Please do point out what facts you believe are insignificant and do point out what you perceive to be hand-waving. Thankfully, this case has been extensively documented so that it is quite easy to access any information to defuse any disinformation attempt.
Yes, I can only be Carlos Cruz to make such a statement...
Well, you did posted a terribly myopic, misinformed, one-sided report of the case, omitting a long list of facts which are fundamental to understand why that criminal gang was found guilty.
I made a minor comment about Paulo Pedroso, which spent sometime in jail to later on be released and no charges made against him.
Yes, no thanks to the intervention of Portugal's government with actions such as changing Portugal's penal process to help out their fellow party member.
And what about Gertrude Nunes, the owner of the house in Elvas where supposedly orgies were happening left and right. She was innocent after all.
Clearly only Carlos Cruz has reasons to be pissed at this moment. Quite frankly, if the owner of a place where child abuse was happening systematically doesn't even go to jail, you as a Portuguese should be pissed as well.
You are a bit confused. Renting a house for sex parties isn't remotely as bad as repeatedly raping young orphan boys.
Or am I supposed to believe she had nothing to do with it? Or am I supposed to accept that that part of the story was a lie, but the victims were truthful in everything else.
Anyway, most of my comment was about the case itself and not a specific person. If you want to focus your attention on that, go ahead. I'm not sure Carlos Cruz was the only guy affected by this delay. And I'm not sure either Justice itself wasn't the most affected...
The only way Carlos Cruz is affected by the delay is that his imprisonment is also delayed. Meanwhile he is free to wander around spreading FUD and deceiving clueless idiots.
Your report of this whole mess is terribly uninformed and one-sided. Let me add a few details which are fundamental to understanding this case:
For example, you claimed that the reason behind placing the key suspects in preventative jail terms was to prevent them fleeing the country. What you opted to omit was the fact that there was the impending danger that if they remained free they would try their best to tamper with the investigation, either by tampering witnesses, destroying evidence and conspire with the remaining criminal network to corrupt and derail the judicial process. That's the reason behind the decision to lock them out while the investigation was ongoing. Yet, even though the judges ordered the arrest of the main suspects, they still managed to tamper with the investigation. One example was how Inês Serra Lopes, a journalist which also happened to be the daughter of an attorney defending the main suspect, was caught planting evidence exonerating her father's client.
Then, that which you describe as "the victims, in many instances, failed to offer clear evidence anything at all" is a deceitful description of the whole process. I'll point it out to you that this was a child abuse case, where the suspects were charged with the crimes of sexually abusing children between the age of 10 and 14 years old. There were over 30 reported victims, all of which were proven to have been sexually molested through multiple forensic tests. Then, what you describe as "failed to offer clear evidence" was small nit-picking details such as asking a then 10 year old boy the exact day, hour and minute he was sexually abused by suspect X, something which happened over 10 years ago. Besides that, although there were 30 victims and the suspects were accused of committing hundreds of crimes, only a hand full were considered to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, to which it also contributed the fact that one suspect confessed to the crimes and implicated all the other suspects, something which you conveniently omitted.
Your post has far more deceitful or simply uninformed bits but I believe these facts I've pointed out are enough to get a clear picture of the case.
I am curious. How exactly do you associate anthropological climate change to "socialism" and then "socialism" to the loss of both freedom of association and the right to private property? Do you base your allegations on facts or solely on scare mongering?
Indeed. According to my own experience, as long as you secure your own house, as long as you guarantee a livelihood and as long as you guarantee that you and your nuclear family is able to satisfy every healthcare and education need, then you and your loved ones start to focus on the upper levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You don't need 75000 dollars to fulfil that. Some people may need a whole lot more, some people actually get that and more for much less. It all depends on who you are, your class, where you live and even your own personality.
Therefore, in fact, trying to put a price tag on happiness is a dumb exercise. For some people, the key to happiness is a roof over their head and a fishing pole. To others, it involves access to every conceivable luxury item and accompanying services. And neither of those are achieved with a 75000 dollar income.
You failed to read what I've wrote, or at least understand what was written. There is a good reason why I explicitly stated that any action performed by a government must be both free from illegalities and unethical behaviour.
Governments either are or should be open, something which, unfortunately for any of their citizens, is routinely opposed and undermined by the very same people who swore to represent their fellow citizens, uphold the law and respect democratic values. Sites such as wikileaks are here to enforce the rules of government that those who managed to find themselves in positions of power and influence actively push to quench or undermine.
The main point is that governments must and should follow the law, which forcefully means that their actions must be free from illegalities and unethical behaviour, and their constituents must be informed of their actions and of the consequences that they bring. In short, every government, due to their nature, must be opened and failing to be so constitutes a violation of their own founding principles.
On the other hand, private citizens do not have that responsibility. Private citizens have the right to privacy and do not have absolutely any responsibility or obligation to disclose every single piece of information regarding their lives, their business or even their relations. They are entitled to live free from tyranny and free from any oppressive influence imposed by their government and, even moreso, by fellow citizens.
Therefore, trying to impose to private citizens the very same full disclosure principles that is expected from governments is either a perfect sign of ignorance or a poorly thought out harassment campaign based on an unexplainable demand for revenge. I don't know why that the idiot from Gawker believes the idea to persecute Assange is any reasonable or even if he decided to do that to be able to profit from the controversy. What I know is that this sort of campaign, which is nothing more than persecuting someone for his attempts to defend healthy and lawful government behaviour is not in anyone's best interests.
