The thing about Free Software is that it's probably built with the user in mind or with some purpose other than making money.
Actually, a famous and well-publicized problem with Free Software is that it's built with the creator in mind, who is in no way an average user. It's often very powerful, but usually only user-friendly to advanced users.
It defeats the purpose of the rating system, and can result in people (at least those in politics) supporting much more restrictive measures. Despite our pretty liberal attitude here, some people are suggesting that if the retailers don't reduce the sale of 18+ games to minors, the government should.
In Netherland the problem seems just the opposite. 18+ games are easily available to kids. Bioshock and similar games are sold in toy stores, right next to Lego and Playmobil. And it doesn't look like most toy stores check the age of their customers.
Opera was remarkable indeed. I got on board at the time of Opera 5. At home, I had Opera 5 or 6 with about 200 websites open on a Pentium 2 with 256MB. Worked more smoothly than many modern browsers. Only closing it took 15 minutes, but that's no different from Firefox 3.6.
Remember this thing came out nearly a decade ago and those "web standards" you fellas like so much really didn't exist as anything more than proposals at the time, most of which were completely changed after IE 6 had already been released.
Quite the opposite, in fact. The (X)HTML and CSS specs are from the late '90s, and were virtually unchanged for a decade, until people finally started working on HTML5. So they were there when IE6 was released, and haven't been changed since.
Does it? Last time I used it, IE Tab used the native IE, of which you can have only one, and it's either 6, or 7, or 8. You can't have several without some ugly hack that's guaranteed to work slightly different from the real thing.
Messing with this, I did manage to get a WinXP VM to end up completely without any version of IE, yet unable to install any of them. So I use IETester, which is guaranteed to be not entirely identical to the real thing. But it's close enough.
I guess it does make sense for many companies. The problem is that we webdevelopers are in the business of fixing things that aren't really broken, and then inventing new things to fix. People using 20 year old tech without problems is bad for our world view and our ego.
On technical merits, IE6 "deserved" to die just as much as Netscape,
No, Netscape at that time really was quite a lot worse than IE6. I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, but IE's victory over Netscape was justified on technical merits. IE6 was by no means a great browser, but it was a lot better than most of the other crap at that time. (I believe Opera already existed at that time, so that might have been the superior browser, but nobody had heard of it yet.)
Actually I think it was really IE5 that won the browser wars by being nowhere near as broken as that buggy piece of shit that's Netscape 4, and IE6 merely consolidated that position. IE6 was supposed to be the end of the line, and for a long time it was. But it's essentially '90s technology from the early and stupid days of the web.
Obviously preview doesn't meet the desires of the users since people constantly fail to use it.
Some people fail to use it. Most people have no problems with it.
Slashdot can keep their heads up their asses and deny there is a problem even though in practice the system is flawed or they can acknowledge that the status quo is inadequate.
But it's not. The system works fine. It's not perfect, but the preview button is the least controversial part of Slashdot.
It's trivial to create some simple solutions to the problems perma-posting attempts to address: - Only allow edits before a reply.
So you spend time editing, and then you can't save your changes because somebody replied in the mean time.
- Only allow edits before a moderation is applied.
So you spend time editing, and then you can't save your changes because somebody modded your post in the mean time.
- Check to ensure when replying that the post hasn't changed while writing a reply and alert the user.
So now the person who replies has to do extra work because the OP messed up?
Slashdot already has a perfectly fine solution to your problem: the preview button. You can't submit straight away, you have to preview first. Read what you just wrote, fix it, and then submit it.
Also, Slashdot discussions are about running discussions. It's not like these discussions will serve as a reference to future generations. They don't need to be edited into perfection. They're here for us right now. How would you feel if you were in a real-life discussion, and somehow people were able to go back and change what they said? That'd be annoying. Instead, just be honest and admit you made a mistake. There's no shame in that.
I believe it's an EU agreement. If an EU member extradites to another EU member, and that second member wants to extradite that same person to yet another country, the first EU member has to give permission. In this case, the UK would have to give Sweden permission to extradite Assange to the US.
