Your definition of communism is correct. However, so is the the definition that I think the grandparent is working from.
The interesting thing about the word "communism" is that, while it's easy to claim that something is communist, it's very difficult to argue that something isn't. This is because communism has been applied to so many different social, economic, and political systems - ranging from small groups of 10 or so people all the way up to a world superpower - that the word has essentially lost all meaning.
This is why folks who talk about communist governments frequently use words like Maoist, Bolshevik, Grahamist, etc. rather than the term 'communist.' Otherwise, there are so many drastically different definitions for the term that it's impossible to know what a speaker means by 'communism' in the absence of a wealth strong contextual clues.
Ahem. That huge information boom mostly only happened for the rich. (If you're here reading Slashdot, that almost definitely includes you. I'm not talking rich-as-in-drives-a-Bentley. Even if your car is ten years old and rusted out, at least you have one.)
This laptop is being designed for folks for whom an information boom would be textbooks and teachers. It's being designed for folks who have a hard enough time putting food on the table and clothing on their backs without dropping two months' paycheck on a piece of electronics. In fact, design flaw #1 on this thing is that it is a piece of electronics.
A computer is a not a magic make-everything-better device.
I am not a radio engineer, but here's what I read from "7.4Mbit/s per MHz per Watt." "At one watt, we can cram 7.4 bits into one cycle of a sine wave. At two watts, we can fit 14.8 bits into one cycle of a sine wave, and so on."
That may be, but I'm not taking my tinfoil hat off yet.
We have radio telescopes that can see objects billions of light years away. Folks can build antennas that let them boost the range of their wi-fi reception to a mile on the cheap. I'm sure a motivated wrongdoer can put together a device that can talk to passport RFID chips from a greater distance than intended.
No, it seems to me like exactly what you would want to do if you were a huge corporation pushing a huge product but wanted to create a huge viral marketing campaign without *too* much effort on your part.
If it really is what MS is trying to do, I think it's a master stroke on their part. The 360 is launching way ahead of any console in its generation, so Microsoft has plenty of time to sacrifice initial launch sales in favor of higher sales in the long run.
And, of course, we all know that things that have been around for decades never drive people off the handle. Only new forms of torment really bother people.
Re:I believe in self-regulation
on
The ESRB Bites Back
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
That makes me wonder - what would the film industry do if someone tried to pass a state law making it illegal for minors to watch, purchase, or rent R-rated movies.
At least where I am, plenty of retailers have a policy on this, but there is no actual law about it.
I'm not convinced that removing the rootkit from your computer would be a violation of the DMCA. However, I only read it once, and that was several years ago, and the damn thing is longer and more tangential than a Tolkien book, so I'm not about to go supporting my claims.
The basis of my argument would be that, if you are just taking the rootkit off, it wouldn't be a circumvention of the copy protection, because the rootkit would be reinstalled as soon as the CD is inserted again. Of course, this means that you couldn't remove the rootkit and then someohow prevent it being installed again - you'd have to get rid of the CD.
I think the much hairier question is, is putting one of these Sony DRM-encumbered CDs in a Macintosh a violation of the DMCA?
I think the word was invented by vegetarians who were sick of people who eat fish claiming to be vegetarians. I've never heard anyone who eats fish say it - half of them say "I don't eat meat except for fish" and the other half seem to think that fish is a vegetable.
So the next question is, is taking up some small amount of your time really theft of property or trespassing? There are already laws on the books that say that you can't market using media where the very act of sending that advertisement forces the receiver to pay - cell phone calls, text messages, fax, etc. A do not call list is a different beast, because it applies to land lines where you do't have to pay for incoming calls. So really all you can claim is that they took some of your time, and maybe annoyed you a bit. You are at liberty to hang up, so you can't hold any time past what it took to find out that this is a telemarketer call against them.
But if calling your house is 'invading your property,' and I don't have the right to do so, aren't you implying that nobody has the right to telephone you without your express permission?
I always thought that willy-nilly, made-because-folks-like-it-and-not-because-it's-ra tionally-defensible type laws (like do not call lists) were the exactly kind of thing that Liberitarianism is opposed to.
Symbolic links make the Unix file system non-hierarchical, resulting in multiple valid path names for a given file. This ambiguity is a source of confusion, especially since some shells work overtime to present a consistent view from programs such as pwd, while other programs and the kernel itself do nothing about the problem.
Situations like directory paths to the same location in the filesystem are the only spot where I can see this abiguity really being a big issue. As long as there's some way for me as a human to tell that one configuration file is just a symlink to another, who cares? Yeah, a less-than-clueful user might make some screw-ups if they're using symlinks improperly, but that's not a compelling argument to me - it could be turned against the delete command, too.
Why not just take away symlinks to directories? They're really most useful for files, anyway.
I think the problem is that, after decades of state-sanctioned monopolies, the land line providers aren't used to competition and aren't quite sure how to handle this shiny new phenomenon. I get the impression that they're just now catching on to the fact that they really do have competitors, and that those competitors are way ahead of them.
I agree that ID is a "weak" theory/conjecture, but it is as "scientific" as other speculative hard-to-test concepts considered scientific ideas such as String Theory, Multiple Universes (Anthropic Principle), time travel, etc. The latter are often considered "scientific ideas", and ID should be included in these.
