That's great, because Wikimedia is not begging. They would be begging if they gave you nothing in return. As it stands, they encourage you to become a patron. When people slander them by calling them beggars, it only shows how little these people appreciate the Foundation's work.
Google Adwords would go perfectly on there...it would remain unobtrusive, stay topical, and provide some income
Provide some income, yes. The rest is subjective, and for many people false. When I look up encyclopedic or scientific information, any ad on the same page would be obtrusive and not topical: I did not ask for this information, and it has NOTHING to do with my query. When I look up "shoe" in an encyclopedia, I want to see encyclopedic material, not a link to nike.com. This is because Nike provides actual shoes, and not objective factual information about shoes. In fact, Nike is notorious for bullshitting and lying through their teeth in their shoe information releases, a.k.a. "ads".
And when I want to buy something, then may be I'll use Google, TYVM.
Yeah, but "liberty" is a noun and "liberated" connotes that it was enslaved at some point and later liberated, which would be misleading most of the time.
None of this redundancy/infighting would probably happen if English just had two nice different words meaning "costless" and "not enslaved", like "gratis" and "libre" (Sp.) or "besplatnoe" and "svobodnoe" (Rus.). Sometimes I think that going with "free" was a misstep on Stallman's part, but at the same time, I cannot think of a good alternative.
Atwood's comparison of programmer to pianist is braindead. Programming is like composing for piano. The quality of the product is almost unrelated to one's proficiency with keyboard. It would matter for a performance, such as coding context.
Why is that bad? If the computers are ubiquitous and students know how to use them correctly to do arithmetic, then what is really the point of learning the arithmetic? Unless you are a math major, and then the journey is its own reward. The human brain is notoriously inefficient—for both speed and accuracy—at doing this kind of thinking. What is wrong with teaching people the basics of algebra and symbolic manipulation, and leaving arithmetic to computers?
Of course, it is sad (as a math teacher, I know) when people cannot compute 14/7. I once tutored a girl who used the calculator to do 4/2. I am not kidding you. I was sitting there thinking: here's a student who is not very bright, but tries pretty hard. She seems to have a real learning disability when it comes to manipulating real numbers, and who knows, may the calculator affords her with the only way she could possibly compute the correct change at a drug store. And how many of these people have you met? How many of them are math or engineering majors? There will always be a few individuals allergic to arithmetic. I think it's actually nice that now we can teach them how to communicate these problems to computers. Or at least we can try.
Oh, and I hate calculators. I think people should use general purpose computers running free software, where available, but that's a side issue here.
Oh yeah... Thanks for helping me to get the missile story straight. Curiously enough, the chain of command on the ship was a weird triumvirate. According to this article (Russian), both Vasili Arkhipov and Valentin Savitsky were captains of second rank. But Savitsky was the captain of the vessel and the only one with the key to the torpedo; he had the final authority in case of imminent danger to the ship or the crew. Whereas Arkhipov was in charge of the whole brigade of submarines, which made him the most superior officer on board. The third player was a political officer, whose only job was to report back to the Party. The article says, neither of them could authorize the launch, but Savitsky had the technical ability to engage. Like you said, no one disobeyed any orders and cool heads prevailed.
I've never seen any kiddie porn, and have no desire to do so. Have you? No? So there, your argument is totally bunk. You also seem to be implying that having story and characters saves the viewer from the desire to emulate in real life what is shown on the screen. This is also bollocks. If anything, a compelling story would make the real thing seem more enticing.
All I am arguing for here is that possessing a file should not be illegal, unless the file itself proves intent to commit a crime. A text file with a plan to massacre a school together with a new unregistered gun under your mattress? You are busted. A 30 year old photo of a naked child with no real children anywhere close and no nother evidence of any kind? Who gives a shit. Show that possession of child porn leads to more abuse or shut up. There are studies showing that availability of regular pornography is correlated with reduction in sex crimes, so good luck proving that availability of pictures with naked children increases child abuse.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but most developers like to eat, which means that commercialization of software comes in at some point
That's great, but may be, as Eben Moglen noticed, they should eat just a tad bit less. While you are sitting here defending them, they are collecting monopoly profits. And I don't mean the kind of monopoly that Microsoft and Google are being accused of, but the intellectual monopoly on ideas that ALL proprietary software vendors enjoy. Are you really that spineless or deluded? Or do you have money to burn? If YOU, the user, are going to pay for software development, why not make it a condition that the result must be free?