No one complains about Microsoft because it is a business or because, as you put it, it exists to earn money. The main reason why Microsoft earned such a profoundly negative reputation is because that corporation has a long history of intentionally deceiving, defrauding and undermining competing projects and businesses.
There is absolutely no reason to dislike anyone just because he intends to run a business. On the other hand, there is a terribly long list of reasons to dislike someone if that person is systematically dishonest and actively campaigns to sabotage other people's work. Microsoft, as a corporation in general and their executives/workers in particular, did (and do) plenty of the latter in the name of the company. So why wouldn't they deserve such a reputation and the bad sentiment that goes with it?
Looks alot like a V-1 or Loon but with hard points on the wings and turbojet instead of pulse jet. So late 50s technology designed with CAD. Probably a 30-40% failure rate on them too, that's standard for first or second generation cruise missiles/drones.
I guess that the Germans in 1940 made a whole lot of comments of that sort when they started to see Russia's T-34s entering action. How did that went out?
Even worse, the RIAA is trying to group together those who distribute copyrighted works without the owner's explicit authorization (i.e, file sharers) with paedophiles and all sorts of depraved individuals. They are trying to pull yet another set of false correlations, such as the one they managed to pull by associating the unauthorized commercial distribution of a copyrighted work with all the raping, pillaging, murder and violence perpetrated by pirates.
I'm not an american nor I ever set foot on US soil but from where I'm standing, a treacherous attack on a docked frigate doesn't negate the legacy of a president which not only managed to get the country's accounting in order but also generated a surplus in the state's budget. Speaking from a country which contracted massive dept and which has to live with a deficit that comes close to 10%, I have to say that a presidency like that sounds pretty good in my book.
"clumsy user", "clueless user", "semi-rational user", "a sign that the user doesn't know what he is doing",...
If you have ever conducted user studies of browsing behavior, you would see that the tasks that Aza describes are exactly the ones users perform in the real world. Why do you think it's unexpected for a user to pause a current browsing session and look for something unrelated, and wish to keep that search session separate from the previous one?
I don't know if you are purposely trying to put words in my mouth or if you simply failed to understand what has been written. Either way, if you take the time to both read what I've posted and make an effort to understand it, you will realize that nowhere it was said that "it's unexpected for a user to pause a current browsing session and look for something unrelated", nor did I said anything in that sense. In fact, once you've read and understood what I've said you will notice that I've said that "the user could very well do the very same thing that any semi-rational user does when he finds himself on that very same situation: open a new browser window dedicated to that search and go crazy with the search results."
So, how come you quoted portions of my text but then you demonstrate that you completely missed the point?
No, simply a new window would not be sufficient, because pretty soon, you end up with several different windows, and not all of us have the luxury of 30" displays to arrange them on.
Your argument doesn't make any sense, specially when it's being used to try to convince that spawning several browser windows in a window manager is somehow bad while spawning several tab groups on a browser-based window manager is suddenly a great thing to have. Nonetheless, to you, how many windows constitute "several" windows? Two? Four? Sixteen? Thirty two? If you dedicate each browser window to store dozens of tabs like in the silly tab candy example, how many opened pages does that make? 24? 48? 96? If you are handling so many opened tabs at once, what makes you believe that a window manager is incapable of handling them but somehow a half-baked attempt at a window manager will handle them well?
And by the way, I have a 19'' monitor and I regularly have from 8 to 14 windows opened, including browser windows with around a half a dozen tabs each. And you know the craziest thing? I never felt the need for a bigger monitor, not a 22'', not a 24'', not a 26''... not even a 30''. I also have a netbook and I also tend to use multiple browser windows, each one with multiple tabs. And guess what? It works great, without ever needing anything more than the basic tab functionality and a basic window manager (lxde). How do you explain that?
Yes, this is a window manager built into the browser, because default window managers have been inadequate in coping with the number of browser windows and applications users have open. If they were adequate, tabs would never have been needed in the first place.
In that case you should probably upgrade from Win98, then. I'm running KDE and LXDE and both perform this job extremely well. In fact, KDE excels at this sort of stuff through great features such as taskbar grouping, merging window tabs, options to place specific windows always on top, storing window manager options per application, etc... So, why not upgrade your window manager for something which has been released in the last decade or so?
From initial design sketches, this does seem like it will contribute its fair share to helping with the information overload problem.
Your argument makes as much sense as claiming that embedding a email client on a browser will "contribute its fair share to helping with the information overload problem". You don't make a problem like this go away by bloating the browser by implementing features which are already impleme
The example which is given in the video from TFA to try to demonstrate the need for this tab candy nonsense is how a clumsy user can fill a tab bar with countless unrelated tabs. Yet, from the example which was presented, there is absolutely no need for that sort of crap. Let me explain.
In the example the user starts off with a browser window which already has tons of tabs, which is already in itself a sign that the user doesn't know what he is doing. From there, a case is presented where the user suddenly feels the need to start a new search, which happens to be completely unrelated to anything that he was already doing. Well, in that scenario, the user could very well do the very same thing that any semi-rational user does when he finds himself on that very same situation: open a new browser window dedicated to that search and go crazy with the search results. There, fixed. There is no need for this tab candy crap, searches/online tasks are perfectly compartmentalized, the tab bar is clean and cluttered, the navigation to/from opened pages becomes simpler... Everyone wins.