Note: I'm no extradition lawyer. I just picked this up in the many discussions where this extradition has been discussed.
Perfect pitch: Yes, to some it comes naturally after years of making music, to some it doesn't.
And to some it comes naturally without years of making music. I admit my dad did play some organ and guitar back in the day, but not really a lot. And as far as I understand, he's always had perfect pitch, not just after years of making music. I don't think my grandparents were exceptionally musically inclined either.
Well, a little bit yes and a little bit no. Most jurisdictions have some sort of residency requirement before they allow you to vote. When I vote in the U.S., for example, they tell me where to go to file my ballot. It's usually someplace close to my home. It might be someone's garage, or a school, or something like that. But although I don't actually have to show an ID to vote, my polling place will have a list of people who they expect to vote in that area. If I were to go back to the country of my birth, on the other hand, I believe I would still have the right to vote, but it would be much more convoluted than it would be for most citizens, because I would not have a local residence on record.
Are you saying that American expats can't vote? I'm neither American nor expat, but I'm reasonably sure they can. They need to mail in their votes some days or weeks before the actual election, I believe.
I guess my only exception to your ideal world is that there are places on the globe that are rather lawless, or outright hostile to the form of government under which I grew up, so I like the idea that there embassies who will help me out if I run into awkward circumstances. An example of a place where it's probably easy to settle without a lot of bureaucracy: Somalia. Sound good to you?
There are a lot more problems with removing all borders than just that. I still think it's a good idea to work towards a world where we can do without borders, though.
Perfect pitch is quite rare in Westerners. Mozart was considered special (in part) because he had it and could name the notes in church bells.
But in China, which uses a tone-based language, 1 out of 10 people have perfect pitch. And this isn't true in other Asian countries that don't use tone. So it certainly is not just an innate skill that some people have.
It's not 100% innate, but it's not 100% learned either. Otherwise all Chinese would have it, and only very experienced musicians in cultures with non-tine-based languages. Clearly some have more talent for it than others, but many talented people still benefit a lot from practice.
Personally, I find brains to be fascinating things, with a lot of really interesting facilities. Once you've trained with a device long enough (a car, a waldo, whatever) your brain will actually incorporate it into your automatic actions as if it was part of the body, offloading the work from the neocortex, meaning you can do it smoothly and without needing to think through it. It's also why people tend to flinch when people hit their cars.
I've got that with bicycles and to some extend with sailing boats. Not with cars yet, unfortunately. But it's funny when you discover that you're operating a big and complex vehicle as if it's an extension of your body. Looks like our brain expects us to become cyborgs.
Case in point: go back through the archives and look at the threads on here relating to the BP oil spill disaster. You'll see instant experts claiming that "BP should have know better than to put blowout preventers using blah blah blah" when if you'd gone to all that people posting in the thread a week before and asked them in person if they knew what a blowout preventer was, the percentage would be pretty close to zero.
That doesn't mean they're wrong, though. The Slashdotters aren't pretending to be experts on oil drilling, and don't need to know how to do it responsibly. BP does have the responsibility to know such things and apply them. If it is known by real experts, then BP should be aware of it too.
True. Lots of stuff is trainable, but is inborn for some people. Strength, for example. Some people are naturally stronger than others, but you can make up for the difference by working out in the gym. Absolute hearing (recognizing the pitch of a note of music): my dad has always been able to do it and can't remember a time when he couldn't, nor did he understand why others couldn't. But many musicians need to train quite hard at it. To some it comes naturally after years of making music, to others it doesn't.
Sometimes it's nature, sometimes it's nurture, sometimes it's a bit of both.
In any case, it's good to know that memory can be trained too. My memory sucks. My wife has always had excellent memory (not quite photographic) without any kind of training (other than regular study, which is also trains your memory, I guess).