People who flex the copyright muscle to keep their software non-free are greedy. They would like to collect monopoly profits, and the cost we are all paying is that the software cannot be improved by volunteers (even if the source is open, that is, can be built with free tools, improvements cannot be shared). I have no problem with monetizing software in a way that keeps the software free. More than 99.9% of all commodity software users are just that: users, and we all get shafted by intellectual monopolies. If we are going to pay for software development, we should pay for free software development, since it is cheaper for us, and results in software that does what we want it to do, and nothing else.
Closed source = no expectation of security + no expectation of privacy + expectation of malice + higher development cost. The sooner Joe Q. Public gets this consumer advocacy message, the better off he'll be. There are only two valid reasons to conceal the code: embarrassment and ill will towards the user. And the only valid reason to make an open-sourced program non-free is greed. None of these are helping the user, the consumer, or whatever you want to call 99% of people who use computers.
I think your reading is correct: this is yet another play in the cold war theater, and we've seen this before. But let's not forget that this is exactly the kind of posturing that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis. I won't claim that it was USSR that saved the day: there were plenty of fuckups on all sides. But it is very sobering that a nuclear war would probably happen if a Soviet submarine captain did not disobey his orders. If we keep doing this shit, it is only a matter of time before we get unlucky.
How? One of the main reasons to backup into something like a cloud is to move the data to a different geographic location, in case of something like a building fire or equipment theft. So I can trade local space for remote privacy. And I could get out a lot cheaper if I used a symmetric cipher with an obscenely large key. They are not gonna break it in 15 or 150 years. They are just not.
and fifteen years later we finally have the tools to crack whatever encryption you were using?
One could use pretty much any kind of cipher here. It's going to be as secure as one makes it. One could 1-time-pad the data before uploading, so it's actually
pretty secure, IMHO.
It's the Global Quickening. The unusually high amounts of THC in the atmosphere are causing the Earth-wide time dilation effect. To compound this problem, major producers of THC are in the talks to fully legalize these emissions, which, if left unchecked for a few more decades, will certainly result in a run-away pizza-house effect, whereas the traffic grid will be flooded with pizza delivery trucks rushing to their destinations.
Yet in a bizarre twist, this "young Republican" struck down the part of the law inserted for the benefit of the insurance companies. So the rest of the bill stands and people cannot be turned down due to pre-existing conditions, but they don't have to buy insurance until they are sick. Or am I not getting something?
It's because you are a sadistic serial killer that you enjoy watching Saw at all.
But, regardless of that, watching child porn means that people making it have an audience, which encourages them to produce more.
Nothing about your argument makes sense. Even if they are producing more recordings and share them, how are the children hurt more? People who share self-produced child porn tend to get caught, unlike many of the bastards who abuse their kids without a record.
but ownership of child porn shows an interest in sex with children.
I too hate to sound like devil's advocate, but do you by any chance own Torah, which teaches that murder is good as long as you are a Jew and YHWH is with you? Because this ownership shows interest in mass murder and genocide. You yourself do not buy any of your arguments if they were about violence, so what gives?
Lately I think, what makes a game truly great is the art, period. The whole is greater than the sum. I agree with you: the multiplayer/singleplayer axis is completely orthogonal to both the goodness axis and the longevity axis. The goodness is in the explicable combination of graphics, sound, writing, controls, UI, and that viscerally felt response to the user input. And that other thing you know, but I am forgetting.
Counterstrike I will give you, even though I personally was never a fan. It just feels so crisp. But also Quake, and Commander Keen, and the whole multitude of godly platformers. And all HalfLife. And Diablo I and II, as different as they are. And most (but not all) games starting with Sim. And ditto for games starting with Sid. And pretty much everything done by Interplay and Black Isle. And, like, every PC adventure that didn't suck, which is a good chunk of them. And I cannot even begin to name console titles, since I am a PC boy, but I am fully aware that I am barely scratching the surface here. There are dozens of excellent games from every genre, ancient or relatively recent, that I could put in this list right now, so I'll just stop.
What the EA drone is trying to say is that they cannot design an effective copy protection for a singleplayer game, so they are not going to finance one. And nothing of value is lost.
Bam. The US-Iraq-Afghanistan war claimed thousands of innocent civilians on all sides: hundreds of thousands on Iraqi side. I am, seriously, wowed by US citizens who think that the benefit of public knowing what the government is actually doing is trumped by a risk of 100020 instead of 100000 innocent people being hurt. And it surely doesn't help that the "risk" is factually non-existent.
Slashdot Mirror
It can be viewed as an axiom, and it can be viewed as a theory consisting of a single axiom.
I'm happy with saying "nothing can be 100% proven" and calling 2+2 a theory.
2+2=4 is indeed a theory in the language of arithmetic, and provably so.
