It's pretty fast now. Blindingly fast compared to the last few months before this redesign. Lately I always had to click "preview" twice, and then "submit" twice. The previous version worked quite well for me for years, but lately it had started to develop all sorts of weird bugs. Now everything works fine again.
Except my personal comments page. Those links are still broken, making it practically impossible for me to respond to reactions to my comments.
I liked the previous version. It didn't always look great, and there were still some CSS bugs, but I loved the ajaxified comments.
The current version? Takes some getting used to. Most annoying part so far is that none of the links on my comments page work. A rely a lot on that page (and I was unhappy when it was moved from ~username to ~username/comments). I hope they'll fix this really soon.
leader of the country (and, historically, the 'free world').
You can leave "free" out of that now. I would love it if the US became leader of the free world again, if only because that would mean it wouldn't be leading the world towards repression, fear and corporatism anymore.
Although it is a bitter pill, Obama is carrying on a number of Bush policies since they make sense given the alternatives.
They don't make sense given the alternatives, they make sense only given the pressure by lobbyists and sick political climate. Even then they don't really make sense. They're just to be expected. Understandable despite (or because of) their harmfulness.
I was really hoping he'd make a real change. Make a stand for freedom and justice. But instead it's just more of the same old sick and corrupt politics that we've gotten so used to.
Maybe unlocking the bootloader is comparable to jailbreaking (though Apple claims the latter is illegal, while Google has never done so about the former), but the point is that on Android, you don't need to unlock anything in order to install non-Google apps.
Unless of course you bought an Android device that has been deliberately crippled by its manufacturer. Something that's unfortunately getting a bit too common lately, and is definitely a threat to the Android ecosystem. But there are also plenty of honest, open Android devices.
Even when you're against all major candidates, you still end up voting for one of them. The only way out is to convince enough anti-R and anti-D voters to vote third party. Preferably all for the same third-party, which has as its main issue to fix the current "lesser evil" system and replace it with something slightly less insane. (I suggest approval voting.)
Quite the rationalization you've got there. Google censors something and they are still open. Apple censors something and they are closed and evil.
Why don't you read the post you're replying to? I explained it right there.
Android is more open by its very nature, because you are not restricted by what Google approves or not. With an iPhone, you are bound by what Apple approves (unless you jailbreak, which Apple would like you to believe is illegal). So when Apple chooses not to sell something in their App Store, it's censorship: they're blocking the only possible way to get it. When Google chooses not to sell something, it's not censorship, because you can still get it through other channels. Just not through the most visible one.
But your reaction does demonstrate the second part of my point: it's bad PR, because to uninformed people, it looks like Google is doing exactly what Apple does.
You're forgetting consequential effects. If he culled 40 million people from the population during the 13th century, he didn't just remove those 40 million people. He also removed all their potential descendants. Given that the estimated population of the world at the time was about 400 million, a 40 million reduction works out to about 10%.
Since percentages aren't distorted by exponential growth, that means he's responsible for a 10% reduction in the world's current population.
The weirdest stuff gets modded up in this discussion. Population growth is not exponential. There are very real limits to population growth, like food, and the space needed to grow it. Population density brings a lot of problems with it.
It's impossible to tell how large the world population would have been had those 40 million people not been killed. It's likely that Russia would have been a lot less fucked-up, however. Kiev and Novgorod were reasonably democratic during the early middle ages, right until the Mongols invaded and moved the center of (much more autocratic) authority to Moscow.
The inherent genocidal madness of the modern "environmentalist" movement.
Think about it; This article actually tries to put a POSITIVE SPIN on GENOCIDE.
I don't understand how this piece of drivel got modded up as Insightful. There's nothing genocidal about the environmentalist movement. At least not the mainstream part of it; there's always some loonies on the fringe, but like another comment already pointed out, that's like saying Christianity is evil because of the KKK, or atheism is evil because of Stalin, or the free market is evil because of Pinochet or Enron.
d3ac0n is an idiot in desperate search of anything to confirm his own wacky world view. There's no need for Slashdot to give him any attention.
No the article is indirectly implying that genocide = good.
