I know. Damn Google - WHY did they rip the useful stuff (OS, browser, etc.) out of their Zeitgeist? It was extremely useful from probably the most representative site on the planet.
I disagree. If universities are gonna offer a net connection, they offer it, and set yourself up as a goddamn common carrier. It is not their job to be the moral police, or take this bullshit from big corporations' lawyers. If they insist on doing that, I encourage every university student to get their own independent net connection. That's what I did, and I've had none of this ridiculous trouble.
Nor, by recent FCC decision, will it be the case for fiber lines, which is why the phone companies are suddenly so gung-ho on building out their fiber networks when they sat on their hands for years. It's also undoubtedly why so many of them are cutting your copper when they install fiber; with a quick snip, they eliminate all competition for Internet services on their lines.
See, that's exactly the kind of thing a competent regulator should be preventing. No, you can't cut the copper, and whatsmore, the copper MUST be maintained to a certain standard to allow good competition. It's sad, they could keep the telcos in line, but they don't.
2) That airwaves, which by natural law are a shared public resource, can somehow be auctioned/sold.
Not really; the use of them is being regulated. As a matter of fact, if this didn't happen, they'd be pretty useless. One day you're happily browsing the web via your 802.11e, the next, some prick has come along and disrupted your signal for his HAM radio. Or something.
Our democratically elected Congress passed this bill.
If you're defining the US congressional elections as 'democratic', that word loses all usefulness. It's not anywhere near representative enough, so no wonder people don't give a shit that these people passed this bill.
Not really, no. Case-sensitivity is only good when you're trying to *avoid* namespace clashes. Passwords and variable names (just about) qualify as good usage. When trying to lower accidental misses, however, it's a terrible idea -- so, it's bad for markup tags, and whoever's hairbrained idea it was to make Unix filesystems case-sensitive should be shot. Actually, I don't think it was because someone thought it was a good idea - they just didn't really think not to do it.
-- after all, just because the dollar sign and the figure 4 come from the same key on the keyboard, they aren't interchangeable, so why should the letter "z" and the letter "Z" be thought of so?
Because $/4 are totally different characters, whereas z/Z are the same character but with only a case difference? Because humans regularly interchange z/Z and would basically understand 'snooze' and 'snooZe' to be the same? Compare that to the difference between 440 and $40.
One thing that's always irritated me about XML...
on
W3C Considering An HTML 5
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
... is that its tags are case-sensitive. This doesn't make any friggin' sense. I've never seen a case where they define 2 tags named identically but cased differently, and indeed it would be silly and confusing, yet XML behaves as if this is the case. XHTML inherits this limitation. I like my HTML tags in uppercase, damnit, to make them more obviously separated from the content! Are XML parsers too lazy to do something like "lc(string1) == lc(string2)"?
Heck, what's to stop its being a National Emergency for evermore? When there's always the threat of terrorist attack (that might kill 3,000 whole people! Sure, a tragedy, but compared to the number of US road deaths per year...), it's always a emergency.
You seem to have a Penchant for overcapitalization.
There is no need to capitalize, in the above text, 'a', 'president', 'constitution', 'judicial', 'people', 'terrorists', 'tax', or 'ineffective'. In fact, it looks a bit silly. Please review your capitalization next time.
That sounds pretty similar to Microsoft's subscription software business model. I hate the idea of these new 'cash cow' models that big business is coming up with, and can only hope people reject them forcefully.
Should it really be illegal to download (for free, so you're not contributing to a commerial market) child porn and view it in the privacy of your own home? As far as I'm concerned, it shouldn't be illegal until you actually harm somebody.
And don't give me this 'harming themselves' BS. Where's freedom gone when you start to decide which choices that someone makes are valid and which aren't?
Is it a particularly good idea to have to install a different OS to do different stuff, though? Wouldn't it be nicer to just have 1 general-purpose one?
(Disclaimer: I checked for the existence of JoeLinux at distrowatch, but the closest match I found was "JoLinux," which is absolutely not the fictitious distribution to which I was referring)
I just released JoeLinux - me and my 2 buddies use it, you insensitive clod!
Parties are the problem, not the solution. We need no parties; we need politicians to think on their own about some issues for a change.
Until recently, I shared this exact opinion. However, I've changed my mind now and think that parties are absolutely fine, as long as they're kept under good scrutiny. The current entrenched parties are a *symptom* of the real problem - the electoral system.
You pretty much need parties in national government. The elected need to have a full spectrum of policies, which is pretty difficult for independents to do. I don't agree with independent candidates standing on 1 local issue; that seems inappropriate for national government, and should be dealt with by local government.