Also, the general rule is that, for purposes of your life in the United States, your U.S. citizenship is what matters and nothing else. If you're a U.S. citizen and you get drafted into the military, for example, you can't claim you don't have to serve because you're a citizen of some other country.
This is exactly the same as with Turkey. You can't lose Turkish nationality (not easily, at least), and people with dual Dutch/Turkish nationality may be drafted into Turkish military service, even when they live in Netherland. Netherland (and other countries too, I presume) don't like it that their citizens can be drafted into foreign military service.
But as for the general attitude toward dual nationality, it makes sense if you think about it. We're a nation of immigrants, for one, no matter what Arizona wants to believe. Also, I have triple citizenship myself -- I'm a naturalized U.S. citizen, but the other two are by birth. So in other words, yes I'm a U.S. citizen, but as for the other two, I can't actually help that. As long as I uphold my obligations as a U.S. citizen, it would be unreasonable to expect me to renounce the circumstances of my own birth.
Yes and no. There are lots of different ways to look at dual nationalities. You get a class of people who have double the voting power of others, because they can vote in two different countries. Would I like to be able to vote in the US, as well as in my own country (and maybe some others)? Of course! But that violates some basic democratic principle.
There's also a difference in global mobility: some people are welcome in several countries, while most people are only welcome in their own country. Or maybe the real problem is that people are generally not terribly welcome outside their own country (unless they're rich of course).
I guess my ideal world would be one where everybody is welcome to settle wherever they like, and you vote for where you live. This stupid concept of nationality should become meaningless. But I'm afraid that in this highly nationalistic world with its clashing cultures, that's going to be a dream for the distant future.
Slashdot Mirror
If everybody in power is by definition corrupt, overthrowing the government isn't going to help you either.
What are they going to do if someone doesn't want to pay double taxes?
So why shouldn't you be able to talk about what you did or how you did it?
Well, that's a matter of choice. If you can mobilize enough people to overthrow a government, you should also be able to mobilize enough to elect one.
The problem is that Sony will sue you if you want to hack your Sony hardware.
The thing about Free Software is that it's probably built with the user in mind or with some purpose other than making money.
Actually, a famous and well-publicized problem with Free Software is that it's built with the creator in mind, who is in no way an average user. It's often very powerful, but usually only user-friendly to advanced users.
Though there are exceptions, of course.
It defeats the purpose of the rating system
Defeating censorship is a good thing.
Yeah, but that's not the case here. Read what I wrote: It's not censorship. Yet.
It defeats the purpose of the rating system, and can result in people (at least those in politics) supporting much more restrictive measures. Despite our pretty liberal attitude here, some people are suggesting that if the retailers don't reduce the sale of 18+ games to minors, the government should.
In Netherland the problem seems just the opposite. 18+ games are easily available to kids. Bioshock and similar games are sold in toy stores, right next to Lego and Playmobil. And it doesn't look like most toy stores check the age of their customers.
Opera was remarkable indeed. I got on board at the time of Opera 5. At home, I had Opera 5 or 6 with about 200 websites open on a Pentium 2 with 256MB. Worked more smoothly than many modern browsers. Only closing it took 15 minutes, but that's no different from Firefox 3.6.
Remember this thing came out nearly a decade ago and those "web standards" you fellas like so much really didn't exist as anything more than proposals at the time, most of which were completely changed after IE 6 had already been released.
Quite the opposite, in fact. The (X)HTML and CSS specs are from the late '90s, and were virtually unchanged for a decade, until people finally started working on HTML5. So they were there when IE6 was released, and haven't been changed since.
Does it? Last time I used it, IE Tab used the native IE, of which you can have only one, and it's either 6, or 7, or 8. You can't have several without some ugly hack that's guaranteed to work slightly different from the real thing.
Messing with this, I did manage to get a WinXP VM to end up completely without any version of IE, yet unable to install any of them. So I use IETester, which is guaranteed to be not entirely identical to the real thing. But it's close enough.
Why are you still working for those people?
