.
No. It's the equivalent of shoplifting. You're taking something without paying for it. It is both illegal and wrong. And not just wrong because it's illegal, either; it's wrong on its face.
If your neighbor had been stealing your money (see "Price Fixing Class Action Lawsuit"), ruining your favorite hobby (enjoyment of music), and putting your friends in jail (see "Jailing Owners of MP3s"), I might suggest he needs a good ass-kicking.
Did you parents never teach you the phrase, "Two wrongs don't make a right?" You might think it's okay to steal from somebody you don't like, but it's not. It's neither legal nor right.
We don?t KNOW this, they surmise this based on some examination of Arial photographs.
Um. We're not talking about vacation snapshots here. These are detailed aerial surveys. They are quite accurate on their own; compared to on-the-ground estimates, they are incredibly accurate.
But either way, just because the SF police were bad at making an estimate doesn't mean everyone else was. You choose to believe so because it helps to maintain the illusion of whatever it is you believe.
I believe so because there's no evidence to the contrary. All the evidence we have says that on-the-ground estimates of crowd size are absurdly inaccurate. This one instance-- again, the only one we have so far-- indicates that the on-the-ground estimates were four times the actual attendance. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, it's reasonable to act on the assumption that other estimates were similarly flawed.
If you want me to believe any of the other attendance numbers, you're going to have to produce evidence of them that's on the same level as aerial surveys. On-the-ground estimates, adjusted based on the San Francisco data, yield a total worldwide attendance of less than one million; figuring in the margin of error, the total may have been slightly over one million. It is definitely not "millions."
Of course if you want to play with numbers there is the generally held statistical belief that for every person showing up, there are 10 who would have liked to attend but were unable because of various reasons (work etc).
You're going to have to produce evidence of such a "generally held statistical belief." I believe that you are making it up.
The point, of course, is that for the very reasons that we're having this conversation, mass protests about war or any other subject don't mean a damn thing.
The edges and screen corners are easy to hit, but grossly underutilised by GUI designers.
This is, of course, why the Mac has a systemwide menu bar at the top of the screen, instead of a NeXT-style menu palette or a menu at the top of each window. The top-of-the-screen menu bar is said to be infinitely tall, because you don't have to worry about the Y coordinate when you click on it. Just push the mouse forward until the pointer stops moving, then click.
The police monitored the demonstrations in all the Western cities.
Jesus. I understand that English is not your native language. I understand that we are having a communication problem. I will try one more time to make this as clear as I can.
The police said there were about 200,000 people at the San Francisco protest. They were wrong. There were about 65,000. We know this because of aerial photographs.
We do not have aerial photographs of other protests. We have only police estimates. Because the San Francisco estimate was off by a factor of four, we divide the other estimates by four, too. This is so we can get numbers that are closer to reality.
Estimated before or after?
After.
if its afterwards it just goes to show that the San Francisco police are pretty nearsighted
There were two estimates. The estimates were independent. One came from police. One came from organizers. Both estimates were initially around 250,000, and were later revised down to 200,000. Both estimates, which were completely independent, were wrong.
But then how did they arrive at the 65,000 number? Did they tell everybody raise their hands and be counted?
Basically, yes. Try this article for a good overview of how the survey was conducted.
Using a fixed camera mounted in the floor of the plane, the crew made images of the rally from 2,000 feet. The photographs -- taken directly above Market Street and Civic Center Plaza and enlarged -- provide a perspective that allows a discrete count of individuals and a view of the spaces between them, a view that is impossible from ground-level.
Both Air Flight Service and The Chronicle examined the photo survey and independently arrived at the estimate of 65,000 marchers at the time the photographs were taken, a figure supported by public transportation statistics.
The flight service says its count is accurate within a range of plus or minus 10 percent.
You should have bought a PowerBook. Giant screen, built in DVD burner, but the battery life is still more than sufficient to watch a 2-1/2 hour movie on the plane. And a hell of a lot better than that if you aren't spinning the optical drive the whole time. I'm an iBook man myself, but a good friend has loaned me his PowerBook on many occasions. Six hours of battery life isn't unusual if you're doing light tasks like word processing with the hard drive spun down most of the time and the AirPort card turned off.
First there is your nonsense that only the San Francisco march is somehow relevant, which - to put it bluntly is crap.