Yes, this phone... Er, computer, is freaking awesome. Some SSs:
picture browser
application switcher
X terminal
Escape Meta Alt Control Shift
conky
This. Just yesterday I augmented my N900 installation with sshfs and Gnumeric, so that now I can edit master copies of my ODS spreadsheets on the run.
That's great, because Wikimedia is not begging. They would be begging if they gave you nothing in return. As it stands, they encourage you to become a patron. When people slander them by calling them beggars, it only shows how little these people appreciate the Foundation's work.
Google Adwords would go perfectly on there...it would remain unobtrusive, stay topical, and provide some income
Provide some income, yes. The rest is subjective, and for many people false. When I look up encyclopedic or scientific information, any ad on the same page would be obtrusive and not topical: I did not ask for this information, and it has NOTHING to do with my query. When I look up "shoe" in an encyclopedia, I want to see encyclopedic material, not a link to nike.com. This is because Nike provides actual shoes, and not objective factual information about shoes. In fact, Nike is notorious for bullshitting and lying through their teeth in their shoe information releases, a.k.a. "ads".
And when I want to buy something, then may be I'll use Google, TYVM.
Yeah, but "liberty" is a noun and "liberated" connotes that it was enslaved at some point and later liberated, which would be misleading most of the time.
None of this redundancy/infighting would probably happen if English just had two nice different words meaning "costless" and "not enslaved", like "gratis" and "libre" (Sp.) or "besplatnoe" and "svobodnoe" (Rus.). Sometimes I think that going with "free" was a misstep on Stallman's part, but at the same time, I cannot think of a good alternative.
Atwood's comparison of programmer to pianist is braindead. Programming is like composing for piano. The quality of the product is almost unrelated to one's proficiency with keyboard. It would matter for a performance, such as coding context.
It's obvious in C. Enter Common Lisp: (setf a 'a)
Why is that bad? If the computers are ubiquitous and students know how to use them correctly to do arithmetic, then what is really the point of learning the arithmetic? Unless you are a math major, and then the journey is its own reward. The human brain is notoriously inefficient—for both speed and accuracy—at doing this kind of thinking. What is wrong with teaching people the basics of algebra and symbolic manipulation, and leaving arithmetic to computers?
Of course, it is sad (as a math teacher, I know) when people cannot compute 14/7. I once tutored a girl who used the calculator to do 4/2. I am not kidding you. I was sitting there thinking: here's a student who is not very bright, but tries pretty hard. She seems to have a real learning disability when it comes to manipulating real numbers, and who knows, may the calculator affords her with the only way she could possibly compute the correct change at a drug store. And how many of these people have you met? How many of them are math or engineering majors? There will always be a few individuals allergic to arithmetic. I think it's actually nice that now we can teach them how to communicate these problems to computers. Or at least we can try.
Oh, and I hate calculators. I think people should use general purpose computers running free software, where available, but that's a side issue here.
Oh yeah... Thanks for helping me to get the missile story straight. Curiously enough, the chain of command on the ship was a weird triumvirate. According to this article (Russian), both Vasili Arkhipov and Valentin Savitsky were captains of second rank. But Savitsky was the captain of the vessel and the only one with the key to the torpedo; he had the final authority in case of imminent danger to the ship or the crew. Whereas Arkhipov was in charge of the whole brigade of submarines, which made him the most superior officer on board. The third player was a political officer, whose only job was to report back to the Party. The article says, neither of them could authorize the launch, but Savitsky had the technical ability to engage. Like you said, no one disobeyed any orders and cool heads prevailed.
I've never seen any kiddie porn, and have no desire to do so. Have you? No? So there, your argument is totally bunk. You also seem to be implying that having story and characters saves the viewer from the desire to emulate in real life what is shown on the screen. This is also bollocks. If anything, a compelling story would make the real thing seem more enticing.
All I am arguing for here is that possessing a file should not be illegal, unless the file itself proves intent to commit a crime. A text file with a plan to massacre a school together with a new unregistered gun under your mattress? You are busted. A 30 year old photo of a naked child with no real children anywhere close and no nother evidence of any kind? Who gives a shit. Show that possession of child porn leads to more abuse or shut up. There are studies showing that availability of regular pornography is correlated with reduction in sex crimes, so good luck proving that availability of pictures with naked children increases child abuse.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but most developers like to eat, which means that commercialization of software comes in at some point
That's great, but may be, as Eben Moglen noticed, they should eat just a tad bit less. While you are sitting here defending them, they are collecting monopoly profits. And I don't mean the kind of monopoly that Microsoft and Google are being accused of, but the intellectual monopoly on ideas that ALL proprietary software vendors enjoy. Are you really that spineless or deluded? Or do you have money to burn? If YOU, the user, are going to pay for software development, why not make it a condition that the result must be free?
