If all of these things are familiar to the American people and still a good chunk of them support the current administration, and still there is no widespread expressed outrage over these issues, the only logical conclusion is that most Americans are fuckwits.
You may be an American, but you don't sound like one, because most Americans are aware that there is the possibility of a difference of opinion on political issues that does not really mean that everyone that disagrees with you is a "fuckwit". Intelligent people do disagree. Here in the US I know many people of quite different political stripes that have quite different politics.
Do you wonder how that is possible? I will briefly explain how it is possible. The world is exceedingly complex. Many things are going on all the time. A single person is not big enough to encompass, let alone comprehend, all the facts that conceivably are relevant to his political views. Therefore, people select. They have no choice but to select the facts they deal with. They also rank facts by importance. Furthermore, they interpret the raw facts differently. Some people look at certain surface facts and discern (or think they discern) obvious behind-the-scenes machinations. Others look at the facts and look at the interpretations of the first group and roll their eyes at the "conspiracy theory". Still others take these first two groups for neglecting certain other, even more important facts. And so it goes.
No person has a grasp on the big picture. The big picture is beyond us all, much as we make an effort to grasp it. Most importantly, the big picture certainly does not consist of that particular list of concerns that you and I imagine all your friends think it must consist of. If you have been entranced by a particular set of facts thinking that this set of facts is definitely the most salient set of facts, that this is what's really important, and that anyone with a different list of salient facts is a cretin and a devil-worshipper, then the explanation for this may be that you are hanging around too much with the same incestuous group of like-minded people and that if you want to grow mentally you should get out more and contact some people with different views. Get some fresh air.
So what you're saying is that Clinton made a bad moral judgement and lied about it, whereas the Bush administration was merely incompetent in matters of national security.
You are equating competence with infallibility, which is incorrect.
Apparently it's difficult for many people to criticize the Bush administration without committing some really obvious blunder like equating competence with infallibility.
Republicans attempted to impeach Clinton on misleading the American public about an extramarital affair. What is the appropriate response when an administration misleads the public and takes us to war over it?
The difference is that the "Republicans" (administration officials) were mistaken, while Clinton was not mistaken - he was lying.
A guy has to make a movie in order for the americans to be informed what the rest of the world already knows... about America!
That's not true. For example:
the American public gets an exposure of its true self, the aggrandazing bubble of benevolence was almost shattered when that Iraqi woman was wailing on camera!
That was so well known inside the US already that it has even been dramatized on popular American TV shows like JAG, that showed a fictional Iraqi woman in tears and blaming the US for killing her family (which the US did) and asking how this was any better than Saddam. This is so old hat that it's already cliche in American TV dramas.
Which is not to say that such footage is not emotionally powerful; it is only to say that the awareness is already there.
The facts he brings out were commonly seen in the rest of the world except the US. I'm talking about the staged elections, the blacks not being allowed to vote, the false "intelligence", the lacking weapons of mass desctruction, etc...
Actually every single thing you mention is familiar to me here in the US, a reader of American news. Once again you demonstrate that many foreigners have a false view of the US, a view that occasionally we Americans catch glimpses of such as in your ignorant post.
I am not saying that I know more about the rest of the world than the rest of the world knows about the US. What strikes me as remarkable, and what I am remarking on, is the arrogant notion that many foreigners have that they know something about the US when in fact (as they demonstrate through their comments) they do not know what they are talking about.
photons sounded like they were riding a wave. The wave passes through both slits, but the thing we measure as a photon only goes through one. Since the wave is now interfering with itself, it affects where the photon lands
The major interpretations disagree with your account. However, David Bohm has elaborated an interpretation right along the lines that you have suggested. The wave in his theory is called the "pilot wave" and it guides the particle, which is a separate entity from the wave.
then you will get some good information. But a warning: his interpretation is very much a minority interpretation. The major interpretations do not treat the wave and particle the way Bohm does.
The only way to keep bits [...] is to keep making multiple fresh copies [...]
In effect, you have to keep running just in order to stay in the same place. (I believe there's a reference here to the Alice books of Lewis Carroll)
This is the opposite of analog: in order to preserve analog, the last thing you want to do is make copies and copies of copies. What you want to do is preserve the original as well as you can, in a cold place, etc.