Now, let's look at what this tab candy crap brings to the table. So a clueless user who is perfectly incapable of organizing his workflow finds himself with a single browser window with dozens of opened tabs. He suddenly feels the need to open another dozen tabs to perform a completely independent task. According to TFA, the solution to his problems comes in the form of this tab candy crap. Yet, the only thing that it is capable of doing is offering yet another needlessly cumbersome step to do nothing more than provide a different, resource-expensive way to present to the user the tabs which he has opened.
So, in other words, this tab candy crap is nothing more than a window manager built into a browser. I mean, manually group tabs? List the tab groups which are currently opened? Put some tabs on the foreground while putting others on the background? Present the user with small icons representing the opened tab? If you replace "tabs" with "windows" you are describing pretty much any window manager out there. So why exactly is it a good idea to build a window manager into a browser?
"I know I use my browser more than I use my OS"
on
Firefox Tab Candy Alpha
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Someone should explain to the guy in TFA's video that, as his browser only runs because there's an operating system that makes it possible for it to run, if he is using a browser then he is automatically using a operating system. So no, you don't use your browser more than you use your OS.
Indeed. If the whole point of this experience was to run the synthesizer through a MIDI keyboard then it would be much better to just spend 50 euros on a MIDI keyboard and, from there, build a small 8-bit synthesizer that supported standard MIDI input. There was no need to scrap a perfectly good organ just to cannibalize it and convert the shell into a synthesizer.
Yes, I get the spirit of the "because it's there" crowd. I also understand that economics doesn't play a major role in this sort of project. Nonetheless, they would earn a whole lot more geek points if instead of trashing the vintage synthesizer they simply built a portable 8-bit synthesizer which supported standard MIDI controllers and, when finished, released a how-to along with parts list and schematics.
Nonetheless, I still admire the talent that's needed to pull this stunt. I could never pull that off. Kudos for the project.
Can you provide an example demonstrating Linus' "dismissive and insulting" behaviour, accompanied with a example of how a possible acceptance is in the form of "repackaging the idea by a different, more favoured developer"? As LKML is public, you should have no problem pointing out the threads that you based yourself to make those attacks and people like me (i.e., everyone) would be able to understand the story instead of just blindly take your word for it. After all, what exactly is there to assure us that you aren't just talking shit? A random slashdoter's word?
Anytime that the government gets involved, it leads to unsustainable projects with no real market, no real innovation, and poor implementation to get a government contract and free money.
So I guess the Hoover Dam should fit neatly in that little anti-government and anti-government projects rant. Why doesn't it fit then?
So in essence all that posturing about defending human rights, freedom of expression and standing against censorship was a marketing ploy to try to mask their acceptance and embracing of totalitarian practices, all in order to worship the all mighty dollar (or euro, yen, or any other currency).
You may not be alone in that but you, along with those who think like you, certainly are not the majority. Joe Six-pack doesn't know the difference between a megahertz and a megabyte and he has much more important things to do than waste his time learning boring stuff such as the difference between SSD HDs and the traditional spinning disk HDs, let alone learn what a processor core is and what importance, if any, it has on his computing needs.
He just goes off to buy a computer and spends his money on what appears to be the best possible product he could purchase on his budget. He just chooses whatever product has the biggest e-penis he can afford. That means he chooses the one with more megahertz, the one with more HD memory, the one with more RAM, the one with more cores, the one with the bigger processor number... Heck, joe six-pack may even end up choosing a computer just because it comes with more RAM chips. "see? it has more rams, which is good."
The sad thing about it is that this behaviour is perfectly natural. When you decide to purchase something, you end up purchasing the best option according to the information that you were able to access and digest. Some of us may be better informed than others but we all do this. Some of us are better informed to the point of being able to see pass Intel's marketing bullshit but others aren't quite so fortunate. Nonetheless, the decision process is the same.
It is not, understandably, the standard for the soft sciences and humanities, for the simple reason that, if you don't need the ability to typeset complicated formulas (or don't need it badly enough), the cost/reward tradeoff for learning any kind of markup language is never going to look good enough to offset the initial outlay of effort.
That would make sense if typesetting math formulas was the only reason that kept LaTeX being used up to this day. You cannot do collaborative work with MS Word, let alone employ any semblance of a version control system.
With LaTeX, unlike MS Word, it's terribly easy to do collaborative work. It could be as easy as writing a main LaTeX file where you \include{file} the chapters that people have been working on independently, which guarantees that you get a seamless merger of work just by updating the included files and compiling the doc. And employing a version control system is trivial, as your entire document is nothing more than a list of source code files and images.
Add that to the comparative rarity of technically inclined people in those fields, and I'm not sure the tradeoff is worth it in the end. These are not failproof, cookie-cutter solutions, and if you add becoming familiar with the concept of markup-based styling to the effort of learning TeX specifically...