No. The article is saying that genocide = good for forests, in some circumstances. A generic "good" is a lot more complex, and the article take it for granted that genocide is not good. The fact that you're reading something else into it says more about you than about the article.
TFA is not about preventing human carbon emissions, it's about people not using their land anymore on account of being dead, thereby giving forests the opportunity to take it back. And forests need CO2 to grow, which they get from the atmosphere.
Of course. You can still install from any source you like, but Google doesn't have to help you distribute it. Perfectly valid decision from Google, and Android is still more open than the iPhone because you don't have to use Google's Android Market. Still, I think it's a stupid decision from Google. It sounds like a perfectly reasonable and harmless app, and banning it gives the impression that Google secretly envies Apple's control freakery.
No, I mean like Wave, Buzz, Google Video and a thousand other "Labs" and beta products that quickly fade away. They just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. Yes, they have had successes, but it's been pretty random.
It always is, for any company. But for Google, trying lots of new stuff, is a major part of their long term strategy. These are not things they dump on the market hoping they make some money, these are things they give away for free, hoping people will find cool stuff to do with it. This worked perfectly fine with Maps, for example.
I said that Apple sells quality goods. That kind of quality control is the kind of thing you do when you sell quality goods and want to control your brand.
It's not merely about quality (in fact, Apple sells plenty of crap). It's about products that fit the Apple vision. They create a comprehensive Apple experience, and outside influences have no place there.
Toshiba and Samsung sell commodity goods, not quality goods. They're the technology equivalent of selling auto parts.
They sell plenty of quality goods. They just don't make it the kind of integrated experience that Apple wants to sell.
Too funny for words. Google is the biggest short-term thinker in the industry - exemplified by all their ridiculous "beta" products that never last.
You mean like GMail, Maps, Google Earth, GDocs, etc? How exactly is that short-term thinking? Did it get them any immediate profit? No! But it builds an infrastructure that makes people do more stuff on the web. And that's how Google grows. Not by anything as mundane as competition or quick profits. Google is the ultimate long-term thinker. They can afford to, and they're as successful as they are because of it.
With respect to H.264 - Google wants to be in "web apps." So, when their online video editing service launches, are users going to have to convert their video to WebM first? Because what's coming out of their video camera is H.264. It's not going to be very user-friendly if they reject that.
Are you serious? Of course Google is going to do it for you. Google is not in the business of making people's life harder. They want to help you out, because that gives them access to your data. They want your movie straight out of the camera no matter what format it's in, and they'll make sure they can convert it for you.
Again, another quite amusing misreading of the market. Apple doesn't sell "experiences." Apple sells products. Actual physical products that you pay actual money for (as well as software that you pay for).
Apple just sells goods and that's it? You couldn't be more wrong. If you were right, Apple wouldn't mind porn apps in their app store, they wouldn't mind people jailbreaking the hardware they already paid for. They wouldn't mind people using Adobe tools to develop apps. They wouldn't mind people selling alternatives to their own apps. But they do.
Apple isn't merely about products. They're about how you use them. The experience you have with their products. How they integrate with each other, the apps you can run on them, it all has to be Apple-approved. Apple is a lot more sophisticated than you give them credit for. They're no mere Toshiba or Samsung.
And Flash. Which needs Adobe's tools to develop for... you are right about Adobe being all about tools and utterly clueless about how they are trying to make sure people keep using Adobe tools. Things that are not Flash reduce the need for using Adobe tools in production.
All Adobe products are already unnecessary in the sense that you can make everything with other tools. Including Flash. Adobe's point is that you can do it easier with their products. You can be a graphics guy instead of a programmer and still do it. I promise you that they will make sure that every nutjob can make pretty HTML5 with their tools.
Any advertising firm cares very much about money and Google as done nothing recently showing any concern for the future of the industry, only the future growth of Google.
