This for the ones who think Movie-OS interfaces are cool and slick looking: They're not efficient, they're not sensible, they are not intuitive and most of all, they're not useable.
I sometimes fall on this camp. Not always, (if I had to use a program that beeped every time the cursor blinked, I would go insane), but often.
1) They're slow. Cue CSI fingerprint patching program. The program displays every single failed compare in quick flash forward display. Pulling the whole dataset from the database and rendering it takes time. This time is wasted. You would not want your program to do that.
Who says it's displaying every single failed compare? Displaying some is a cool way of letting you know that it's working, and not stuck. It's the equivalent of a progress bar. More often than not you come into a situation where you could accurately update the progress bar thousands of times a second. However, doing that slows down the program, so you don't report it that often, even if you have enough information to.
2) Hard to reach buttons. Unfortunately, Knight Rider is the only example that comes to my mind right now, but it's true for far too many movies. Buttons located overhead, out of reach, sometimes requiring the user/pilot to stop doing whatever he is doing right now, move his hands and punch a minuscle button somewhere awkward. Yes, it looks cool, but it's about as sensible as putting the gear stick behind the driver's seat.
I don't know about your knight rider example in particular, but if it's a button that's not intended to be used every 2 minutes, it should be hard to reach. You don't want to accidentally hit KITT's jet booster (I assume it has one)
3) 100" see through displays. Again CSI (but it's made its way into various other movies by now). Yes, we all want bigger displays. Bigger is better. But there's a limit to better. Especially if, as in CSI, the additional space is not used to present more information but just to display the information in larger font or to fill it with more pointless gimmicky pictures. The angle your eye can see sharp in and can easily catch is very tiny. The diameter of the screen has to be viewable by moving your eyes alone and without strain, or it can just as well be accessible by scrolling.
I don't watch CSI, but unless it's the computer monitor, if whole frigging wall can be a screen, it should be. The computer monitor is something you need to have awareness of the entire screen the entire time, so I agree with you that too big can be awkward. Display monitors meant for presentations to multiple people are a different story. You're only going to be staring at it for two hours max while someone is giving you a presentation. Turning your head isn't really that bad for a short period of time. You do it naturally when you walk down the street to get a view of your surroundings, and I doubt you even notice it. That said, proper use of the real estate is important, so I half-agree with you.
4) Lifted-hands interface. Lacking a better term I dubbed it that: An interface that does not allow your hand to rest but requires you to lift them and reach. First of all, it's inaccurate. You are moving your hand from your shoulder instead of your wrist, which does limit your accuracy quite a bit. It's straining and tiring. Especially when you're supposed to hit tiny icons, this is magnitudes worse than traditional input.
Agreed that it shouldn't be the main form of interface with the computer, like in Minority Report. That would tire the hell out of me. However, in Avatar, they had a cool UI, where a dude just dragged his hand from the screen his working on, to his PADD like tablet computer. It was a very intuitive way of saying, "I want the data on this screen right now transferred to my portable computer here." It's not something you'd do often enough to tire you, and it's
Good to see Firefox not opting into a system that pushes us towards a non-free de-facto standard.
As others have said before, there's no reason why the codec should be part of the standard. It should be like the <img> tag. If you have the codec installed in your computer, use it. This allows the html standard to not be outdated when people come out with new codecs, free or not.
That said, if you want to complain about youtube's choice of a non-free codec, that's valid. Firefox shouldn't be actively not supporting things just because it's proprietary.
Anyway, Firefox 3.6 (which was released today) works fine with youtube html5. I just tried it out. So this entire discussion is moot anyway.
Well, I'm sorry, but if a company wants to operate in a country, it should abide by its laws, otherwise it's a criminal organization.
Isn't that what Google is doing? They're not threatening to invade China with an army of google-engineered robots unless demands are met. This particular event is not even the despicable "let's buy some politicians with campaign contributions" thing. They're saying, "we don't agree with your laws, and if you're not willing to change them, we'll no longer be willing to operate in your country". That's the only thing they've threatened to do: to stop doing business there.
Nevertheless, I think it's not unreasonable, conversationally, to call into question whether what he's doing is really sensible.
It's perfectly reasonable to have a conversation as to whether or not ReactOS is a sensible project, in the sense of whether or not you think it would be useful to anyone. What is not reasonable to do is claim that this developer in particular should go out and do something else in his free time because this something else would be more useful to the population at large.
I do plenty of things with me free time that is not useful to absolutely anyone. I watch movies, I play video games. What you're doing is akin to saying, "you shouldn't be watching movies, you should be reading up some technical manuals that would increase your skillset and make you more useful to your employer. Sure, we can both agree that would be a more productive use of my time, but that does not mean in any way that we agree that's what I *should* be doing with my time. My goal for my time does not match yours, and I'd rather just watch my damn movie.
To me, it's not. I can't think of something I'd personally be less interested in than running a clone of MS Windows.