I always figured that no matter what the makers try, if the machine is programmable then a layer can be built on top of the hardware, a virtual machine, that can in effect incapacitate any DRM.
If there is some sort of foolproof hardware that can't be circumvented, no one has ever explained to me how such a thing could work without being non-programmable.
Maybe software could be written that needs to hook into the DRM to run. But software is crackable, or seems to have been so far.
Try to read almost anything on fortune.com and you'll see that in many cases, the answer is "yes". You can even pay for Slashdot and get a little * by your name.
That suggests a business model where we pay the cable company for access to the network, but we pay the individual channels (the organizations that produce them) for access to them. In that way, the cable company would not even be in the loop for content payments - which may be a good thing. I remember AOL, which offered a lot of content for a flat fee; that resembles the Cable model in that way. I haven't used AOL in about decade.
why can't I have access to ALL the tv channels in the world?
I agree and am surprised with how many people want to pay by channel. Do we pay for Internet service by website? Would it be a good thing if we did? That would be absurd; no one would do it. A main selling point of the Internet is access to more websites than you could imagine, websites you would not even think of on the day that you were signing up for Internet access, websites you discover as you go along.
Another thing I am surprised by is the number of people who are complaining that they are paying for channels that they do not want. But that is arguably the equivalent of saying that they are paying for websites that they do not want. They are paying for access to the cable network, but they are not specifically paying for each channel that is on the network any more than an Internet Service subscriber is paying for each website that is available on the Internet.
One simple question is this: is the US willing to reciprocate? If a US citizen publishes "Mein Kampf" on his US web site and Germans can access that web site, should he be extradited to Germany because that's against the law in Germany? If he publishes nude photographs for Saudis to see, should he be extradited to Saudi Arabia, where that sort of thing is a crime?
In fact, the US is apparently unwilling to accept any international jurisdiction over its citizens (viz the refusal to participate in the international criminal court).
Indeed. And you've just given a good example of why that US position is right (never mind the hypocrisy of the current case) and should be followed by all countries.
The multiplicity of countries with many laws is a defense against tyranny (e.g., think of political refugees). If we start bringing the world legally together so that there is one set of laws that applies worldwide (and the attempt to extradite this guy is a step in that direction) then we are eliminating a critical defense against tyranny.
The payment has nothing to do with whether Linux contains SCO code. It's part of a settlement for something entirely different. CA might just as significantly have agreed to license the use of the word "is". The very last paragraph of the article contains the key point:
Computer Associates said its license for Linux is part of a legal settlement with Canopy Group, SCO's major shareholder. In August, Computer Associates signed the SCO license and paid $40 million to Canopy Group to settle breach-of-contract charges, but news of that deal surfaced only recently on Web sites.
I hope that the papers will at least get this right, after botching the job on the AutoZone lawsuit.
Re:Credit cards are free, why pay $200?
on
The Universal Card
·
· Score: 1
Your credit cards are *free*? Even the ones I have that don't have an annual fee charge me interest... and I'm sure that some of that interest pays for printing new cards when they expire, break, or get lost.
Your *account* is not free. Before I go further, I just want to clarify that I wasn't talking about the account, but about the physical card. But you have a solid point: even if it's not you, somebody is paying something for the card to be manufactured, and indirectly that cost may filter back to you (though in practice it seems to really filter back to the merchant that you buy from, because if you pay your bills on time and there is no annual fee, then the merchant is still paying a certain percentage for the privilege of accepting the card, and that percentage generally does not filter back to you, meaning that you do not pay more if you use a credit card than if you pay cash).
Yeah, but then the Perl freaks would be modding the Python code down as trollish, or something..
A possibility. However, there are responses even against that, even going beyond Slashdot-style meta-moderation. For example, you personally could collect together a list of moderators that you found to be serious about Python, and filter for their results, and immediately downgrade moderators that called your preferred contributors "trolls" as well as immediately downgrade contributors that your preferred moderators called "trolls". That already might solve most problems.