But they do it not so much by increasing their share of the pie, but by making the pie itself larger. They want more people to use the web for more stuff. That's thinking on a very different scale than regular advertising companies. This is why Google is so eager to experiment and give their products away for free. They're not merely pushing ads, they're creating new things for you to do on the web. New places to create and collect information on what ads to serve, and more places to serve them. Most Google products don't have to generate any measurable profit in the short term, or even in the long term. They just create more web use, and increase the size of the pie of which Google already has the largest piece.
That's how Google works. If you think they're merely a regular advertising company, then you have no idea of how disruptive their business model really is. Or why they are giving so much stuff away.
Except that web technologies that APPLE has pushed heavily are totally open!! OOPS.
Are they? Have you seen Apple's HTML5 demos? In a non-Safari browser?
Apple doesn't care about openness for its own sake like Google does. Apple merely adopts open standards and open source when it helps them make a leap in an area where they're falling behind. I don't think Apple has ever open sourced anything that they created from scratch.
Mozilla: They're just not going to pay for H.264
Which is fine, there's no need to if they just let the video tag flow through to OS support.
That's not as easy as you make it out to be. Unlike IE and Safari, which are single-platform browsers that rely on specific codec infrastructure (WM and Quicktime), Firefox is available for all platforms, and doesn't have its own codec plugin system. So their options are to either create a big unreliable mess, or integrate the video support into the browser.
Exactly the same is true for Chrome and Opera, the other two cross-platform browsers that don't have their own pluggable codec infrastructure and will therefore implement video support in the browser itself. There is a very good reason why these three use the exact same approach: it's the only one that works.
Thing is, Eric Schmidt did say that. Well, what he actually said was: if you want to keep it private, perhaps it's something you shouldn't be doing at all.
Slashdot Mirror
It's pretty fast now. Blindingly fast compared to the last few months before this redesign. Lately I always had to click "preview" twice, and then "submit" twice. The previous version worked quite well for me for years, but lately it had started to develop all sorts of weird bugs. Now everything works fine again.
Except my personal comments page. Those links are still broken, making it practically impossible for me to respond to reactions to my comments.
I posted stuff in this discussion a few hours ago, and now it doesn't show up? Let's see if it works this time.
And still no WYSIWYG comment box, only HTML or plain text.
And I'm really happy about that. Make it too easy for people to post unreadable crap, and they will.
I don't mind if some command of html is a requirement for posting anything beyond simple text.
Did they actually test this redesign this time?!
They clearly didn't test the ~user/comments page. All the links there are broken. But the comment box is indeed a lot snappier. That's nice.
I liked the previous version. It didn't always look great, and there were still some CSS bugs, but I loved the ajaxified comments.
The current version? Takes some getting used to. Most annoying part so far is that none of the links on my comments page work. A rely a lot on that page (and I was unhappy when it was moved from ~username to ~username/comments). I hope they'll fix this really soon.
And don't blame me either, I hate democracy. Overrated big time.
I don't know. It might be worth giving it a try some time.
leader of the country (and, historically, the 'free world').
You can leave "free" out of that now. I would love it if the US became leader of the free world again, if only because that would mean it wouldn't be leading the world towards repression, fear and corporatism anymore.
So vote for a party that wants to change that system!
Although it is a bitter pill, Obama is carrying on a number of Bush policies since they make sense given the alternatives.
They don't make sense given the alternatives, they make sense only given the pressure by lobbyists and sick political climate. Even then they don't really make sense. They're just to be expected. Understandable despite (or because of) their harmfulness.
I was really hoping he'd make a real change. Make a stand for freedom and justice. But instead it's just more of the same old sick and corrupt politics that we've gotten so used to.
Maybe unlocking the bootloader is comparable to jailbreaking (though Apple claims the latter is illegal, while Google has never done so about the former), but the point is that on Android, you don't need to unlock anything in order to install non-Google apps.
Unless of course you bought an Android device that has been deliberately crippled by its manufacturer. Something that's unfortunately getting a bit too common lately, and is definitely a threat to the Android ecosystem. But there are also plenty of honest, open Android devices.
Yes, I have heard of Cydia, and I think I'm a bit better informed than you are. You need to jailbreak in order to install Cydia.