People who flex the copyright muscle to keep their software non-free are greedy. They would like to collect monopoly profits, and the cost we are all paying is that the software cannot be improved by volunteers (even if the source is open, that is, can be built with free tools, improvements cannot be shared). I have no problem with monetizing software in a way that keeps the software free. More than 99.9% of all commodity software users are just that: users, and we all get shafted by intellectual monopolies. If we are going to pay for software development, we should pay for free software development, since it is cheaper for us, and results in software that does what we want it to do, and nothing else.
Closed source = no expectation of security + no expectation of privacy + expectation of malice + higher development cost. The sooner Joe Q. Public gets this consumer advocacy message, the better off he'll be. There are only two valid reasons to conceal the code: embarrassment and ill will towards the user. And the only valid reason to make an open-sourced program non-free is greed. None of these are helping the user, the consumer, or whatever you want to call 99% of people who use computers.
I think your reading is correct: this is yet another play in the cold war theater, and we've seen this before. But let's not forget that this is exactly the kind of posturing that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis. I won't claim that it was USSR that saved the day: there were plenty of fuckups on all sides. But it is very sobering that a nuclear war would probably happen if a Soviet submarine captain did not disobey his orders. If we keep doing this shit, it is only a matter of time before we get unlucky.
How? One of the main reasons to backup into something like a cloud is to move the data to a different geographic location, in case of something like a building fire or equipment theft. So I can trade local space for remote privacy. And I could get out a lot cheaper if I used a symmetric cipher with an obscenely large key. They are not gonna break it in 15 or 150 years. They are just not.
and fifteen years later we finally have the tools to crack whatever encryption you were using?
One could use pretty much any kind of cipher here. It's going to be as secure as one makes it. One could 1-time-pad the data before uploading, so it's actually pretty secure, IMHO.
It's the Global Quickening. The unusually high amounts of THC in the atmosphere are causing the Earth-wide time dilation effect. To compound this problem, major producers of THC are in the talks to fully legalize these emissions, which, if left unchecked for a few more decades, will certainly result in a run-away pizza-house effect, whereas the traffic grid will be flooded with pizza delivery trucks rushing to their destinations.
Yet in a bizarre twist, this "young Republican" struck down the part of the law inserted for the benefit of the insurance companies. So the rest of the bill stands and people cannot be turned down due to pre-existing conditions, but they don't have to buy insurance until they are sick. Or am I not getting something?
It's because you are a sadistic serial killer that you enjoy watching Saw at all.
But, regardless of that, watching child porn means that people making it have an audience, which encourages them to produce more.
Nothing about your argument makes sense. Even if they are producing more recordings and share them, how are the children hurt more? People who share self-produced child porn tend to get caught, unlike many of the bastards who abuse their kids without a record.
but ownership of child porn shows an interest in sex with children.
I too hate to sound like devil's advocate, but do you by any chance own Torah, which teaches that murder is good as long as you are a Jew and YHWH is with you? Because this ownership shows interest in mass murder and genocide. You yourself do not buy any of your arguments if they were about violence, so what gives?
Lately I think, what makes a game truly great is the art, period. The whole is greater than the sum. I agree with you: the multiplayer/singleplayer axis is completely orthogonal to both the goodness axis and the longevity axis. The goodness is in the explicable combination of graphics, sound, writing, controls, UI, and that viscerally felt response to the user input. And that other thing you know, but I am forgetting.
Counterstrike I will give you, even though I personally was never a fan. It just feels so crisp. But also Quake, and Commander Keen, and the whole multitude of godly platformers. And all HalfLife. And Diablo I and II, as different as they are. And most (but not all) games starting with Sim. And ditto for games starting with Sid. And pretty much everything done by Interplay and Black Isle. And, like, every PC adventure that didn't suck, which is a good chunk of them. And I cannot even begin to name console titles, since I am a PC boy, but I am fully aware that I am barely scratching the surface here. There are dozens of excellent games from every genre, ancient or relatively recent, that I could put in this list right now, so I'll just stop.
What the EA drone is trying to say is that they cannot design an effective copy protection for a singleplayer game, so they are not going to finance one. And nothing of value is lost.
Bam. The US-Iraq-Afghanistan war claimed thousands of innocent civilians on all sides: hundreds of thousands on Iraqi side. I am, seriously, wowed by US citizens who think that the benefit of public knowing what the government is actually doing is trumped by a risk of 100020 instead of 100000 innocent people being hurt. And it surely doesn't help that the "risk" is factually non-existent.