Given that you need a full spectrum of policies, parties make sense. People clump together to form their spectrum of policies. However, what you need to eliminate is people not being able to get SOME kind of representation, even if they're not in the majority. That's where the problem lies; first-past-the-post. It needs to be replaced with open-list proportional representation. Check out Finland and Israel for 2 good examples. A party system, but without the inherent evils that come with 2/3 party entrenchment.
I really can't blame the Governments too much because if they just say, "Shit happens and we can't panic. We'll work on this and bring these guys to justice. And in the meantime, let's see what we can do to stop this kind of activity in the World." It'll never happen because the general public wouldn't accept it.
Perhaps it could be said, then, that owing to human nature, terrorism is guaranteed to work?
new[s] aggregates, private websites, porn sites, all of these are fueled completely by banner ads and Google Adsense. Isn't anyone else the least bit disturbed by this?
Because you want them to be fueled by: - Someone's own earned cash. They should do it out of their goodwill, for me, damnit! - Individual payments from visitors. Very difficult to get a proper infrastructure setup for this, and I'd rather have ads than pay separately for EACH SITE i visit. - Donations. Good luck there. - *waves hand vaguely* Other sources. Just... Other. Damnit. But not ads.
I'm rather surprised you bought it from somewhere without the 'interrogation'. I bet your details were going to go to TV Licensing. Sure, they might have a 'database of every home without a TV licence' (or, more accurately, every home), but they'd rather address their extortion letters to your name, rather than 'The Current Occupier'.
T-mobile already banned VOIP from their own users - they offer the cheapest 3G rates in the UK, so no wonder they don't want their users switching to this.
Ah, yes. The old telephony trick.
1. Advertise extensive, cheap service. 2. Prevent paying users from using service. 3. ??? 4. Profit!!!
Slashdot Mirror
I know. Damn Google - WHY did they rip the useful stuff (OS, browser, etc.) out of their Zeitgeist? It was extremely useful from probably the most representative site on the planet.
I disagree. If universities are gonna offer a net connection, they offer it, and set yourself up as a goddamn common carrier. It is not their job to be the moral police, or take this bullshit from big corporations' lawyers. If they insist on doing that, I encourage every university student to get their own independent net connection. That's what I did, and I've had none of this ridiculous trouble.
Nor, by recent FCC decision, will it be the case for fiber lines, which is why the phone companies are suddenly so gung-ho on building out their fiber networks when they sat on their hands for years. It's also undoubtedly why so many of them are cutting your copper when they install fiber; with a quick snip, they eliminate all competition for Internet services on their lines.
See, that's exactly the kind of thing a competent regulator should be preventing. No, you can't cut the copper, and whatsmore, the copper MUST be maintained to a certain standard to allow good competition. It's sad, they could keep the telcos in line, but they don't.
2) That airwaves, which by natural law are a shared public resource, can somehow be auctioned/sold.
Not really; the use of them is being regulated. As a matter of fact, if this didn't happen, they'd be pretty useless. One day you're happily browsing the web via your 802.11e, the next, some prick has come along and disrupted your signal for his HAM radio. Or something.
Because in America, anything owned by the government is evil, and anything owned by private companies is good.
Our democratically elected Congress passed this bill.
If you're defining the US congressional elections as 'democratic', that word loses all usefulness. It's not anywhere near representative enough, so no wonder people don't give a shit that these people passed this bill.
Case-sensitive behaviour is fine in its own right
Not really, no. Case-sensitivity is only good when you're trying to *avoid* namespace clashes. Passwords and variable names (just about) qualify as good usage. When trying to lower accidental misses, however, it's a terrible idea -- so, it's bad for markup tags, and whoever's hairbrained idea it was to make Unix filesystems case-sensitive should be shot. Actually, I don't think it was because someone thought it was a good idea - they just didn't really think not to do it.
-- after all, just because the dollar sign and the figure 4 come from the same key on the keyboard, they aren't interchangeable, so why should the letter "z" and the letter "Z" be thought of so?
Because $/4 are totally different characters, whereas z/Z are the same character but with only a case difference? Because humans regularly interchange z/Z and would basically understand 'snooze' and 'snooZe' to be the same? Compare that to the difference between 440 and $40.
... is that its tags are case-sensitive. This doesn't make any friggin' sense. I've never seen a case where they define 2 tags named identically but cased differently, and indeed it would be silly and confusing, yet XML behaves as if this is the case. XHTML inherits this limitation. I like my HTML tags in uppercase, damnit, to make them more obviously separated from the content! Are XML parsers too lazy to do something like "lc(string1) == lc(string2)"?