I guess it does make sense for many companies. The problem is that we webdevelopers are in the business of fixing things that aren't really broken, and then inventing new things to fix. People using 20 year old tech without problems is bad for our world view and our ego.
While we're at it, why don't we check to see if Mosaic is still workable for browsing the web.
I think it's still worth it to make sure websites are somewhat usable in lynx.
>
On technical merits, IE6 "deserved" to die just as much as Netscape,
No, Netscape at that time really was quite a lot worse than IE6. I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, but IE's victory over Netscape was justified on technical merits. IE6 was by no means a great browser, but it was a lot better than most of the other crap at that time. (I believe Opera already existed at that time, so that might have been the superior browser, but nobody had heard of it yet.)
Actually I think it was really IE5 that won the browser wars by being nowhere near as broken as that buggy piece of shit that's Netscape 4, and IE6 merely consolidated that position. IE6 was supposed to be the end of the line, and for a long time it was. But it's essentially '90s technology from the early and stupid days of the web.
Obviously preview doesn't meet the desires of the users since people constantly fail to use it.
Some people fail to use it. Most people have no problems with it.
Slashdot can keep their heads up their asses and deny there is a problem even though in practice the system is flawed or they can acknowledge that the status quo is inadequate.
But it's not. The system works fine. It's not perfect, but the preview button is the least controversial part of Slashdot.
It's trivial to create some simple solutions to the problems perma-posting attempts to address:
- Only allow edits before a reply.
So you spend time editing, and then you can't save your changes because somebody replied in the mean time.
- Only allow edits before a moderation is applied.
So you spend time editing, and then you can't save your changes because somebody modded your post in the mean time.
- Check to ensure when replying that the post hasn't changed while writing a reply and alert the user.
So now the person who replies has to do extra work because the OP messed up?
Slashdot already has a perfectly fine solution to your problem: the preview button. You can't submit straight away, you have to preview first. Read what you just wrote, fix it, and then submit it.
Also, Slashdot discussions are about running discussions. It's not like these discussions will serve as a reference to future generations. They don't need to be edited into perfection. They're here for us right now. How would you feel if you were in a real-life discussion, and somehow people were able to go back and change what they said? That'd be annoying. Instead, just be honest and admit you made a mistake. There's no shame in that.
I believe it's an EU agreement. If an EU member extradites to another EU member, and that second member wants to extradite that same person to yet another country, the first EU member has to give permission. In this case, the UK would have to give Sweden permission to extradite Assange to the US.
Note: I'm no extradition lawyer. I just picked this up in the many discussions where this extradition has been discussed.
Perfect pitch: Yes, to some it comes naturally after years of making music, to some it doesn't.
And to some it comes naturally without years of making music. I admit my dad did play some organ and guitar back in the day, but not really a lot. And as far as I understand, he's always had perfect pitch, not just after years of making music. I don't think my grandparents were exceptionally musically inclined either.
The UK can also still deny Swedish extradition to the US.
I don't think politicians decide on extraditions, do they? It's a legal matter, and therefore decided by judges.
Well, a little bit yes and a little bit no. Most jurisdictions have some sort of residency requirement before they allow you to vote. When I vote in the U.S., for example, they tell me where to go to file my ballot. It's usually someplace close to my home. It might be someone's garage, or a school, or something like that. But although I don't actually have to show an ID to vote, my polling place will have a list of people who they expect to vote in that area. If I were to go back to the country of my birth, on the other hand, I believe I would still have the right to vote, but it would be much more convoluted than it would be for most citizens, because I would not have a local residence on record.
Are you saying that American expats can't vote? I'm neither American nor expat, but I'm reasonably sure they can. They need to mail in their votes some days or weeks before the actual election, I believe.
I guess my only exception to your ideal world is that there are places on the globe that are rather lawless, or outright hostile to the form of government under which I grew up, so I like the idea that there embassies who will help me out if I run into awkward circumstances. An example of a place where it's probably easy to settle without a lot of bureaucracy: Somalia. Sound good to you?