Good for you. I even agree with that statement. It's just not relevant to the original statement which said this guy "*should* just start working on WINE." That's not how your free time projects work. You don't do the most productive thing, or the more efficient thing, or what helps the most people. None of that is relevant at all. You do what you want to do, because it's what you want to do. He sees some value in ReactOS we don't and that's what matters.
Seriously, if you want to ask the question, "why would anyone use ReactOS," which appears to be the question you're really interested in, go ahead. It's a good question, might get some interesting answers. Implying the developer should go do something else for free just because it'd be more useful to us is just selfish. Why should he care which project benefits us more?
The poster did not question his freedom to do so. He asked _why_ he would contribute to one particular project rather than another project. Your reply did not answer the question that was asked.
Yes, it did. The answer is, "because he wants to." No other answer is required.
This is a guy working on something out of passion, not because he's getting paid to do so. The question you need to answer is "what would motivate him to work for the wine project if his passion lies with the ReactOS project?" You can't just expect him to up and start contributing his free time to something else just because you think it's a more efficient use of said time. It's his time to use in whatever manner he wants to. In this case he wants to write an operating system, not just a windows compatible layer.
Everyone's immediate reaction to filtering and blocking in China, etc. is "OH NO, HOW CAN THEY BE DOING THIS?" They are a company, they can do what serves their customers, it is not "evil". Get over it. Google's job is to make a profit.
Companies are run by people and decisions are made by people. The goal of a company is to make money, but only through actions which do not violate the ethics of the board members and shareholders as a whole. Anything those individuals consider immoral, but agree to do anyway in order to make a profit, is still immoral.
Given that google is an american company, censorship is seen as evil by the people that control the company, and they go so far as to say so in the article. Therefore the company shouldn't be doing it.
Okay. So Lois had her memory wiped by Superman after sleeping with him.
Yeah, the events of Superman 2 were really messed up. Lois finds out Clark is superman, he gets rid of his powers to stay with her, they sleep together, other Kryptonian survivors appear and they're all evil ("Kneel before Zod"), so Superman has to go regain his powers and fight them.
All the while, Lois gets kidnapped because Luthor knows Superman has a thing for her, but she still tries to protect Superman (and his secret, she knows his secret identity at this point) with no regard for her own life. To repay her for this, Superman erases her memory at the end of the movie. I'm sure he's telling himself it's for her own good, but we all know that's bull. Luthor knew to kidnap her, and he wasn't even aware of how far their relationship had gone. She's still in danger, just for being the reporter that knows Superman the best.
But I remember Luthor waving the green rock at the kid and seeing the kid flinch and him asking whose kid this is. That happens after the child has displayed his powers, does it? The first thing I remember of that is him throwing a piano at someone which I thought was later?
The piano did happen later. Luthor waved the Kryptonite for the same reason he had Lois kidnapped in Superman 2. He knows the two have a relationship, he's just not sure how far this has gone. He also figured that the kid is old enough to have been conceived before Superman went away, which is why he asks about the kid's age.
All I really remember from the film was Superman's behaviour, the utter stupidity of Luthor's plan (I'm going to kill millions and then go into real estate) and that the overall message of the movie seems to be that you can beat any problem with brute force if you just pull a constipated face whilst your lifting the continent you're allergic to into space.:(
The movie sucked. Bryan Singer was obviously a fan, but he's a fan of the wrong Superman. The early post-crisis Superman is the interesting one. His powers are nerfed somewhat, which means he's actually in danger of dying from things other than Kryptonite. He considers his identity of Clark Kent to be his real identity, and Superman to be the fake one. That makes him easier to relate to, and it means the Clark persona isn't an idiot who is constantly messing up everyday tasks. The Lois and Clark TV series really is what got the closest to a good live-action interpretation of Superman (and that's saying a lot, because it really wasn't that good). Everything else has sucked.
He mouths off about copyright all the time, but his grasp of law and legal history is laughable. Yet he consistently makes headlines for saying asinine things about subjects about which he has no expertise.
How do I get people to pay me for saying stupid things about fashionable subjects?
Hilarious irony. You claim he has no expertise on the subject of copyright and then asks how you can get paid for stating your opinion. Doctorow's expertise on the subject is precisely that he manages to get paid while giving his books away, which is something authors in favor of DRM books claim they couldn't possibly do.
Cory's Sacred Ancestors (or whoever the hell he was referencing) didn't have a clue about what effect the scanning and distribution of a book to 100,000 strangers on the Internet would have on the publishing industry.
Scribes didn't have a clue about the effect the printing press would have on their profession.
Even if you're right, and the publishing industry as it stands today dies, so what? Or do you long for the days when books were wildly expensive and very few had access to them because they had to be copied by hand? New technology kills industries, new ones take their place.
I panicked for a moment - I thought it said five million.
The homo sapiens species has only been around roughly 500,000 years. Human civilization, from its absolutely earliest form, has only been around for about 14,000 years.