Hoo boy. Did you read? The San Francisco protest is the only one for which we have even remotely reliable attendence numbers. If you know of another, then say so. Don't just say, "The other big demonstrations around the world were also covered from the sky" if it isn't true.
Just blatantly making stuff up is not a good way to win an argument.
Second, is the nonsense about diving it by 4 because you feel more comfortable by trying to dismiss the large numbers.
The San Francisco protest was estimated by both organizers and police as having about 250,000 attendees. The actual number was 65,000, with a 10% margin of error. That means the estimates were off by a factor of four. I'm not dividing by four because I feel like it. I'm dividing by four because I'm trying to get an approximation that is even remotely close to the truth.
But truth evidently isn't a big deal for you, huh?
What?! Enough volume to turn a profit? All they have to cover are some servers, and a decent pipe.
That's the thing about Apple running this instead of some start-up outfit. They already own the servers and the pipe. Apple provides lots of web services already, through.Mac and Software Update and whatnot. And they already pay for crazy bandwidth through Akamai. At first, as this service is initially being rolled out, Apple will be able to offer it essentially for nothing. As it grows, it will be able to pay for itself as the need for dedicated content servers and bandwidth increases over time.
Losslessly compressed in an open format, no DRM. A good selection, especially classical and jazz. Quality control, no truncation, pops or glitches of any kind. I would pay up to $2/song, $10/album.
I want to set my niece up with a kazaa account so she can download music. Even with the passwords/filters provided by KaZaA. (diet, Lite, whatever) There are still plenty of songs that come up that I think her parents wouldn't want her downloading.
Let me get this straight. You're concerned about the fact that some songs have bad words in them or whatever, but the whole "you are breaking the law by doing this" thing doesn't bother you?
Listen, I'm all for keeping kids away from content that their parents deem unacceptable, but get a sense of perspective, man! Downloading copyrighted music is against the law!
I don't understand how this is different from rhapsody from http://www.listen.com Listen.com has a plan where you pay $9.95/month, then you can preview as many as you like. You can also download and burn as many as you like for an additional 49 cents per track.
Let me get this straight. You have to pay a monthly fee whether you download anything or not, and for everything you download, you have to pay an additional fee?
If the artists you're listening to can only make one or two good songs, then they suck.
You know, Monet did a whole series of paintings of water lilies, but I only really like one or two of them. Guess Monet must have really sucked as a painter.
Yeah. Either that, or... your reasoning is completely and utterly screwed up. One of those two. I'm not quite sure which.
Why would I pay $1 a track, $15 a cd when I can go to a used Record/CD store, pick-up used copies of the artists I want to hear for about $6-$9 a pop.
Because you can do it in your underwear, instantly. You know when you go to the kwik-e-mart, they have those little displays of crap right by the register? Those are called impulse items. They're there because people stand in line and look over and say, "Gee, I'd like some gum. It's only a dollar. I'll buy it." An impulse, you see, hence the name.
With this service, people are going to sit at home and say, "Gee, I'd like some Midnight Oil. It's only a dollar. I'll buy it."
A system like this would basically turn the whole of recorded music into an impulse item.
There is no evidence one way or the other, so its illogical to doubt that life is there.
There is no evidence one way or the other, so it's illogical to doubt that underpants gnomes sneak into my room at night and steal my underpants.
Friend, you've got it all wrong. In the absence of evidence that there is life on Europa, the reasonable hypothesis is that there is none.
And what's all this about, excuse me, "terracentric?" We're Earthlings, you dimwit. On what else are we supposed to base our understanding of the universe? Star Trek reruns?
The standards are being actively trampled here, so this is the right battle at this moment.
Since you brought up the word "battle," that naturally puts one in mind of that old saw, "Choose your battles." Weigh the benefits against the effort required. If you either (1) drop PeopleSoft for another solution, or (b) screw with the vendor's supported configuration, you're making significant work for yourself. Is it worth it? Isn't it possible that your time could be better invested elsewhere?
One has to keep a sense of perspective about these things, otherwise one ends up tilting at windmills.
Slashdot Mirror
it seems to me that for a news orginization that promotes open source, there would be some sort of mentality that information should be free, to everyone, at the same same time, in the same context, etc.
I can see how you might think that, but it's not true. In point of fact, the average Slashdot user believes that only other people's information (or music, or movies, or software, or news stories) should be free.