There are a lot more problems with removing all borders than just that. I still think it's a good idea to work towards a world where we can do without borders, though.
Perfect pitch is quite rare in Westerners. Mozart was considered special (in part) because he had it and could name the notes in church bells.
But in China, which uses a tone-based language, 1 out of 10 people have perfect pitch. And this isn't true in other Asian countries that don't use tone. So it certainly is not just an innate skill that some people have.
It's not 100% innate, but it's not 100% learned either. Otherwise all Chinese would have it, and only very experienced musicians in cultures with non-tine-based languages. Clearly some have more talent for it than others, but many talented people still benefit a lot from practice.
Personally, I find brains to be fascinating things, with a lot of really interesting facilities. Once you've trained with a device long enough (a car, a waldo, whatever) your brain will actually incorporate it into your automatic actions as if it was part of the body, offloading the work from the neocortex, meaning you can do it smoothly and without needing to think through it. It's also why people tend to flinch when people hit their cars.
I've got that with bicycles and to some extend with sailing boats. Not with cars yet, unfortunately. But it's funny when you discover that you're operating a big and complex vehicle as if it's an extension of your body. Looks like our brain expects us to become cyborgs.
Case in point: go back through the archives and look at the threads on here relating to the BP oil spill disaster. You'll see instant experts claiming that "BP should have know better than to put blowout preventers using blah blah blah" when if you'd gone to all that people posting in the thread a week before and asked them in person if they knew what a blowout preventer was, the percentage would be pretty close to zero.
That doesn't mean they're wrong, though. The Slashdotters aren't pretending to be experts on oil drilling, and don't need to know how to do it responsibly. BP does have the responsibility to know such things and apply them. If it is known by real experts, then BP should be aware of it too.
True. Lots of stuff is trainable, but is inborn for some people. Strength, for example. Some people are naturally stronger than others, but you can make up for the difference by working out in the gym. Absolute hearing (recognizing the pitch of a note of music): my dad has always been able to do it and can't remember a time when he couldn't, nor did he understand why others couldn't. But many musicians need to train quite hard at it. To some it comes naturally after years of making music, to others it doesn't.
Sometimes it's nature, sometimes it's nurture, sometimes it's a bit of both.
In any case, it's good to know that memory can be trained too. My memory sucks. My wife has always had excellent memory (not quite photographic) without any kind of training (other than regular study, which is also trains your memory, I guess).
Also, the general rule is that, for purposes of your life in the United States, your U.S. citizenship is what matters and nothing else. If you're a U.S. citizen and you get drafted into the military, for example, you can't claim you don't have to serve because you're a citizen of some other country.
This is exactly the same as with Turkey. You can't lose Turkish nationality (not easily, at least), and people with dual Dutch/Turkish nationality may be drafted into Turkish military service, even when they live in Netherland. Netherland (and other countries too, I presume) don't like it that their citizens can be drafted into foreign military service.
But as for the general attitude toward dual nationality, it makes sense if you think about it. We're a nation of immigrants, for one, no matter what Arizona wants to believe. Also, I have triple citizenship myself -- I'm a naturalized U.S. citizen, but the other two are by birth. So in other words, yes I'm a U.S. citizen, but as for the other two, I can't actually help that. As long as I uphold my obligations as a U.S. citizen, it would be unreasonable to expect me to renounce the circumstances of my own birth.
Yes and no. There are lots of different ways to look at dual nationalities. You get a class of people who have double the voting power of others, because they can vote in two different countries. Would I like to be able to vote in the US, as well as in my own country (and maybe some others)? Of course! But that violates some basic democratic principle.
There's also a difference in global mobility: some people are welcome in several countries, while most people are only welcome in their own country. Or maybe the real problem is that people are generally not terribly welcome outside their own country (unless they're rich of course).
I guess my ideal world would be one where everybody is welcome to settle wherever they like, and you vote for where you live. This stupid concept of nationality should become meaningless. But I'm afraid that in this highly nationalistic world with its clashing cultures, that's going to be a dream for the distant future.