Even if it said five million, I dont think that would be reason to panic. That's a really, really long time. Although maybe that's the joke you were trying to make, and I'm too dense to get it.
At one time, people would respect others and not annoy the crap out of them. It was simply understood that you weren't to bother others.
Right. And that's what you're not doing. You want everyone else to stop listening to music because it bothers you without considering the effect on their working day at all. What happened to you respecting THEM?
They're respecting you by putting headphones on, and not blasting the music out of their speakers. You respect them by finding some way to manage the noise leak. That's the only fair solution.
You're either not a programmer or an incredibly good programmer. I've been guilty many times of knowing there's a better way to do something, realizing there was a quick solution that was horrible in some way (difficult to maintain or extend) and saying, "screw it" to get something done quickly. I might even write a comment that says something to the effect of "don't ever do this, it's really bad" to those who look at the code and might decide to learn from it.
Of course, all they learn from it is that it's ok to write bad code as long as you acknowledge it in the comments. So I do feel guilty about it, and if I have free time I might go back and fix some of those things. They don't get fixed often enough though.
Audiophiles have known for decades that most listeners cannot discern excellent from mediocre music. Most people think that if there is lots of bass and the music is loud without obvious distortion, their system is great.
Most people have known for decades that audiophiles are full of crap. Every single time I've seen a double-blind test to see if they can hear the difference on what they claim they can hear, turns out they can't. Hey, good for the people selling them $1,000 audio cables.
That said, there's a good reason to go with FLAC. Want to re-encode a lower quality version for your storage-space-limited device? You can do that without additional quality loss, just like re-ripping from the cd. Want to change your collection to ogg because it sounds better at lower bitrates? Again, go ahead.
Basically, it's nice having a hard drive copy that is lossless, because you can re-encode it into the lossless codec of your choice for whatever device you want without introducing further artifacts.
Hey, I get that it's not the most visually appealing thing on the Internet:). I'm just really tired of the culture of bitching about ads wherein people honestly expect to get stuff completely free of charge or ads when producing said stuff costs money.
Remember when google wasn't the dominant search engine? You had yahoo, altavista, and the other guys filling up the search page with all sorts of ad banners. Google comes along with a very simple search page which is still there. Text ads only. A very large of information that you searched for, and only a few ads to the side.
Guess what? Most people don't bother blocking google's ads. And now they're the dominant player, because everyone would rather use them than their competitors.
It's reasonable that you want people to visit your site and get paid by supplying ads. If you make the ads so damn annoying, and divide up the information that should be in a single page into 15 pages just to get more adviews...well, don't be surprised when people try to circumvent your ads. It's your fault for losing the customer.
Your other option is to go the route Murdoch keeps saying he wants to switch to. You can charge people to visit your site. That's also fine, but don't complain when people aren't willing to pay the price. It's their choice to spend the money however they want. Bottom line: if people are complaining about your business model, your business model sucks. You can't just fill up a site with ads and expect that everyone will be happy about it because they're also benefiting from your hard work. You have to find that point that maximizes profit. It's the equilibrium point where you enough ads that you make the highest profit you can make without alienating so many people that you can't make a profit. It's the same for anything you sell, ad-supported or not. You don't think all those people selling iphone apps would like to price them at $500+? So why are so many of them around $2? Because there's more money to be made selling 10,000 copies at $2 than 5 copies at $500.
If you can't find that equilibrium point, and no matter what you do you can't make a profit...then either your business model or your product sucks. That's your problem, not mine. Obviously few people will miss your product/site.
In a free society, criminals would owe restitution to their victims, and victims would be also entitled to request retribution against the criminal. Then people at large could make their own associative or dis-associative decisions regarding the criminal.
In a completely free society, nobody is stopped from doing anything, which includes murdering others. A completely free society has no laws, and the strong rule.
In a society where people value life, liberty, and property, we restrict what others can do in order to protect those rights which we, as a society, have determined are most important. Thus, in order to protect my right to life, we have enacted laws against murder. In order to protect my right to property, we have enacted laws against theft. By violating the victim's right to life, those criminals gave up their right to freedom for nineteen years. According to German law, they have apparently given up no other right, and owe nobody else any other restitution. Their debt has been paid, and they now have all the rights given any other citizen. That's fine by me.
I still side with Wikipedia here because, among other reasons, German laws should not apply outside Germany. However, I object to your statement that in free society retribution is expected. Every law removes of some liberties in order to protect rights which said society values and thus, by definition, makes a society less free. A completely free society would not be one I'd like to live in, so these restrictions can make for a better society, but not a freer one.
Note that I'm not saying I have, per se, the right to know information about other people. That would imply positive obligations on the part of other people. However, no-one has the right to stop the various people at Wikipedia from recording and maintaining an account of history. That is their private property right.