If that sounds like hard work, keep in mind that the Internet is all about delegating, spreading the workload, sharing. There's always a dedicated fanatic who makes life easier for the rest of us. Specifically, if you trusted just one person (and I think it's not too hard to find one person to trust) and he was sufficiently interested to put together a list of serious contributors and moderators, then you could just use his list.
And if the list is small to begin with, you or he could even grow this list Google-style: Google gives more weight to web pages that are themselves heavily linked to, thereby creating a chain of reputation: the reputation of one website boosts the reputation of another website. Similarly, you could take a small list of serious Python contributors and moderators and generate a list of all the contributors and moderators that they themselves moderated highly.
I think that a reputational system can be extremely robust once it has been well-implemented. Online, people are still struggling with refining the implementation.
Re:Credit cards are free, why pay $200?
on
The Universal Card
·
· Score: 1
Picture shows that it fits in a wallet
Cumbersome to use.
You can always use your real credit cards. What if a palm pilot breaks?
Credit card = money. When you need money, you need it much more urgently than you need your datebook. No money, no eat. No money, no gas. Also, if you have credit cards with you then that adds to the bulk.
You spill pasta sauce on your sweater, you buy a new one and are much more careful if it is expensive.
Prefer a free replacement, thanks. So I'll stick with cards.
Considering the plethora or small handheld devices out there, why is this one so much harder to track charge for?
As above, credit card = money, more critical. Ever lost your wallet? Remember the panic?
Well, you reload the data from either the credit cards again or the backup that was made
And in the meantime, you feel what we all feel when we've lost our wallet.
Credit cards are free, why pay $200?
on
The Universal Card
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Let me list the reasons why
1) Cumbersome
2) Breakable
3) All eggs in one basket
4) A lost/stolen card is replaced by the credit card company. Who replaces that lost/stolen $200 computer?
5) What do you do when the batteries run out
6) What happens when the OS crashes and the information is wiped out?
Seriously, seems cumbersome and delicate. Can I sit on one of these? You don't want me sitting on your lap (for various reasons) but my credit cards can handle it.
Seriously. I visited the local LUG and was appalled at the attitude some of the older members had
I have found that one of the best times to get information from someone is right after he has gone through the incredibly painful experience of doing something and wants to tell his story. "Oh, man, that was so hard, there was hardly any help anywhere. Here's what I did...here's what ended up working...here's the line I added to this file...Here's the website that gave me real answers...etc."
And of course it's not the older users but the new users and the newer users who are most likely to have just figured out that thing that you are trying to figure out, and who are dying to tell you about it.
I know I need answers all the time for things, but the one time I CAN HELP and try to do so, DENIED. Blah.
You'll get your chance. In the meantime, it's your sort of people that are the reason Wiki, open source, and voluntary online collaboration generally are working out so well. Hope that makes you feel better.
I could sit here and take a bunch of time that could otherwise be spent productively and fix it up and wait for the next idiot to make a dumb change, but it'd be almost as futile as reading Slashdot.
And yet you are reading Slashdot. So you will make the fixes, yes?
This seems like a great idea, untill some smartass decides to mask harmful commands as solutions to obscure problems.
Possibly some sort of slashdot-like rating system for the code might help to distinguish solid code from questionable code. The greater the proportion and number of positive votes for a piece of code, the more likely it is to be solid. The greater number of views without negative votes, the more likely it is to be solid. The longer it has stayed up, and (a) gotten consistently positive votes and (b) stayed intact, without changes, the more likely it is to be solid.
Additionally, contributors can develop reputations. A karma-like system, in other words.
So really this case has nothing to do with Linux at all, looked at in that manner.
Absolutely, not in the legal sense, but it is also clear that this case has everything to do with Linux in the PR sense. Almost every single article in the press has interpreted this as being about the use of Linux, and surely this was precisely SCO's intent. I'm stunned that the press can be so stupid, but there you have it, it's right there on Google News.
I noticed that as well, but when I switched the search to SCO sues, without mentioning Linux in my search, I still got a barrage of headlines clearly implying the suit was about Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
If all of these things are familiar to the American people and still a good chunk of them support the current administration, and still there is no widespread expressed outrage over these issues, the only logical conclusion is that most Americans are fuckwits.