Even when you're against all major candidates, you still end up voting for one of them. The only way out is to convince enough anti-R and anti-D voters to vote third party. Preferably all for the same third-party, which has as its main issue to fix the current "lesser evil" system and replace it with something slightly less insane. (I suggest approval voting.)
Quite the rationalization you've got there. Google censors something and they are still open. Apple censors something and they are closed and evil.
Why don't you read the post you're replying to? I explained it right there.
Android is more open by its very nature, because you are not restricted by what Google approves or not. With an iPhone, you are bound by what Apple approves (unless you jailbreak, which Apple would like you to believe is illegal). So when Apple chooses not to sell something in their App Store, it's censorship: they're blocking the only possible way to get it. When Google chooses not to sell something, it's not censorship, because you can still get it through other channels. Just not through the most visible one.
But your reaction does demonstrate the second part of my point: it's bad PR, because to uninformed people, it looks like Google is doing exactly what Apple does.
What era exactly are you talking about, because back when the arabs mattered, Mohammed had not yet been born.
You are wrong. Arabs mattered through most of the European middle ages. Mohammed was long dead at that time.
You don't solve global warming by starving the poor. The rich pollute a lot more.
You're forgetting consequential effects. If he culled 40 million people from the population during the 13th century, he didn't just remove those 40 million people. He also removed all their potential descendants. Given that the estimated population of the world at the time was about 400 million, a 40 million reduction works out to about 10%.
Since percentages aren't distorted by exponential growth, that means he's responsible for a 10% reduction in the world's current population.
The weirdest stuff gets modded up in this discussion. Population growth is not exponential. There are very real limits to population growth, like food, and the space needed to grow it. Population density brings a lot of problems with it.
It's impossible to tell how large the world population would have been had those 40 million people not been killed. It's likely that Russia would have been a lot less fucked-up, however. Kiev and Novgorod were reasonably democratic during the early middle ages, right until the Mongols invaded and moved the center of (much more autocratic) authority to Moscow.
The inherent genocidal madness of the modern "environmentalist" movement.
Think about it; This article actually tries to put a POSITIVE SPIN on GENOCIDE.
I don't understand how this piece of drivel got modded up as Insightful. There's nothing genocidal about the environmentalist movement. At least not the mainstream part of it; there's always some loonies on the fringe, but like another comment already pointed out, that's like saying Christianity is evil because of the KKK, or atheism is evil because of Stalin, or the free market is evil because of Pinochet or Enron.
d3ac0n is an idiot in desperate search of anything to confirm his own wacky world view. There's no need for Slashdot to give him any attention.
No the article is indirectly implying that genocide = good.
No. The article is saying that genocide = good for forests, in some circumstances. A generic "good" is a lot more complex, and the article take it for granted that genocide is not good. The fact that you're reading something else into it says more about you than about the article.
TFA is not about preventing human carbon emissions, it's about people not using their land anymore on account of being dead, thereby giving forests the opportunity to take it back. And forests need CO2 to grow, which they get from the atmosphere.
Of course. You can still install from any source you like, but Google doesn't have to help you distribute it. Perfectly valid decision from Google, and Android is still more open than the iPhone because you don't have to use Google's Android Market. Still, I think it's a stupid decision from Google. It sounds like a perfectly reasonable and harmless app, and banning it gives the impression that Google secretly envies Apple's control freakery.
No, I mean like Wave, Buzz, Google Video and a thousand other "Labs" and beta products that quickly fade away. They just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. Yes, they have had successes, but it's been pretty random.
It always is, for any company. But for Google, trying lots of new stuff, is a major part of their long term strategy. These are not things they dump on the market hoping they make some money, these are things they give away for free, hoping people will find cool stuff to do with it. This worked perfectly fine with Maps, for example.
I said that Apple sells quality goods. That kind of quality control is the kind of thing you do when you sell quality goods and want to control your brand.
It's not merely about quality (in fact, Apple sells plenty of crap). It's about products that fit the Apple vision. They create a comprehensive Apple experience, and outside influences have no place there.
Toshiba and Samsung sell commodity goods, not quality goods. They're the technology equivalent of selling auto parts.