Yes, I agree completely with you there. Seems like if they wanted to protect the identity of the murderers once they got out of jail, a better law would have been to never reveal this information in the first place, except to people who have some reason to be directly involved (family of the victims and the criminals, lawyers, etc). Once the information is out, it's out.
You forgot to read the part where it says the SCOTUS is the supreme arbiter of constitutionality. If congress does it, and the Supreme Court says it's okay, then it's defacto constitutional, so says the constitution.
Yeah...I don't remember much at all from my High School US History / US Government classes, but I do remember some of the major stuff. This would be one of them: the Constitution has no clauses that specify the right to judicial review, and this right was established only years after in the Marbury v. Madison case.
Not that I'm saying I'm against judicial review. Somebody has to do it, and the judicial branch doesn't really have a strong role in the "Checks and Balances" philosophy without it. However, it's not a function specifically outlined in the constitution.
Back when they dropped support for NT on MIPS and Alpha?:-)
That's true, but that wasn't a case of writing code specifically to block those architectures. It was removal of code. The Atom is x86, Apple computers are x86, the OS will naturally work with that processor unless Apple specifically does something to prevent it from doing so.
Granted, they didn't do anything of the sort, but the fact that they have a history of locking things down made it seem plausible at the time.
Riiight, because whenever a Microsoft OS BSODs, people never think "Microsoft fucked up my machine! It wasn't that driver that I just installed, it was Microsoft!"
That's because it was Microsoft's fault. A properly designed operating system doesn't crash because of bad drivers (or ever). Case in point, Microsoft has finally done it right, and when my crappy nvidia drivers crash, the operating system survives (since Vista) and restarts the driver.
Actually, this was some blog poster that screwed up his Hackintosh and blamed it on Apple.
In one line you sum up why Apple has no interest in seeing OSX become the system builder's OS of choice.
Oh please. If Apple didn't try to block system builders, there would be no people "screwing up their Hackintoshes and blaming it on Apple" in the first place. When was the last time you heard a rumor that Microsoft was disabling support for some line of processors on Windows? If some idiot did claim that in a blog post, he would be laughed at.
At moments like these I feel like I do, in fact, personally have a stake in the evolutionary game: I feel like I should make sure that my non-previewing genes go nowhere. Oh, well...I'm a slashdotter, so they're unlikely to be passed on anyway:)
In evolutionary terms that makes you a failure. It's as if your genes never existed, since they stop here and go no further.
First, that's not necessarily true. If he's "chasing different women," as he put it, illegitimate children are not ruled out. Even if his careful, birth control isn't foolproof. He could also be making some of his disposable income by donating to a sperm bank, and if he's being successful in other endeavors in life, he could get pick and spread his genes:)
Evolutionary speculation aside, why the hell would you care if your genes get spread or not? Oh, I get that those who don't care might be less likely to pass on their genes, so the majority will care. From a pure rational analysis though, spreading your genes gives you absolutely no benefits. Sure, having a family might make you happy, and that's a rational reason to have one. If the extra disposable income and lack of family-related responsibilities are what make him happy, than that's the rational choice for him. The human species might have a stake in the evolutionary game, but the individuals most certainly don't.
What planet do they live on? I haven't used anything of those for years. When I buy them, I buy them digitally. If they are not available digitally, I don't buy them, but get them elsewhere. Simple as that.
Film studios: Welcome to the 21st century!
On the other hand, I refuse to buy movies digitally. If they stopped selling media, they'd stop getting money from me.
DRM on digital files prevents me from taking movies to a friend's place if I so chose. Even if they dropped that, the cost of adding hard drives to store the high resolution videos would be too much, considering they're not selling the digital versions sufficiently cheaper than the discs.
I don't want to live on your idea of 21st century. Just add DRMless "digital copy discs" to the purchase, and the option of downloading the thing online, and both you and I can be happy. I'm guessing most people still side with me in that they would be extremely unhappy if physical media went away.
What you cited doesn't say what you claimed it does. He doesn't say there that making a profit from software was unethical. He said making a profit from proprietary software was unethical, which should be no surprise since he considers the existence of proprietary software unethical. RMS would highly encourage you to profit from free software.
I'd much rather have a comment tell me something is a WTF and is clearly violating some assumption the developer had rather than lyric comments.
Sure, so would I.
Somehow I suspect the lyric comments were instead of, not in addition to the comments that ought ot have been there.
Why would you suspect that? One most definitely does not preclude the other. If he weren't leaving any relevant comments where he should have been, then yes, his project manager should talk to him about making sure to make useful comments, in the same way he should talk to someone who makes no comments at all. Nobody should give a crap if he leaves what is essentially a comment signature. It's not like any of that affects the quality of the final product, they don't get compiled in.
Work is work and play is play
Bullshit, and any work environment that tries to enforce that rule sucks.
Slashdot Mirror
This for the ones who think Movie-OS interfaces are cool and slick looking: They're not efficient, they're not sensible, they are not intuitive and most of all, they're not useable.