You may be an American, but you don't sound like one, because most Americans are aware that there is the possibility of a difference of opinion on political issues that does not really mean that everyone that disagrees with you is a "fuckwit". Intelligent people do disagree. Here in the US I know many people of quite different political stripes that have quite different politics.
Do you wonder how that is possible? I will briefly explain how it is possible. The world is exceedingly complex. Many things are going on all the time. A single person is not big enough to encompass, let alone comprehend, all the facts that conceivably are relevant to his political views. Therefore, people select. They have no choice but to select the facts they deal with. They also rank facts by importance. Furthermore, they interpret the raw facts differently. Some people look at certain surface facts and discern (or think they discern) obvious behind-the-scenes machinations. Others look at the facts and look at the interpretations of the first group and roll their eyes at the "conspiracy theory". Still others take these first two groups for neglecting certain other, even more important facts. And so it goes.
No person has a grasp on the big picture. The big picture is beyond us all, much as we make an effort to grasp it. Most importantly, the big picture certainly does not consist of that particular list of concerns that you and I imagine all your friends think it must consist of. If you have been entranced by a particular set of facts thinking that this set of facts is definitely the most salient set of facts, that this is what's really important, and that anyone with a different list of salient facts is a cretin and a devil-worshipper, then the explanation for this may be that you are hanging around too much with the same incestuous group of like-minded people and that if you want to grow mentally you should get out more and contact some people with different views. Get some fresh air.
So what you're saying is that Clinton made a bad moral judgement and lied about it, whereas the Bush administration was merely incompetent in matters of national security.
You are equating competence with infallibility, which is incorrect.
Apparently it's difficult for many people to criticize the Bush administration without committing some really obvious blunder like equating competence with infallibility.
Republicans attempted to impeach Clinton on misleading the American public about an extramarital affair. What is the appropriate response when an administration misleads the public and takes us to war over it?
The difference is that the "Republicans" (administration officials) were mistaken, while Clinton was not mistaken - he was lying.
A guy has to make a movie in order for the americans to be informed what the rest of the world already knows... about America!
That's not true. For example:
the American public gets an exposure of its true self, the aggrandazing bubble of benevolence was almost shattered when that Iraqi woman was wailing on camera!
That was so well known inside the US already that it has even been dramatized on popular American TV shows like JAG, that showed a fictional Iraqi woman in tears and blaming the US for killing her family (which the US did) and asking how this was any better than Saddam. This is so old hat that it's already cliche in American TV dramas.
Which is not to say that such footage is not emotionally powerful; it is only to say that the awareness is already there.
The facts he brings out were commonly seen in the rest of the world except the US. I'm talking about the staged elections, the blacks not being allowed to vote, the false "intelligence", the lacking weapons of mass desctruction, etc...
Actually every single thing you mention is familiar to me here in the US, a reader of American news. Once again you demonstrate that many foreigners have a false view of the US, a view that occasionally we Americans catch glimpses of such as in your ignorant post.
I am not saying that I know more about the rest of the world than the rest of the world knows about the US. What strikes me as remarkable, and what I am remarking on, is the arrogant notion that many foreigners have that they know something about the US when in fact (as they demonstrate through their comments) they do not know what they are talking about.
photons sounded like they were riding a wave. The wave passes through both slits, but the thing we measure as a photon only goes through one. Since the wave is now interfering with itself, it affects where the photon lands
a ve)
The major interpretations disagree with your account. However, David Bohm has elaborated an interpretation right along the lines that you have suggested. The wave in his theory is called the "pilot wave" and it guides the particle, which is a separate entity from the wave.
If you search Google with these terms:
David Bohm pilot wave
(i.e. http://www.google.com/search?q=David+Bohm+pilot+w
then you will get some good information. But a warning: his interpretation is very much a minority interpretation. The major interpretations do not treat the wave and particle the way Bohm does.
The only way to keep bits [...] is to keep making multiple fresh copies [...]
In effect, you have to keep running just in order to stay in the same place. (I believe there's a reference here to the Alice books of Lewis Carroll)
This is the opposite of analog: in order to preserve analog, the last thing you want to do is make copies and copies of copies. What you want to do is preserve the original as well as you can, in a cold place, etc.