You are assuming that academic types from fields such as soft sciences and humanities are, somehow, complete idiots who can't manage to grasp simple aspects that even first-year students from any IT degree manage to grasp on their first weeks on the course. They may not be familiar with the workflow associated with writing a LaTeX document but to go as far as insinuate that they are so technically incompetent that they can't possibly manage to work through all that voodoo... Well, you aren't basing your opinion on reality.
Most soft sciences and humanities students don't have the time or background to come to grips with LaTeX, and most faculty can afford to leave formatting up to the publisher; after all, English grammar is handled reasonably well by Word.
This comment is completely out of touch with reality. I point it out to you that no one is born knowing how to use a WYSIWYG editor, let alone MS Word. If you need to use MS Word you have to spend your "time" and you must have enough "background" to come to grips with MS Word. In fact, using MS Word forces you to waste even more of your time as you are forced to deal with it's long list of gotchas and as you are forced to spend countless hours hand-formatting your entire text just to compensate for MS Word's knack to screw up the document's formatting. By claiming that learning how to use LaTeX is somehow cumbersome while using MS Word is somehow an error-free experience you are both demonstrating you don't have a clue about what's it like to use LaTeX and MS Word.
I really doubt you had to use MS Word to any relevant extent if you both complain about LaTeX's fonts and how "a slight change of the text would result in widely different figure/table placements, sometimes even clumping them all at the end". I've dedicated a considerable portion of my life writing documets and reports, both with LaTeX and MS Word and although LaTeX documents, when written by hand with the help of a plain text editor (which, according to your description and complains, appears to be your case), has it's weak points, MS Word is by far the worse, most painful, problem-prone, gotcha-plagued tool available to write a document. I mean, MS Word 2007 doesn't even offer a clean way to generate numbered, hierarchical ToCs, forcing it's users to jump through hoops to edit new styles for hierarchical headers that don't screw around with document references. Moreover, the bloody tool doesn't even support referencing equations, which forces MS Word users to rely on custom combinations of tables, equations and custom reference targets. And have you even tried to add pictures to a MS Word document? Adding pictures to LaTeX documents so that they look half decent is child's play when compared to the MS Word way of doing things. Yes, MS Word let's you drag and drop but what good does it do to you if it SCREWS THE FORMATTING OF YOUR ENTIRE DOCUMENT in such a way that you are forced to hand-tweak the entire document by hand?
And don't get me started on collaborative work. MS Word even manages to screw terribly basic operations such as copying a text-only MS Word document and pasting it at the end of another MS Word document. I'm talking about documents which are produced with the default MS Word style, the one with unnumbered headers in the blue calibri fonts, and without ever touching a single text formatting option.
And you get all that from a tool which costs you around 200 euros?
Hand-written LaTeX may have it's weak points, such as generating tables. Yet, generating tables by hand may be a cumbersome task but at least it assures you that when you finish writing the table's markup you get a impeccable table that doesn't change just because you added another paragraph just before it. And the best thing about LaTeX is that your documents do look great, if not absolutely flawless. And a good sign of how this is a widely known fact is that chances are a randomly picked book from your bookstore or even your shelve was compiled from LaTeX. You will be hard-pressed to get your hands on a paper that wasn't compiled in LaTeX. And that happens although MS Word is around for what? 30 years?
And by the way, just because it's LaTeX it doesn't mean it must not be WYSIWYG. There are plenty of WYSIWYG tools for LaTeX such as Scientific Workplace. You would know that if you really did any serious documentation work.
TeX has been extensively used to develop high-quality documents, from small articles to full-fledged books. Yet, I don't believe that neither animation nor stereographic sound will come out well in print. Exactly, what's the objective here? Is it to replace media formats which support sound, video and 3D graphics?
This is a good opportunity for the world to rethink its perception of what viruses, trojans and the like are. Due to the vast and never ending list of problems and software defects that plague the dominating platform (i.e., microsoft windows) since it's inception and continue to affect it up to this day, the world has been conditioned to think that having a base system with so many profoundly serious defects is somehow acceptable. I mean, these bugs are so serious that they even let other people take over your system, a system that you've paid with your hard-earned money to be able to use as you use fit. Why exactly should this be normal, let alone acceptable?
In this instance we have a very rare glimpse of what the issue of software vulnerabilities is and how it should be handled. A very serious software bug could be exploited by malicious people to be able to gain control of the system and that problem was fixed by fixing the software bug. That is exactly how it should be. Yet, what Microsoft forced us to believe it is the right way of handling this thing is let that security hole stay wide open. What Microsoft forced the world to believe is that you solve the problems arising from any security bug by paying some third-party vendor for a piece of software that monitors your system for a hand full of instances of malicious code that made it's way into your system through those security holes. And this has become acceptable why? It's as you've bought a house with so many holes that could be used by malicious people to enter your house as they see fit and take over it. The problem lies in those holes being there and the problem doesn't go away if you employ security guards instead of plugging those damn holes your incompetent builder left there.
I don't understand this anti-intellectual campaign. Is it so hard to understand that if you don't have a degree then chances are you don't know what you are talking about? I mean sure, it's quite possible to learn stuff on your own and investigate things on your spare time. Some even manage to get a decent grasp on a specific topic without ever having a course on it. Yet, when we look into it... how many uneducated know-it-alls do you know that really know nearly as much about a specific field than the educated person? And how many know-it-alls do you happen to know that boast how much they know about some stuff but, when we really delve into it, we find out they know jack shit?