I sometimes fall on this camp. Not always, (if I had to use a program that beeped every time the cursor blinked, I would go insane), but often.
1) They're slow. Cue CSI fingerprint patching program. The program displays every single failed compare in quick flash forward display. Pulling the whole dataset from the database and rendering it takes time. This time is wasted. You would not want your program to do that.
Who says it's displaying every single failed compare? Displaying some is a cool way of letting you know that it's working, and not stuck. It's the equivalent of a progress bar. More often than not you come into a situation where you could accurately update the progress bar thousands of times a second. However, doing that slows down the program, so you don't report it that often, even if you have enough information to.
2) Hard to reach buttons. Unfortunately, Knight Rider is the only example that comes to my mind right now, but it's true for far too many movies. Buttons located overhead, out of reach, sometimes requiring the user/pilot to stop doing whatever he is doing right now, move his hands and punch a minuscle button somewhere awkward. Yes, it looks cool, but it's about as sensible as putting the gear stick behind the driver's seat.
I don't know about your knight rider example in particular, but if it's a button that's not intended to be used every 2 minutes, it should be hard to reach. You don't want to accidentally hit KITT's jet booster (I assume it has one)
3) 100" see through displays. Again CSI (but it's made its way into various other movies by now). Yes, we all want bigger displays. Bigger is better. But there's a limit to better. Especially if, as in CSI, the additional space is not used to present more information but just to display the information in larger font or to fill it with more pointless gimmicky pictures. The angle your eye can see sharp in and can easily catch is very tiny. The diameter of the screen has to be viewable by moving your eyes alone and without strain, or it can just as well be accessible by scrolling.
I don't watch CSI, but unless it's the computer monitor, if whole frigging wall can be a screen, it should be. The computer monitor is something you need to have awareness of the entire screen the entire time, so I agree with you that too big can be awkward. Display monitors meant for presentations to multiple people are a different story. You're only going to be staring at it for two hours max while someone is giving you a presentation. Turning your head isn't really that bad for a short period of time. You do it naturally when you walk down the street to get a view of your surroundings, and I doubt you even notice it. That said, proper use of the real estate is important, so I half-agree with you.
4) Lifted-hands interface. Lacking a better term I dubbed it that: An interface that does not allow your hand to rest but requires you to lift them and reach. First of all, it's inaccurate. You are moving your hand from your shoulder instead of your wrist, which does limit your accuracy quite a bit. It's straining and tiring. Especially when you're supposed to hit tiny icons, this is magnitudes worse than traditional input.
Agreed that it shouldn't be the main form of interface with the computer, like in Minority Report. That would tire the hell out of me. However, in Avatar, they had a cool UI, where a dude just dragged his hand from the screen his working on, to his PADD like tablet computer. It was a very intuitive way of saying, "I want the data on this screen right now transferred to my portable computer here." It's not something you'd do often enough to tire you, and it's
Good to see Firefox not opting into a system that pushes us towards a non-free de-facto standard.
As others have said before, there's no reason why the codec should be part of the standard. It should be like the <img> tag. If you have the codec installed in your computer, use it. This allows the html standard to not be outdated when people come out with new codecs, free or not.
That said, if you want to complain about youtube's choice of a non-free codec, that's valid. Firefox shouldn't be actively not supporting things just because it's proprietary.
Anyway, Firefox 3.6 (which was released today) works fine with youtube html5. I just tried it out. So this entire discussion is moot anyway.
Well, I'm sorry, but if a company wants to operate in a country, it should abide by its laws, otherwise it's a criminal organization.
Isn't that what Google is doing? They're not threatening to invade China with an army of google-engineered robots unless demands are met. This particular event is not even the despicable "let's buy some politicians with campaign contributions" thing. They're saying, "we don't agree with your laws, and if you're not willing to change them, we'll no longer be willing to operate in your country". That's the only thing they've threatened to do: to stop doing business there.
Nevertheless, I think it's not unreasonable, conversationally, to call into question whether what he's doing is really sensible.
It's perfectly reasonable to have a conversation as to whether or not ReactOS is a sensible project, in the sense of whether or not you think it would be useful to anyone. What is not reasonable to do is claim that this developer in particular should go out and do something else in his free time because this something else would be more useful to the population at large.
I do plenty of things with me free time that is not useful to absolutely anyone. I watch movies, I play video games. What you're doing is akin to saying, "you shouldn't be watching movies, you should be reading up some technical manuals that would increase your skillset and make you more useful to your employer. Sure, we can both agree that would be a more productive use of my time, but that does not mean in any way that we agree that's what I *should* be doing with my time. My goal for my time does not match yours, and I'd rather just watch my damn movie.
To me, it's not. I can't think of something I'd personally be less interested in than running a clone of MS Windows.