Announcer: "Krusty the Klown" is brought to you by the new Gamestation 256: It's slightly faster... to the max!
Bart: 256? [groan] And I'm stuck with this useless 252!
[he drop-kicks the system into the fireplace, where it slowly melts]
Gamestation 252: Don't destroy me! I can still make you happy... to the max!
How's this for a troll? Get bent. You have posted exactly three comments to Slashdot. Two of them have been directed at me, and both of them have been personal attacks. If you don't have something constructive to add-- which you evidently haven't since January 28, 2002, then what say you get the hell off my back?
You know, if you're such an advocate of free speech, there's at least a chance that you know what it means, right? So you know that the notion of free speech-- as a literal right, not as a principle-- is embodied in the first amendment to the Constitution. Right? And you know, therefore, that the first amendment defines what your right to free speech actually is. Right?See the important part right up there in front? "Congress shall make no law." (Surely one of the most beautiful phrases ever uttered in the English language, by the way. Right up there with "We the people.") It doesn't say "AOL shall make no acceptable use policy." AOL is a private company, not a public agency of the government.
Now, let's talk about your comparison to the KKK. You said,
The KKK and the NOI can publicly advertise their unwanted speech because the First Amendment protects them.
Let's get more specific about this. The first amendment doesn't give anybody a right or the permission to do anything. It merely puts a restriction on what the government can do. So instead of saying that the KKK and the NOI can advertise because the first amendment protects them, it's more accurate to say that Congress cannot prevent the KKK or the NOI from advertising because the first amendment protects them. This distinction is important, as you'll soon see.
They cannot be barred from advertising in newspapers...
By Congress? No. The KKK cannot be barred by act of Congress from advertising in newspapers. Can an individual newspaper refuse to run a KKK ad? Yes. The first amendment doesn't apply here. The first amendment doesn't say, "The New York Times ad sales department shall make no business decision abridging the freedom of speech." The first amendment, if I may personify, doesn't give a damn what The New York Times ad sales department does.
The same thing applies to the bit about billboards and the bit about open forums. Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, and that includes billboards and the Internet.
But spammers don't have these rights?
Yes, they do. Spammers, just like you, me, and the KKK, have the right to speak their minds in whatever medium and on whatever message without Congress getting in their way. The first amendment guarantees that. Since, however, AOL is not Congress, the first amendment does not apply to this situation, and the spammers' right to free speech is not being abridged.
You better think about that position a little.
Right back atcha, OG.
There's a *lot* less mouse movement... As I said, there's really going to be a point where moving the mouse barely a centimetre outweighs being able to just fling it at the top of the screen... The single Mac menu is a pain because it is only present on the primary screen, so if your cursor is on another screen it's got a *long* way to go...
Usability is not defined by mouse mileage, nor by differences of tenths of a second. Sorry.
I think you'd find a menu pallette that popped up under the mouse cursor with a single click - paticularly if implemented as a pie menu - would be significantly faster that the Mac's single menu bar.
Marking menus. Sure, it's okay for selecting from one of, say, six choices. But the menu bar is hierarchical in nature: under the File menu you have these items, and under the Edit menu you have these, and so on. Marking menus don't work well for that.
There is a point at which having to move the mouse only a tiny distance outweighs having an infinitely high target.
Not really. I'm sure you're getting at speed here, and how much of a pain it is to drag the mouse all that way to the top of the screen, but if speed is your criteria then hotkeys will always win the race. They're incredibly fast-- instantaneous-- but they're also incredibly user-hostile.
There are other examples where the Mac's single menu bar is not the best solution as well, such as multiple monitors, or very high resolutions.
Actually, in both of those cases the single menu bar is the best solution, due to that "infinite height" property I mentioned.
Face it, I'm going around the system, which is what this discussion was all about.
Who made the music? Who paid them to make it? Who, and this is the most important part of all, owns the copyright on it? You're not using the system in the same sense that a petty thief doesn't use the cash register. You're stealing, dude.
Taking it from whom?
From the copyright holders. The people who have the legally granted exclusive right to sell you a copy.
Just because the RIAA would like me to give them money doesn't mean I'm stealing if I don't.
Oh, dear sweet Lord Jesus. How do you respond to somebody who confesses to the act and then says, "No, I'm not?" You're a thief, dude. An amoral thief. If there's any justice in the world, your hard drive will crash and you'll lose all that music you've worked so hard for so long to steal.