I really don't understand this anti-intellectual nonsense. Since when does an uneducated, ignorant but strongly opinionated individual knows more about a subject than a publicly recognized expert on a subject who is recognized for making significant contributions to humanity's understanding of a specific subject?
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Please do point out what facts you believe are insignificant and do point out what you perceive to be hand-waving. Thankfully, this case has been extensively documented so that it is quite easy to access any information to defuse any disinformation attempt.
Yes, I can only be Carlos Cruz to make such a statement...
Well, you did posted a terribly myopic, misinformed, one-sided report of the case, omitting a long list of facts which are fundamental to understand why that criminal gang was found guilty.
I made a minor comment about Paulo Pedroso, which spent sometime in jail to later on be released and no charges made against him.
Yes, no thanks to the intervention of Portugal's government with actions such as changing Portugal's penal process to help out their fellow party member.
And what about Gertrude Nunes, the owner of the house in Elvas where supposedly orgies were happening left and right. She was innocent after all.
You are wrong. Gertrude Nunes was found guilty of providing her house to be used in child abuse orgies but they also stated that there weren't enough evidences to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she was guilty of pimping the children.
Clearly only Carlos Cruz has reasons to be pissed at this moment. Quite frankly, if the owner of a place where child abuse was happening systematically doesn't even go to jail, you as a Portuguese should be pissed as well.
You are a bit confused. Renting a house for sex parties isn't remotely as bad as repeatedly raping young orphan boys.
Or am I supposed to believe she had nothing to do with it? Or am I supposed to accept that that part of the story was a lie, but the victims were truthful in everything else.
Anyway, most of my comment was about the case itself and not a specific person. If you want to focus your attention on that, go ahead. I'm not sure Carlos Cruz was the only guy affected by this delay. And I'm not sure either Justice itself wasn't the most affected...
The only way Carlos Cruz is affected by the delay is that his imprisonment is also delayed. Meanwhile he is free to wander around spreading FUD and deceiving clueless idiots.
Your report of this whole mess is terribly uninformed and one-sided. Let me add a few details which are fundamental to understanding this case:
For example, you claimed that the reason behind placing the key suspects in preventative jail terms was to prevent them fleeing the country. What you opted to omit was the fact that there was the impending danger that if they remained free they would try their best to tamper with the investigation, either by tampering witnesses, destroying evidence and conspire with the remaining criminal network to corrupt and derail the judicial process. That's the reason behind the decision to lock them out while the investigation was ongoing. Yet, even though the judges ordered the arrest of the main suspects, they still managed to tamper with the investigation. One example was how Inês Serra Lopes, a journalist which also happened to be the daughter of an attorney defending the main suspect, was caught planting evidence exonerating her father's client.
Then, that which you describe as "the victims, in many instances, failed to offer clear evidence anything at all" is a deceitful description of the whole process. I'll point it out to you that this was a child abuse case, where the suspects were charged with the crimes of sexually abusing children between the age of 10 and 14 years old. There were over 30 reported victims, all of which were proven to have been sexually molested through multiple forensic tests. Then, what you describe as "failed to offer clear evidence" was small nit-picking details such as asking a then 10 year old boy the exact day, hour and minute he was sexually abused by suspect X, something which happened over 10 years ago. Besides that, although there were 30 victims and the suspects were accused of committing hundreds of crimes, only a hand full were considered to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, to which it also contributed the fact that one suspect confessed to the crimes and implicated all the other suspects, something which you conveniently omitted.
Your post has far more deceitful or simply uninformed bits but I believe these facts I've pointed out are enough to get a clear picture of the case.
I am curious. How exactly do you associate anthropological climate change to "socialism" and then "socialism" to the loss of both freedom of association and the right to private property? Do you base your allegations on facts or solely on scare mongering?
Indeed. According to my own experience, as long as you secure your own house, as long as you guarantee a livelihood and as long as you guarantee that you and your nuclear family is able to satisfy every healthcare and education need, then you and your loved ones start to focus on the upper levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You don't need 75000 dollars to fulfil that. Some people may need a whole lot more, some people actually get that and more for much less. It all depends on who you are, your class, where you live and even your own personality.
Therefore, in fact, trying to put a price tag on happiness is a dumb exercise. For some people, the key to happiness is a roof over their head and a fishing pole. To others, it involves access to every conceivable luxury item and accompanying services. And neither of those are achieved with a 75000 dollar income.
You failed to read what I've wrote, or at least understand what was written. There is a good reason why I explicitly stated that any action performed by a government must be both free from illegalities and unethical behaviour.
Governments either are or should be open, something which, unfortunately for any of their citizens, is routinely opposed and undermined by the very same people who swore to represent their fellow citizens, uphold the law and respect democratic values. Sites such as wikileaks are here to enforce the rules of government that those who managed to find themselves in positions of power and influence actively push to quench or undermine.
The main point is that governments must and should follow the law, which forcefully means that their actions must be free from illegalities and unethical behaviour, and their constituents must be informed of their actions and of the consequences that they bring. In short, every government, due to their nature, must be opened and failing to be so constitutes a violation of their own founding principles.