Good for you. I even agree with that statement. It's just not relevant to the original statement which said this guy "*should* just start working on WINE." That's not how your free time projects work. You don't do the most productive thing, or the more efficient thing, or what helps the most people. None of that is relevant at all. You do what you want to do, because it's what you want to do. He sees some value in ReactOS we don't and that's what matters.
Seriously, if you want to ask the question, "why would anyone use ReactOS," which appears to be the question you're really interested in, go ahead. It's a good question, might get some interesting answers. Implying the developer should go do something else for free just because it'd be more useful to us is just selfish. Why should he care which project benefits us more?
The poster did not question his freedom to do so. He asked _why_ he would contribute to one particular project rather than another project. Your reply did not answer the question that was asked.
Yes, it did. The answer is, "because he wants to." No other answer is required.
This is a guy working on something out of passion, not because he's getting paid to do so. The question you need to answer is "what would motivate him to work for the wine project if his passion lies with the ReactOS project?" You can't just expect him to up and start contributing his free time to something else just because you think it's a more efficient use of said time. It's his time to use in whatever manner he wants to. In this case he wants to write an operating system, not just a windows compatible layer.
Everyone's immediate reaction to filtering and blocking in China, etc. is "OH NO, HOW CAN THEY BE DOING THIS?" They are a company, they can do what serves their customers, it is not "evil". Get over it. Google's job is to make a profit.
Companies are run by people and decisions are made by people. The goal of a company is to make money, but only through actions which do not violate the ethics of the board members and shareholders as a whole. Anything those individuals consider immoral, but agree to do anyway in order to make a profit, is still immoral.
Given that google is an american company, censorship is seen as evil by the people that control the company, and they go so far as to say so in the article. Therefore the company shouldn't be doing it.
It's well known that Superman is a dick.
Okay. So Lois had her memory wiped by Superman after sleeping with him.
Yeah, the events of Superman 2 were really messed up. Lois finds out Clark is superman, he gets rid of his powers to stay with her, they sleep together, other Kryptonian survivors appear and they're all evil ("Kneel before Zod"), so Superman has to go regain his powers and fight them.
All the while, Lois gets kidnapped because Luthor knows Superman has a thing for her, but she still tries to protect Superman (and his secret, she knows his secret identity at this point) with no regard for her own life. To repay her for this, Superman erases her memory at the end of the movie. I'm sure he's telling himself it's for her own good, but we all know that's bull. Luthor knew to kidnap her, and he wasn't even aware of how far their relationship had gone. She's still in danger, just for being the reporter that knows Superman the best.
But I remember Luthor waving the green rock at the kid and seeing the kid flinch and him asking whose kid this is. That happens after the child has displayed his powers, does it? The first thing I remember of that is him throwing a piano at someone which I thought was later?
The piano did happen later. Luthor waved the Kryptonite for the same reason he had Lois kidnapped in Superman 2. He knows the two have a relationship, he's just not sure how far this has gone. He also figured that the kid is old enough to have been conceived before Superman went away, which is why he asks about the kid's age.
All I really remember from the film was Superman's behaviour, the utter stupidity of Luthor's plan (I'm going to kill millions and then go into real estate) and that the overall message of the movie seems to be that you can beat any problem with brute force if you just pull a constipated face whilst your lifting the continent you're allergic to into space. :(
The movie sucked. Bryan Singer was obviously a fan, but he's a fan of the wrong Superman. The early post-crisis Superman is the interesting one. His powers are nerfed somewhat, which means he's actually in danger of dying from things other than Kryptonite. He considers his identity of Clark Kent to be his real identity, and Superman to be the fake one. That makes him easier to relate to, and it means the Clark persona isn't an idiot who is constantly messing up everyday tasks. The Lois and Clark TV series really is what got the closest to a good live-action interpretation of Superman (and that's saying a lot, because it really wasn't that good). Everything else has sucked.
He mouths off about copyright all the time, but his grasp of law and legal history is laughable. Yet he consistently makes headlines for saying asinine things about subjects about which he has no expertise.
How do I get people to pay me for saying stupid things about fashionable subjects?
Hilarious irony. You claim he has no expertise on the subject of copyright and then asks how you can get paid for stating your opinion. Doctorow's expertise on the subject is precisely that he manages to get paid while giving his books away, which is something authors in favor of DRM books claim they couldn't possibly do.
Cory's Sacred Ancestors (or whoever the hell he was referencing) didn't have a clue about what effect the scanning and distribution of a book to 100,000 strangers on the Internet would have on the publishing industry.
Scribes didn't have a clue about the effect the printing press would have on their profession.
Even if you're right, and the publishing industry as it stands today dies, so what? Or do you long for the days when books were wildly expensive and very few had access to them because they had to be copied by hand? New technology kills industries, new ones take their place.
I panicked for a moment - I thought it said five million.
The homo sapiens species has only been around roughly 500,000 years. Human civilization, from its absolutely earliest form, has only been around for about 14,000 years.