I'm not, hence the piracy.
Oh, you most definitely are using the system. You are listening to music produced by artists and distributed by record companies. You are just doing it illegally.
This is the copying of IP we're talking about here. The equivilent of cheating at a video game, or descrambling cable.
No. It's the equivalent of shoplifting. You're taking something without paying for it. It is both illegal and wrong. And not just wrong because it's illegal, either; it's wrong on its face.
If your neighbor had been stealing your money (see "Price Fixing Class Action Lawsuit"), ruining your favorite hobby (enjoyment of music), and putting your friends in jail (see "Jailing Owners of MP3s"), I might suggest he needs a good ass-kicking.
Did you parents never teach you the phrase, "Two wrongs don't make a right?" You might think it's okay to steal from somebody you don't like, but it's not. It's neither legal nor right.
We don?t KNOW this, they surmise this based on some examination of Arial photographs.
Um. We're not talking about vacation snapshots here. These are detailed aerial surveys. They are quite accurate on their own; compared to on-the-ground estimates, they are incredibly accurate.
But either way, just because the SF police were bad at making an estimate doesn't mean everyone else was. You choose to believe so because it helps to maintain the illusion of whatever it is you believe.
I believe so because there's no evidence to the contrary. All the evidence we have says that on-the-ground estimates of crowd size are absurdly inaccurate. This one instance-- again, the only one we have so far-- indicates that the on-the-ground estimates were four times the actual attendance. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, it's reasonable to act on the assumption that other estimates were similarly flawed.
If you want me to believe any of the other attendance numbers, you're going to have to produce evidence of them that's on the same level as aerial surveys. On-the-ground estimates, adjusted based on the San Francisco data, yield a total worldwide attendance of less than one million; figuring in the margin of error, the total may have been slightly over one million. It is definitely not "millions."
Of course if you want to play with numbers there is the generally held statistical belief that for every person showing up, there are 10 who would have liked to attend but were unable because of various reasons (work etc).
You're going to have to produce evidence of such a "generally held statistical belief." I believe that you are making it up.
The point, of course, is that for the very reasons that we're having this conversation, mass protests about war or any other subject don't mean a damn thing.
The edges and screen corners are easy to hit, but grossly underutilised by GUI designers.
This is, of course, why the Mac has a systemwide menu bar at the top of the screen, instead of a NeXT-style menu palette or a menu at the top of each window. The top-of-the-screen menu bar is said to be infinitely tall, because you don't have to worry about the Y coordinate when you click on it. Just push the mouse forward until the pointer stops moving, then click.
Jesus. I understand that English is not your native language. I understand that we are having a communication problem. I will try one more time to make this as clear as I can.
The police said there were about 200,000 people at the San Francisco protest. They were wrong. There were about 65,000. We know this because of aerial photographs.
We do not have aerial photographs of other protests. We have only police estimates. Because the San Francisco estimate was off by a factor of four, we divide the other estimates by four, too. This is so we can get numbers that are closer to reality.
Estimated before or after?
After.
if its afterwards it just goes to show that the San Francisco police are pretty nearsighted
There were two estimates. The estimates were independent. One came from police. One came from organizers. Both estimates were initially around 250,000, and were later revised down to 200,000. Both estimates, which were completely independent, were wrong.
But then how did they arrive at the 65,000 number? Did they tell everybody raise their hands and be counted?
Basically, yes. Try this article for a good overview of how the survey was conducted. This provides more detail.
UT2003 works just fine across two monitors, although things are centered where the bezels meet, which isn't that great
Sounds like you need a third monitor.
You should have bought a PowerBook. Giant screen, built in DVD burner, but the battery life is still more than sufficient to watch a 2-1/2 hour movie on the plane. And a hell of a lot better than that if you aren't spinning the optical drive the whole time. I'm an iBook man myself, but a good friend has loaned me his PowerBook on many occasions. Six hours of battery life isn't unusual if you're doing light tasks like word processing with the hard drive spun down most of the time and the AirPort card turned off.
First there is your nonsense that only the San Francisco march is somehow relevant, which - to put it bluntly is crap.
Hoo boy. Did you read? The San Francisco protest is the only one for which we have even remotely reliable attendence numbers. If you know of another, then say so. Don't just say, "The other big demonstrations around the world were also covered from the sky" if it isn't true.