I just find that, well, intriguing.
I always figured that no matter what the makers try, if the machine is programmable then a layer can be built on top of the hardware, a virtual machine, that can in effect incapacitate any DRM.
If there is some sort of foolproof hardware that can't be circumvented, no one has ever explained to me how such a thing could work without being non-programmable.
Maybe software could be written that needs to hook into the DRM to run. But software is crackable, or seems to have been so far.
I don't understand the bit about it being "released today". I bought it at Wordsworth in Harvard Square at least a week ago, more like two I think.
Try to read almost anything on fortune.com and you'll see that in many cases, the answer is "yes". You can even pay for Slashdot and get a little * by your name.
That suggests a business model where we pay the cable company for access to the network, but we pay the individual channels (the organizations that produce them) for access to them. In that way, the cable company would not even be in the loop for content payments - which may be a good thing. I remember AOL, which offered a lot of content for a flat fee; that resembles the Cable model in that way. I haven't used AOL in about decade.
why can't I have access to ALL the tv channels in the world?
I agree and am surprised with how many people want to pay by channel. Do we pay for Internet service by website? Would it be a good thing if we did? That would be absurd; no one would do it. A main selling point of the Internet is access to more websites than you could imagine, websites you would not even think of on the day that you were signing up for Internet access, websites you discover as you go along.
Another thing I am surprised by is the number of people who are complaining that they are paying for channels that they do not want. But that is arguably the equivalent of saying that they are paying for websites that they do not want. They are paying for access to the cable network, but they are not specifically paying for each channel that is on the network any more than an Internet Service subscriber is paying for each website that is available on the Internet.
One simple question is this: is the US willing to reciprocate? If a US citizen publishes "Mein Kampf" on his US web site and Germans can access that web site, should he be extradited to Germany because that's against the law in Germany? If he publishes nude photographs for Saudis to see, should he be extradited to Saudi Arabia, where that sort of thing is a crime?
In fact, the US is apparently unwilling to accept any international jurisdiction over its citizens (viz the refusal to participate in the international criminal court).
Indeed. And you've just given a good example of why that US position is right (never mind the hypocrisy of the current case) and should be followed by all countries.
The multiplicity of countries with many laws is a defense against tyranny (e.g., think of political refugees). If we start bringing the world legally together so that there is one set of laws that applies worldwide (and the attempt to extradite this guy is a step in that direction) then we are eliminating a critical defense against tyranny.
The payment has nothing to do with whether Linux contains SCO code. It's part of a settlement for something entirely different. CA might just as significantly have agreed to license the use of the word "is". The very last paragraph of the article contains the key point:
Computer Associates said its license for Linux is part of a legal settlement with Canopy Group, SCO's major shareholder. In August, Computer Associates signed the SCO license and paid $40 million to Canopy Group to settle breach-of-contract charges, but news of that deal surfaced only recently on Web sites.
I hope that the papers will at least get this right, after botching the job on the AutoZone lawsuit.
Your credit cards are *free*? Even the ones I have that don't have an annual fee charge me interest... and I'm sure that some of that interest pays for printing new cards when they expire, break, or get lost.
Your *account* is not free. Before I go further, I just want to clarify that I wasn't talking about the account, but about the physical card. But you have a solid point: even if it's not you, somebody is paying something for the card to be manufactured, and indirectly that cost may filter back to you (though in practice it seems to really filter back to the merchant that you buy from, because if you pay your bills on time and there is no annual fee, then the merchant is still paying a certain percentage for the privilege of accepting the card, and that percentage generally does not filter back to you, meaning that you do not pay more if you use a credit card than if you pay cash).
But still: Credit cards are cheap, why pay $200?
Yeah, but then the Perl freaks would be modding the Python code down as trollish, or something..
A possibility. However, there are responses even against that, even going beyond Slashdot-style meta-moderation. For example, you personally could collect together a list of moderators that you found to be serious about Python, and filter for their results, and immediately downgrade moderators that called your preferred contributors "trolls" as well as immediately downgrade contributors that your preferred moderators called "trolls". That already might solve most problems.