Even if it said five million, I dont think that would be reason to panic. That's a really, really long time. Although maybe that's the joke you were trying to make, and I'm too dense to get it.
At one time, people would respect others and not annoy the crap out of them. It was simply understood that you weren't to bother others.
Right. And that's what you're not doing. You want everyone else to stop listening to music because it bothers you without considering the effect on their working day at all. What happened to you respecting THEM?
They're respecting you by putting headphones on, and not blasting the music out of their speakers. You respect them by finding some way to manage the noise leak. That's the only fair solution.
You're either not a programmer or an incredibly good programmer. I've been guilty many times of knowing there's a better way to do something, realizing there was a quick solution that was horrible in some way (difficult to maintain or extend) and saying, "screw it" to get something done quickly. I might even write a comment that says something to the effect of "don't ever do this, it's really bad" to those who look at the code and might decide to learn from it.
Of course, all they learn from it is that it's ok to write bad code as long as you acknowledge it in the comments. So I do feel guilty about it, and if I have free time I might go back and fix some of those things. They don't get fixed often enough though.
Audiophiles have known for decades that most listeners cannot discern excellent from mediocre music. Most people think that if there is lots of bass and the music is loud without obvious distortion, their system is great.
Most people have known for decades that audiophiles are full of crap. Every single time I've seen a double-blind test to see if they can hear the difference on what they claim they can hear, turns out they can't. Hey, good for the people selling them $1,000 audio cables.
That said, there's a good reason to go with FLAC. Want to re-encode a lower quality version for your storage-space-limited device? You can do that without additional quality loss, just like re-ripping from the cd. Want to change your collection to ogg because it sounds better at lower bitrates? Again, go ahead.
Basically, it's nice having a hard drive copy that is lossless, because you can re-encode it into the lossless codec of your choice for whatever device you want without introducing further artifacts.
Hey, I get that it's not the most visually appealing thing on the Internet :). I'm just really tired of the culture of bitching about ads wherein people honestly expect to get stuff completely free of charge or ads when producing said stuff costs money.
Remember when google wasn't the dominant search engine? You had yahoo, altavista, and the other guys filling up the search page with all sorts of ad banners. Google comes along with a very simple search page which is still there. Text ads only. A very large of information that you searched for, and only a few ads to the side.
Guess what? Most people don't bother blocking google's ads. And now they're the dominant player, because everyone would rather use them than their competitors.
It's reasonable that you want people to visit your site and get paid by supplying ads. If you make the ads so damn annoying, and divide up the information that should be in a single page into 15 pages just to get more adviews...well, don't be surprised when people try to circumvent your ads. It's your fault for losing the customer.
Your other option is to go the route Murdoch keeps saying he wants to switch to. You can charge people to visit your site. That's also fine, but don't complain when people aren't willing to pay the price. It's their choice to spend the money however they want. Bottom line: if people are complaining about your business model, your business model sucks. You can't just fill up a site with ads and expect that everyone will be happy about it because they're also benefiting from your hard work. You have to find that point that maximizes profit. It's the equilibrium point where you enough ads that you make the highest profit you can make without alienating so many people that you can't make a profit. It's the same for anything you sell, ad-supported or not. You don't think all those people selling iphone apps would like to price them at $500+? So why are so many of them around $2? Because there's more money to be made selling 10,000 copies at $2 than 5 copies at $500.
If you can't find that equilibrium point, and no matter what you do you can't make a profit...then either your business model or your product sucks. That's your problem, not mine. Obviously few people will miss your product/site.
In a free society, criminals would owe restitution to their victims, and victims would be also entitled to request retribution against the criminal. Then people at large could make their own associative or dis-associative decisions regarding the criminal.
In a completely free society, nobody is stopped from doing anything, which includes murdering others. A completely free society has no laws, and the strong rule.
In a society where people value life, liberty, and property, we restrict what others can do in order to protect those rights which we, as a society, have determined are most important. Thus, in order to protect my right to life, we have enacted laws against murder. In order to protect my right to property, we have enacted laws against theft. By violating the victim's right to life, those criminals gave up their right to freedom for nineteen years. According to German law, they have apparently given up no other right, and owe nobody else any other restitution. Their debt has been paid, and they now have all the rights given any other citizen. That's fine by me.
I still side with Wikipedia here because, among other reasons, German laws should not apply outside Germany. However, I object to your statement that in free society retribution is expected. Every law removes of some liberties in order to protect rights which said society values and thus, by definition, makes a society less free. A completely free society would not be one I'd like to live in, so these restrictions can make for a better society, but not a freer one.
Note that I'm not saying I have, per se, the right to know information about other people. That would imply positive obligations on the part of other people. However, no-one has the right to stop the various people at Wikipedia from recording and maintaining an account of history. That is their private property right.
Yes, I agree completely with you there. Seems like if they wanted to protect the identity of the murderers once they got out of jail, a better law would have been to never reveal this information in the first place, except to people who have some reason to be directly involved (family of the victims and the criminals, lawyers, etc). Once the information is out, it's out.