On the other hand, private citizens do not have that responsibility. Private citizens have the right to privacy and do not have absolutely any responsibility or obligation to disclose every single piece of information regarding their lives, their business or even their relations. They are entitled to live free from tyranny and free from any oppressive influence imposed by their government and, even moreso, by fellow citizens.
Therefore, trying to impose to private citizens the very same full disclosure principles that is expected from governments is either a perfect sign of ignorance or a poorly thought out harassment campaign based on an unexplainable demand for revenge. I don't know why that the idiot from Gawker believes the idea to persecute Assange is any reasonable or even if he decided to do that to be able to profit from the controversy. What I know is that this sort of campaign, which is nothing more than persecuting someone for his attempts to defend healthy and lawful government behaviour is not in anyone's best interests.
No one complains about Microsoft because it is a business or because, as you put it, it exists to earn money. The main reason why Microsoft earned such a profoundly negative reputation is because that corporation has a long history of intentionally deceiving, defrauding and undermining competing projects and businesses.
There is absolutely no reason to dislike anyone just because he intends to run a business. On the other hand, there is a terribly long list of reasons to dislike someone if that person is systematically dishonest and actively campaigns to sabotage other people's work. Microsoft, as a corporation in general and their executives/workers in particular, did (and do) plenty of the latter in the name of the company. So why wouldn't they deserve such a reputation and the bad sentiment that goes with it?
And after that they will go after bookbookbook.com, a networking site for Swedish chefs.
I guess that the Germans in 1940 made a whole lot of comments of that sort when they started to see Russia's T-34s entering action. How did that went out?
Even worse, the RIAA is trying to group together those who distribute copyrighted works without the owner's explicit authorization (i.e, file sharers) with paedophiles and all sorts of depraved individuals. They are trying to pull yet another set of false correlations, such as the one they managed to pull by associating the unauthorized commercial distribution of a copyrighted work with all the raping, pillaging, murder and violence perpetrated by pirates.
I'm not an american nor I ever set foot on US soil but from where I'm standing, a treacherous attack on a docked frigate doesn't negate the legacy of a president which not only managed to get the country's accounting in order but also generated a surplus in the state's budget. Speaking from a country which contracted massive dept and which has to live with a deficit that comes close to 10%, I have to say that a presidency like that sounds pretty good in my book.
"clumsy user", "clueless user", "semi-rational user", "a sign that the user doesn't know what he is doing", ...
If you have ever conducted user studies of browsing behavior, you would see that the tasks that Aza describes are exactly the ones users perform in the real world. Why do you think it's unexpected for a user to pause a current browsing session and look for something unrelated, and wish to keep that search session separate from the previous one?
I don't know if you are purposely trying to put words in my mouth or if you simply failed to understand what has been written. Either way, if you take the time to both read what I've posted and make an effort to understand it, you will realize that nowhere it was said that "it's unexpected for a user to pause a current browsing session and look for something unrelated", nor did I said anything in that sense. In fact, once you've read and understood what I've said you will notice that I've said that "the user could very well do the very same thing that any semi-rational user does when he finds himself on that very same situation: open a new browser window dedicated to that search and go crazy with the search results."
So, how come you quoted portions of my text but then you demonstrate that you completely missed the point?
No, simply a new window would not be sufficient, because pretty soon, you end up with several different windows, and not all of us have the luxury of 30" displays to arrange them on.
Your argument doesn't make any sense, specially when it's being used to try to convince that spawning several browser windows in a window manager is somehow bad while spawning several tab groups on a browser-based window manager is suddenly a great thing to have. Nonetheless, to you, how many windows constitute "several" windows? Two? Four? Sixteen? Thirty two? If you dedicate each browser window to store dozens of tabs like in the silly tab candy example, how many opened pages does that make? 24? 48? 96? If you are handling so many opened tabs at once, what makes you believe that a window manager is incapable of handling them but somehow a half-baked attempt at a window manager will handle them well?
And by the way, I have a 19'' monitor and I regularly have from 8 to 14 windows opened, including browser windows with around a half a dozen tabs each. And you know the craziest thing? I never felt the need for a bigger monitor, not a 22'', not a 24'', not a 26''... not even a 30''. I also have a netbook and I also tend to use multiple browser windows, each one with multiple tabs. And guess what? It works great, without ever needing anything more than the basic tab functionality and a basic window manager (lxde). How do you explain that?
Yes, this is a window manager built into the browser, because default window managers have been inadequate in coping with the number of browser windows and applications users have open. If they were adequate, tabs would never have been needed in the first place.
In that case you should probably upgrade from Win98, then. I'm running KDE and LXDE and both perform this job extremely well. In fact, KDE excels at this sort of stuff through great features such as taskbar grouping, merging window tabs, options to place specific windows always on top, storing window manager options per application, etc... So, why not upgrade your window manager for something which has been released in the last decade or so?
From initial design sketches, this does seem like it will contribute its fair share to helping with the information overload problem.
Your argument makes as much sense as claiming that embedding a email client on a browser will "contribute its fair share to helping with the information overload problem". You don't make a problem like this go away by bloating the browser by implementing features which are already impleme
The example which is given in the video from TFA to try to demonstrate the need for this tab candy nonsense is how a clumsy user can fill a tab bar with countless unrelated tabs. Yet, from the example which was presented, there is absolutely no need for that sort of crap. Let me explain.