If that sounds like hard work, keep in mind that the Internet is all about delegating, spreading the workload, sharing. There's always a dedicated fanatic who makes life easier for the rest of us. Specifically, if you trusted just one person (and I think it's not too hard to find one person to trust) and he was sufficiently interested to put together a list of serious contributors and moderators, then you could just use his list.
And if the list is small to begin with, you or he could even grow this list Google-style: Google gives more weight to web pages that are themselves heavily linked to, thereby creating a chain of reputation: the reputation of one website boosts the reputation of another website. Similarly, you could take a small list of serious Python contributors and moderators and generate a list of all the contributors and moderators that they themselves moderated highly.
I think that a reputational system can be extremely robust once it has been well-implemented. Online, people are still struggling with refining the implementation.
Picture shows that it fits in a wallet
Cumbersome to use.
You can always use your real credit cards. What if a palm pilot breaks?
Credit card = money. When you need money, you need it much more urgently than you need your datebook. No money, no eat. No money, no gas. Also, if you have credit cards with you then that adds to the bulk.
You spill pasta sauce on your sweater, you buy a new one and are much more careful if it is expensive.
Prefer a free replacement, thanks. So I'll stick with cards.
Considering the plethora or small handheld devices out there, why is this one so much harder to track charge for?
As above, credit card = money, more critical. Ever lost your wallet? Remember the panic?
Well, you reload the data from either the credit cards again or the backup that was made
And in the meantime, you feel what we all feel when we've lost our wallet.
Let me list the reasons why
1) Cumbersome
2) Breakable
3) All eggs in one basket
4) A lost/stolen card is replaced by the credit card company. Who replaces that lost/stolen $200 computer?
5) What do you do when the batteries run out
6) What happens when the OS crashes and the information is wiped out?
So many reasons...
Seriously, seems cumbersome and delicate. Can I sit on one of these? You don't want me sitting on your lap (for various reasons) but my credit cards can handle it.
Seriously. I visited the local LUG and was appalled at the attitude some of the older members had
I have found that one of the best times to get information from someone is right after he has gone through the incredibly painful experience of doing something and wants to tell his story. "Oh, man, that was so hard, there was hardly any help anywhere. Here's what I did...here's what ended up working...here's the line I added to this file...Here's the website that gave me real answers...etc."
And of course it's not the older users but the new users and the newer users who are most likely to have just figured out that thing that you are trying to figure out, and who are dying to tell you about it.
I wasn't looking to the answers to everything, only the differences between "user" and "nodev" options and when it is best to use them.
Just read the man pages.
(kidding!)
I know I need answers all the time for things, but the one time I CAN HELP and try to do so, DENIED. Blah.
You'll get your chance. In the meantime, it's your sort of people that are the reason Wiki, open source, and voluntary online collaboration generally are working out so well. Hope that makes you feel better.
I could sit here and take a bunch of time that could otherwise be spent productively and fix it up and wait for the next idiot to make a dumb change, but it'd be almost as futile as reading Slashdot.
And yet you are reading Slashdot. So you will make the fixes, yes?
This seems like a great idea, untill some smartass decides to mask harmful commands as solutions to obscure problems.
Possibly some sort of slashdot-like rating system for the code might help to distinguish solid code from questionable code. The greater the proportion and number of positive votes for a piece of code, the more likely it is to be solid. The greater number of views without negative votes, the more likely it is to be solid. The longer it has stayed up, and (a) gotten consistently positive votes and (b) stayed intact, without changes, the more likely it is to be solid.
Additionally, contributors can develop reputations. A karma-like system, in other words.
So really this case has nothing to do with Linux at all, looked at in that manner.
Absolutely, not in the legal sense, but it is also clear that this case has everything to do with Linux in the PR sense. Almost every single article in the press has interpreted this as being about the use of Linux, and surely this was precisely SCO's intent. I'm stunned that the press can be so stupid, but there you have it, it's right there on Google News.
Well, yes, because you searched for SCO Linux
I noticed that as well, but when I switched the search to SCO sues, without mentioning Linux in my search, I still got a barrage of headlines clearly implying the suit was about Linux.