You forgot to read the part where it says the SCOTUS is the supreme arbiter of constitutionality. If congress does it, and the Supreme Court says it's okay, then it's defacto constitutional, so says the constitution.
Yeah...I don't remember much at all from my High School US History / US Government classes, but I do remember some of the major stuff. This would be one of them: the Constitution has no clauses that specify the right to judicial review, and this right was established only years after in the Marbury v. Madison case.
Not that I'm saying I'm against judicial review. Somebody has to do it, and the judicial branch doesn't really have a strong role in the "Checks and Balances" philosophy without it. However, it's not a function specifically outlined in the constitution.
Back when they dropped support for NT on MIPS and Alpha? :-)
That's true, but that wasn't a case of writing code specifically to block those architectures. It was removal of code. The Atom is x86, Apple computers are x86, the OS will naturally work with that processor unless Apple specifically does something to prevent it from doing so.
Granted, they didn't do anything of the sort, but the fact that they have a history of locking things down made it seem plausible at the time.
Riiight, because whenever a Microsoft OS BSODs, people never think "Microsoft fucked up my machine! It wasn't that driver that I just installed, it was Microsoft!"
That's because it was Microsoft's fault. A properly designed operating system doesn't crash because of bad drivers (or ever). Case in point, Microsoft has finally done it right, and when my crappy nvidia drivers crash, the operating system survives (since Vista) and restarts the driver.
Actually, this was some blog poster that screwed up his Hackintosh and blamed it on Apple.
In one line you sum up why Apple has no interest in seeing OSX become the system builder's OS of choice.
Oh please. If Apple didn't try to block system builders, there would be no people "screwing up their Hackintoshes and blaming it on Apple" in the first place. When was the last time you heard a rumor that Microsoft was disabling support for some line of processors on Windows? If some idiot did claim that in a blog post, he would be laughed at.
if his careful
he's
he could get pick
picked
than that's the rational choice
then
At moments like these I feel like I do, in fact, personally have a stake in the evolutionary game: I feel like I should make sure that my non-previewing genes go nowhere. Oh, well...I'm a slashdotter, so they're unlikely to be passed on anyway :)
I've never really wanted kids...
In evolutionary terms that makes you a failure. It's as if your genes never existed, since they stop here and go no further.
First, that's not necessarily true. If he's "chasing different women," as he put it, illegitimate children are not ruled out. Even if his careful, birth control isn't foolproof. He could also be making some of his disposable income by donating to a sperm bank, and if he's being successful in other endeavors in life, he could get pick and spread his genes :)
Evolutionary speculation aside, why the hell would you care if your genes get spread or not? Oh, I get that those who don't care might be less likely to pass on their genes, so the majority will care. From a pure rational analysis though, spreading your genes gives you absolutely no benefits. Sure, having a family might make you happy, and that's a rational reason to have one. If the extra disposable income and lack of family-related responsibilities are what make him happy, than that's the rational choice for him. The human species might have a stake in the evolutionary game, but the individuals most certainly don't.
Man, so the message is clear: we will have to fuck those nasty aliens when they show up to get that "hybrid vigor" on a galactic scale.
So that was Jim Kirk's motivation!
What planet do they live on? I haven't used anything of those for years. When I buy them, I buy them digitally. If they are not available digitally, I don't buy them, but get them elsewhere. Simple as that.
Film studios: Welcome to the 21st century!
On the other hand, I refuse to buy movies digitally. If they stopped selling media, they'd stop getting money from me.
DRM on digital files prevents me from taking movies to a friend's place if I so chose. Even if they dropped that, the cost of adding hard drives to store the high resolution videos would be too much, considering they're not selling the digital versions sufficiently cheaper than the discs.
I don't want to live on your idea of 21st century. Just add DRMless "digital copy discs" to the purchase, and the option of downloading the thing online, and both you and I can be happy. I'm guessing most people still side with me in that they would be extremely unhappy if physical media went away.
Citation provided
What you cited doesn't say what you claimed it does. He doesn't say there that making a profit from software was unethical. He said making a profit from proprietary software was unethical, which should be no surprise since he considers the existence of proprietary software unethical. RMS would highly encourage you to profit from free software.
I'd much rather have a comment tell me something is a WTF and is clearly violating some assumption the developer had rather than lyric comments.
Sure, so would I.
Somehow I suspect the lyric comments were instead of, not in addition to the comments that ought ot have been there.
Why would you suspect that? One most definitely does not preclude the other. If he weren't leaving any relevant comments where he should have been, then yes, his project manager should talk to him about making sure to make useful comments, in the same way he should talk to someone who makes no comments at all. Nobody should give a crap if he leaves what is essentially a comment signature. It's not like any of that affects the quality of the final product, they don't get compiled in.
Work is work and play is play
Bullshit, and any work environment that tries to enforce that rule sucks.