In the example the user starts off with a browser window which already has tons of tabs, which is already in itself a sign that the user doesn't know what he is doing. From there, a case is presented where the user suddenly feels the need to start a new search, which happens to be completely unrelated to anything that he was already doing. Well, in that scenario, the user could very well do the very same thing that any semi-rational user does when he finds himself on that very same situation: open a new browser window dedicated to that search and go crazy with the search results. There, fixed. There is no need for this tab candy crap, searches/online tasks are perfectly compartmentalized, the tab bar is clean and cluttered, the navigation to/from opened pages becomes simpler... Everyone wins.
Now, let's look at what this tab candy crap brings to the table. So a clueless user who is perfectly incapable of organizing his workflow finds himself with a single browser window with dozens of opened tabs. He suddenly feels the need to open another dozen tabs to perform a completely independent task. According to TFA, the solution to his problems comes in the form of this tab candy crap. Yet, the only thing that it is capable of doing is offering yet another needlessly cumbersome step to do nothing more than provide a different, resource-expensive way to present to the user the tabs which he has opened.
So, in other words, this tab candy crap is nothing more than a window manager built into a browser. I mean, manually group tabs? List the tab groups which are currently opened? Put some tabs on the foreground while putting others on the background? Present the user with small icons representing the opened tab? If you replace "tabs" with "windows" you are describing pretty much any window manager out there. So why exactly is it a good idea to build a window manager into a browser?
Someone should explain to the guy in TFA's video that, as his browser only runs because there's an operating system that makes it possible for it to run, if he is using a browser then he is automatically using a operating system. So no, you don't use your browser more than you use your OS.
Indeed. If the whole point of this experience was to run the synthesizer through a MIDI keyboard then it would be much better to just spend 50 euros on a MIDI keyboard and, from there, build a small 8-bit synthesizer that supported standard MIDI input. There was no need to scrap a perfectly good organ just to cannibalize it and convert the shell into a synthesizer.
Yes, I get the spirit of the "because it's there" crowd. I also understand that economics doesn't play a major role in this sort of project. Nonetheless, they would earn a whole lot more geek points if instead of trashing the vintage synthesizer they simply built a portable 8-bit synthesizer which supported standard MIDI controllers and, when finished, released a how-to along with parts list and schematics.
Nonetheless, I still admire the talent that's needed to pull this stunt. I could never pull that off. Kudos for the project.
Can you provide an example demonstrating Linus' "dismissive and insulting" behaviour, accompanied with a example of how a possible acceptance is in the form of "repackaging the idea by a different, more favoured developer"? As LKML is public, you should have no problem pointing out the threads that you based yourself to make those attacks and people like me (i.e., everyone) would be able to understand the story instead of just blindly take your word for it. After all, what exactly is there to assure us that you aren't just talking shit? A random slashdoter's word?
Anytime that the government gets involved, it leads to unsustainable projects with no real market, no real innovation, and poor implementation to get a government contract and free money.
So I guess the Hoover Dam should fit neatly in that little anti-government and anti-government projects rant. Why doesn't it fit then?
So in essence all that posturing about defending human rights, freedom of expression and standing against censorship was a marketing ploy to try to mask their acceptance and embracing of totalitarian practices, all in order to worship the all mighty dollar (or euro, yen, or any other currency).
This makes articles such as http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2010/03/22/china-google-withdrawal-shows-government-intransigence">this one, where Google is praised for their support for basic human rights, was in essence a exercise in hypocrisy.
You may not be alone in that but you, along with those who think like you, certainly are not the majority. Joe Six-pack doesn't know the difference between a megahertz and a megabyte and he has much more important things to do than waste his time learning boring stuff such as the difference between SSD HDs and the traditional spinning disk HDs, let alone learn what a processor core is and what importance, if any, it has on his computing needs.
He just goes off to buy a computer and spends his money on what appears to be the best possible product he could purchase on his budget. He just chooses whatever product has the biggest e-penis he can afford. That means he chooses the one with more megahertz, the one with more HD memory, the one with more RAM, the one with more cores, the one with the bigger processor number... Heck, joe six-pack may even end up choosing a computer just because it comes with more RAM chips. "see? it has more rams, which is good."
The sad thing about it is that this behaviour is perfectly natural. When you decide to purchase something, you end up purchasing the best option according to the information that you were able to access and digest. Some of us may be better informed than others but we all do this. Some of us are better informed to the point of being able to see pass Intel's marketing bullshit but others aren't quite so fortunate. Nonetheless, the decision process is the same.
That would make sense if typesetting math formulas was the only reason that kept LaTeX being used up to this day. You cannot do collaborative work with MS Word, let alone employ any semblance of a version control system.
With LaTeX, unlike MS Word, it's terribly easy to do collaborative work. It could be as easy as writing a main LaTeX file where you \include{file} the chapters that people have been working on independently, which guarantees that you get a seamless merger of work just by updating the included files and compiling the doc. And employing a version control system is trivial, as your entire document is nothing more than a list of source code files and images.
You are assuming that academic types from fields such as soft sciences and humanities are, somehow, complete idiots who can't manage to grasp simple aspects that even first-year students from any IT degree manage to grasp on their first weeks on the course. They may not be familiar with the workflow associated with writing a LaTeX document but to go as far as insinuate that they are so technically incompetent that they can't possibly manage to work through all that voodoo... Well, you aren't basing your opinion on reality.