They sell plenty of quality goods. They just don't make it the kind of integrated experience that Apple wants to sell.
Too funny for words. Google is the biggest short-term thinker in the industry - exemplified by all their ridiculous "beta" products that never last.
You mean like GMail, Maps, Google Earth, GDocs, etc? How exactly is that short-term thinking? Did it get them any immediate profit? No! But it builds an infrastructure that makes people do more stuff on the web. And that's how Google grows. Not by anything as mundane as competition or quick profits. Google is the ultimate long-term thinker. They can afford to, and they're as successful as they are because of it.
With respect to H.264 - Google wants to be in "web apps." So, when their online video editing service launches, are users going to have to convert their video to WebM first? Because what's coming out of their video camera is H.264. It's not going to be very user-friendly if they reject that.
Are you serious? Of course Google is going to do it for you. Google is not in the business of making people's life harder. They want to help you out, because that gives them access to your data. They want your movie straight out of the camera no matter what format it's in, and they'll make sure they can convert it for you.
Again, another quite amusing misreading of the market. Apple doesn't sell "experiences." Apple sells products. Actual physical products that you pay actual money for (as well as software that you pay for).
Apple just sells goods and that's it? You couldn't be more wrong. If you were right, Apple wouldn't mind porn apps in their app store, they wouldn't mind people jailbreaking the hardware they already paid for. They wouldn't mind people using Adobe tools to develop apps. They wouldn't mind people selling alternatives to their own apps. But they do.
Apple isn't merely about products. They're about how you use them. The experience you have with their products. How they integrate with each other, the apps you can run on them, it all has to be Apple-approved. Apple is a lot more sophisticated than you give them credit for. They're no mere Toshiba or Samsung.
And Flash. Which needs Adobe's tools to develop for... you are right about Adobe being all about tools and utterly clueless about how they are trying to make sure people keep using Adobe tools. Things that are not Flash reduce the need for using Adobe tools in
production.
All Adobe products are already unnecessary in the sense that you can make everything with other tools. Including Flash. Adobe's point is that you can do it easier with their products. You can be a graphics guy instead of a programmer and still do it. I promise you that they will make sure that every nutjob can make pretty HTML5 with their tools.
Any advertising firm cares very much about money and Google as done nothing recently showing any concern for the future of the industry, only the future growth of Google.
But they do it not so much by increasing their share of the pie, but by making the pie itself larger. They want more people to use the web for more stuff. That's thinking on a very different scale than regular advertising companies. This is why Google is so eager to experiment and give their products away for free. They're not merely pushing ads, they're creating new things for you to do on the web. New places to create and collect information on what ads to serve, and more places to serve them. Most Google products don't have to generate any measurable profit in the short term, or even in the long term. They just create more web use, and increase the size of the pie of which Google already has the largest piece.
That's how Google works. If you think they're merely a regular advertising company, then you have no idea of how disruptive their business model really is. Or why they are giving so much stuff away.
Except that web technologies that APPLE has pushed heavily are totally open!! OOPS.
Are they? Have you seen Apple's HTML5 demos? In a non-Safari browser?
Apple doesn't care about openness for its own sake like Google does. Apple merely adopts open standards and open source when it helps them make a leap in an area where they're falling behind. I don't think Apple has ever open sourced anything that they created from scratch.
Mozilla: They're just not going to pay for H.264
Which is fine, there's no need to if they just let the video tag flow through to OS support.
That's not as easy as you make it out to be. Unlike IE and Safari, which are single-platform browsers that rely on specific codec infrastructure (WM and Quicktime), Firefox is available for all platforms, and doesn't have its own codec plugin system. So their options are to either create a big unreliable mess, or integrate the video support into the browser.
Exactly the same is true for Chrome and Opera, the other two cross-platform browsers that don't have their own pluggable codec infrastructure and will therefore implement video support in the browser itself. There is a very good reason why these three use the exact same approach: it's the only one that works.
Be less evil than the other big guys.
Thing is, Eric Schmidt did say that. Well, what he actually said was: if you want to keep it private, perhaps it's something you shouldn't be doing at all.