Just blatantly making stuff up is not a good way to win an argument.
Second, is the nonsense about diving it by 4 because you feel more comfortable by trying to dismiss the large numbers.
The San Francisco protest was estimated by both organizers and police as having about 250,000 attendees. The actual number was 65,000, with a 10% margin of error. That means the estimates were off by a factor of four. I'm not dividing by four because I feel like it. I'm dividing by four because I'm trying to get an approximation that is even remotely close to the truth.
But truth evidently isn't a big deal for you, huh?
What?! Enough volume to turn a profit? All they have to cover are some servers, and a decent pipe.
.Mac and Software Update and whatnot. And they already pay for crazy bandwidth through Akamai. At first, as this service is initially being rolled out, Apple will be able to offer it essentially for nothing. As it grows, it will be able to pay for itself as the need for dedicated content servers and bandwidth increases over time.
That's the thing about Apple running this instead of some start-up outfit. They already own the servers and the pipe. Apple provides lots of web services already, through
Losslessly compressed in an open format, no DRM. A good selection, especially classical and jazz. Quality control, no truncation, pops or glitches of any kind. I would pay up to $2/song, $10/album.
Um. Have you tried the nearest used CD store?
I want to set my niece up with a kazaa account so she can download music. Even with the passwords/filters provided by KaZaA. (diet, Lite, whatever) There are still plenty of songs that come up that I think her parents wouldn't want her downloading.
Let me get this straight. You're concerned about the fact that some songs have bad words in them or whatever, but the whole "you are breaking the law by doing this" thing doesn't bother you?
Listen, I'm all for keeping kids away from content that their parents deem unacceptable, but get a sense of perspective, man! Downloading copyrighted music is against the law!
I don't understand how this is different from rhapsody from http://www.listen.com Listen.com has a plan where you pay $9.95/month, then you can preview as many as you like. You can also download and burn as many as you like for an additional 49 cents per track.
Let me get this straight. You have to pay a monthly fee whether you download anything or not, and for everything you download, you have to pay an additional fee?
There's your difference right there, Sparky.
If the artists you're listening to can only make one or two good songs, then they suck.
You know, Monet did a whole series of paintings of water lilies, but I only really like one or two of them. Guess Monet must have really sucked as a painter.
Yeah. Either that, or... your reasoning is completely and utterly screwed up. One of those two. I'm not quite sure which.
Why would I pay $1 a track, $15 a cd when I can go to a used Record/CD store, pick-up used copies of the artists I want to hear for about $6-$9 a pop.
Because you can do it in your underwear, instantly. You know when you go to the kwik-e-mart, they have those little displays of crap right by the register? Those are called impulse items. They're there because people stand in line and look over and say, "Gee, I'd like some gum. It's only a dollar. I'll buy it." An impulse, you see, hence the name.
With this service, people are going to sit at home and say, "Gee, I'd like some Midnight Oil. It's only a dollar. I'll buy it."
A system like this would basically turn the whole of recorded music into an impulse item.
What if my excuse for piracy is "I don't like the system"?
Then don't use it. What if my excuse for beating the hell out of my next-door neighbor is, "I don't like him?"
He's anticipating looking back on what will have been a positive experience.
In other words, he's saying that this will have been going to be a good thing.
Fermi's Solution: Any sufficiently advanced civilization either destroys itself or transcends to superintelligence.
My favorite theories are the ones with no data at all, supporting or otherwise.
There is no evidence one way or the other, so its illogical to doubt that life is there.
There is no evidence one way or the other, so it's illogical to doubt that underpants gnomes sneak into my room at night and steal my underpants.
Friend, you've got it all wrong. In the absence of evidence that there is life on Europa, the reasonable hypothesis is that there is none.
And what's all this about, excuse me, "terracentric?" We're Earthlings, you dimwit. On what else are we supposed to base our understanding of the universe? Star Trek reruns?
The standards are being actively trampled here, so this is the right battle at this moment.
Since you brought up the word "battle," that naturally puts one in mind of that old saw, "Choose your battles." Weigh the benefits against the effort required. If you either (1) drop PeopleSoft for another solution, or (b) screw with the vendor's supported configuration, you're making significant work for yourself. Is it worth it? Isn't it possible that your time could be better invested elsewhere?
One has to keep a sense of perspective about these things, otherwise one ends up tilting at windmills.