This comment is completely out of touch with reality. I point it out to you that no one is born knowing how to use a WYSIWYG editor, let alone MS Word. If you need to use MS Word you have to spend your "time" and you must have enough "background" to come to grips with MS Word. In fact, using MS Word forces you to waste even more of your time as you are forced to deal with it's long list of gotchas and as you are forced to spend countless hours hand-formatting your entire text just to compensate for MS Word's knack to screw up the document's formatting. By claiming that learning how to use LaTeX is somehow cumbersome while using MS Word is somehow an error-free experience you are both demonstrating you don't have a clue about what's it like to use LaTeX and MS Word.
I really doubt you had to use MS Word to any relevant extent if you both complain about LaTeX's fonts and how "a slight change of the text would result in widely different figure/table placements, sometimes even clumping them all at the end". I've dedicated a considerable portion of my life writing documets and reports, both with LaTeX and MS Word and although LaTeX documents, when written by hand with the help of a plain text editor (which, according to your description and complains, appears to be your case), has it's weak points, MS Word is by far the worse, most painful, problem-prone, gotcha-plagued tool available to write a document. I mean, MS Word 2007 doesn't even offer a clean way to generate numbered, hierarchical ToCs, forcing it's users to jump through hoops to edit new styles for hierarchical headers that don't screw around with document references. Moreover, the bloody tool doesn't even support referencing equations, which forces MS Word users to rely on custom combinations of tables, equations and custom reference targets. And have you even tried to add pictures to a MS Word document? Adding pictures to LaTeX documents so that they look half decent is child's play when compared to the MS Word way of doing things. Yes, MS Word let's you drag and drop but what good does it do to you if it SCREWS THE FORMATTING OF YOUR ENTIRE DOCUMENT in such a way that you are forced to hand-tweak the entire document by hand?
And don't get me started on collaborative work. MS Word even manages to screw terribly basic operations such as copying a text-only MS Word document and pasting it at the end of another MS Word document. I'm talking about documents which are produced with the default MS Word style, the one with unnumbered headers in the blue calibri fonts, and without ever touching a single text formatting option.
And you get all that from a tool which costs you around 200 euros?
Hand-written LaTeX may have it's weak points, such as generating tables. Yet, generating tables by hand may be a cumbersome task but at least it assures you that when you finish writing the table's markup you get a impeccable table that doesn't change just because you added another paragraph just before it. And the best thing about LaTeX is that your documents do look great, if not absolutely flawless. And a good sign of how this is a widely known fact is that chances are a randomly picked book from your bookstore or even your shelve was compiled from LaTeX. You will be hard-pressed to get your hands on a paper that wasn't compiled in LaTeX. And that happens although MS Word is around for what? 30 years?
And by the way, just because it's LaTeX it doesn't mean it must not be WYSIWYG. There are plenty of WYSIWYG tools for LaTeX such as Scientific Workplace. You would know that if you really did any serious documentation work.
TeX has been extensively used to develop high-quality documents, from small articles to full-fledged books. Yet, I don't believe that neither animation nor stereographic sound will come out well in print. Exactly, what's the objective here? Is it to replace media formats which support sound, video and 3D graphics?
This is a good opportunity for the world to rethink its perception of what viruses, trojans and the like are. Due to the vast and never ending list of problems and software defects that plague the dominating platform (i.e., microsoft windows) since it's inception and continue to affect it up to this day, the world has been conditioned to think that having a base system with so many profoundly serious defects is somehow acceptable. I mean, these bugs are so serious that they even let other people take over your system, a system that you've paid with your hard-earned money to be able to use as you use fit. Why exactly should this be normal, let alone acceptable?
In this instance we have a very rare glimpse of what the issue of software vulnerabilities is and how it should be handled. A very serious software bug could be exploited by malicious people to be able to gain control of the system and that problem was fixed by fixing the software bug. That is exactly how it should be. Yet, what Microsoft forced us to believe it is the right way of handling this thing is let that security hole stay wide open. What Microsoft forced the world to believe is that you solve the problems arising from any security bug by paying some third-party vendor for a piece of software that monitors your system for a hand full of instances of malicious code that made it's way into your system through those security holes. And this has become acceptable why? It's as you've bought a house with so many holes that could be used by malicious people to enter your house as they see fit and take over it. The problem lies in those holes being there and the problem doesn't go away if you employ security guards instead of plugging those damn holes your incompetent builder left there.
I don't understand this anti-intellectual campaign. Is it so hard to understand that if you don't have a degree then chances are you don't know what you are talking about? I mean sure, it's quite possible to learn stuff on your own and investigate things on your spare time. Some even manage to get a decent grasp on a specific topic without ever having a course on it. Yet, when we look into it... how many uneducated know-it-alls do you know that really know nearly as much about a specific field than the educated person? And how many know-it-alls do you happen to know that boast how much they know about some stuff but, when we really delve into it, we find out they know jack shit?
I really don't understand this anti-intellectual nonsense. Since when does an uneducated, ignorant but strongly opinionated individual knows more about a subject than a publicly recognized expert on a subject who is recognized for making significant contributions to humanity's understanding of a specific subject?