Heck, what's to stop its being a National Emergency for evermore? When there's always the threat of terrorist attack (that might kill 3,000 whole people! Sure, a tragedy, but compared to the number of US road deaths per year...), it's always a emergency.
The current incompetent president, Hosni Mubarak, has been in power for more than 25 centuries
Erm, surely you mean 25 years.
You seem to have a Penchant for overcapitalization.
There is no need to capitalize, in the above text, 'a', 'president', 'constitution', 'judicial', 'people', 'terrorists', 'tax', or 'ineffective'. In fact, it looks a bit silly. Please review your capitalization next time.
That sounds pretty similar to Microsoft's subscription software business model. I hate the idea of these new 'cash cow' models that big business is coming up with, and can only hope people reject them forcefully.
Simple. Setup a Windows proxy on one machine and route your Linux/Mac connections through there. :-P
(PS. Joke. I hope he doesn't actually give this as an answer)
Should it really be illegal to download (for free, so you're not contributing to a commerial market) child porn and view it in the privacy of your own home? As far as I'm concerned, it shouldn't be illegal until you actually harm somebody.
And don't give me this 'harming themselves' BS. Where's freedom gone when you start to decide which choices that someone makes are valid and which aren't?
Is it a particularly good idea to have to install a different OS to do different stuff, though? Wouldn't it be nicer to just have 1 general-purpose one?
(Disclaimer: I checked for the existence of JoeLinux at distrowatch, but the closest match I found was "JoLinux," which is absolutely not the fictitious distribution to which I was referring)
I just released JoeLinux - me and my 2 buddies use it, you insensitive clod!
As well as the fact that for most people Windows and pirated Office Just Work(tm) (which they kinda do, come to think of it) so why change?
Because they want to become legal?
Parties are the problem, not the solution. We need no parties; we need politicians to think on their own about some issues for a change.
Until recently, I shared this exact opinion. However, I've changed my mind now and think that parties are absolutely fine, as long as they're kept under good scrutiny. The current entrenched parties are a *symptom* of the real problem - the electoral system.
You pretty much need parties in national government. The elected need to have a full spectrum of policies, which is pretty difficult for independents to do. I don't agree with independent candidates standing on 1 local issue; that seems inappropriate for national government, and should be dealt with by local government.
Given that you need a full spectrum of policies, parties make sense. People clump together to form their spectrum of policies. However, what you need to eliminate is people not being able to get SOME kind of representation, even if they're not in the majority. That's where the problem lies; first-past-the-post. It needs to be replaced with open-list proportional representation. Check out Finland and Israel for 2 good examples. A party system, but without the inherent evils that come with 2/3 party entrenchment.
I really can't blame the Governments too much because if they just say, "Shit happens and we can't panic. We'll work on this and bring these guys to justice. And in the meantime, let's see what we can do to stop this kind of activity in the World." It'll never happen because the general public wouldn't accept it.
Perhaps it could be said, then, that owing to human nature, terrorism is guaranteed to work?
A Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting for "what's for dinner".
Sure. Because the powerful in US society are prohibited from using power to exploit the weak, right?
new[s] aggregates, private websites, porn sites, all of these are fueled completely by banner ads and Google Adsense. Isn't anyone else the least bit disturbed by this?
Because you want them to be fueled by:
- Someone's own earned cash. They should do it out of their goodwill, for me, damnit!
- Individual payments from visitors. Very difficult to get a proper infrastructure setup for this, and I'd rather have ads than pay separately for EACH SITE i visit.
- Donations. Good luck there.
- *waves hand vaguely* Other sources. Just... Other. Damnit. But not ads.
(assuming you're in the UK...)
I'm rather surprised you bought it from somewhere without the 'interrogation'. I bet your details were going to go to TV Licensing. Sure, they might have a 'database of every home without a TV licence' (or, more accurately, every home), but they'd rather address their extortion letters to your name, rather than 'The Current Occupier'.
T-mobile already banned VOIP from their own users - they offer the cheapest 3G rates in the UK, so no wonder they don't want their users switching to this.
Ah, yes. The old telephony trick.
1. Advertise extensive, cheap service.
2. Prevent paying users from using service.
3. ???
4. Profit!!!
There isn't really any way around the VBA problems at the moment, either.
That's a feature, not a bug!
O'Bama
Has the guy changed his nationality to Irish?