The difference is that the proponents all of these ideas - string theory, multiple universes, etc. will admit that their ideas are unscientific. If you complain to a string theorist that string theory is not falsifiable, he will respond, "True, we haven't found an experiment that could falsify it yet, but we're working on it." If you tell a scientist who likes to write about time travel that all her ideas are just speculation, she will respond, "OF COURSE it's speculation, you doofus!"
If you point out that ID is not falsifiable to an ID proponent, they'll either dodge the question by throwing up a smokescreen of botched scientific experiments related to evolution, or they will throw up a smokescreen of gobbledygook about how eyeballs prove it or whatever.
The reason why many members the first group of things get to be in the science is that the people who are working on these ideas are trying to turn it into science, while ID doesn't get to be in the science club because the ID people merely came up with a baroque consipracy theory and called it a day.
Hear hear. I started using Linux back in high school because it was "cool," but I moved to Linux being my primary desktop OS in college when I decided to be a software pirate.
Wintel is not a hospitable place for people who are neither rich nor unethical.
They started that Linux port years ago. I think the chances of them finishing it before they run out of money are slim to none at this point. The BeOS version is no longer being sold, and has not been sold for years.
Whatever it was, whatever it may be, right here and right now, Gobe Productive is for Windows only.
Yeah, because, you know, nobody else has been complaining about how slow and bloated OO.o is, or how slow and bloated StarOffice was. OO.o is perfect. Everyone in the Linux community is just perfectly satisified with their choice of office software. I know I am.
AbiWord: Not an office suite! (Though a much better start for a word processor than OO.o writer.) Lotus SmartSuite: Windows-only. Gobe Productive: Windows-only.
Moore's law has absolutely nothing to say about whether or not we should have 5.7GHz CPUs by now. Moore's Law refers to transistor counts, not clock speed.
Seriously. I have a 300kbit internet connection (not as fast as standard cable modem service, but faster than 2/3 of Americans), and I hit the "stop" button and take my surfing somewhere else when I encounter Flash sites. I'm sick of the load times. I'm sick of the craptacular web design that seems to be endemic to Flash websites. I'm sick of overdone Flash sites that run poorly on my three-year-old computer. I'm sick of Flash sites bitching that I don't have the latest version installed. I'm sick of sites with text that's too small to read and that I can't make larger because they did the text rendering with Flash. I'm sick of sites that force me to make my browser window larger when I'm using a small window or that only fill a small portion of the window when I'm using a large browser window because Flash sites run one size and one size only.
Businesses that have Flash-based websites with no non-Flash option usually lose my business. I won't even stick around to see the sales pitch. I'll go find a competitor who didn't start their relationship with me by annoying me with some animation-rich but content-deprived piece of self-absorbed fluff.
Flash is for Homestar Runner, not overdesigned menu sets and half-implmeneted-and-mostly-broken re-implementations of things that are already built into HTML such as the button and the scroll bar. It's a toy for web designers who think their primary job responsibility is mucking around with Flash, not making websites that don't suck.
Slashdot used to run quite a few opinion and rant pieces written by the editors. Probably the most well-known of these is JonKatz's "Voices from the Hellmouth" series of essays on his thoughts on the whole high school shooting thing of the late 1990s.
Yeah, this hasn't happened on Slashdot in quite a while, but honestly, I'm glad to see it happen again, and I hope that this means it will happen more in the future.
Of course, I think the reason why it ended in the first place is that the comments section for every single opnion piece that Slashdot ran was filled to the brim with slashbots' knee-jerk rants and flaming of whichever editor wrote the article, to the point that the opinion pieces brought Slashdot comments sections to a new low in that absolutely no intelligent discourse would happen whatsoever.
Given that your flame of CmdrTaco hit "+5, Insightful" so quickly, I have a feeling that things haven't changed much since the first time the slashbot crowd killed opinion pieces on Slashdot. So yean, even if I want them back, I admit they probably shouldn't come back.
It seems that any issue involving kid's safety has the effect of turning of brain cells in some school officials.
Screaming "Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children!?" in a public forum is a well-established and time honored way to grant yourself a license to kill, and I would appreciate it if you would refrain from harshly (and falsely) mischaracterizing this great and noble tradition in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Your definition of communism is correct. However, so is the the definition that I think the grandparent is working from.
The interesting thing about the word "communism" is that, while it's easy to claim that something is communist, it's very difficult to argue that something isn't. This is because communism has been applied to so many different social, economic, and political systems - ranging from small groups of 10 or so people all the way up to a world superpower - that the word has essentially lost all meaning.
This is why folks who talk about communist governments frequently use words like Maoist, Bolshevik, Grahamist, etc. rather than the term 'communist.' Otherwise, there are so many drastically different definitions for the term that it's impossible to know what a speaker means by 'communism' in the absence of a wealth strong contextual clues.
Ahem. That huge information boom mostly only happened for the rich. (If you're here reading Slashdot, that almost definitely includes you. I'm not talking rich-as-in-drives-a-Bentley. Even if your car is ten years old and rusted out, at least you have one.)
This laptop is being designed for folks for whom an information boom would be textbooks and teachers. It's being designed for folks who have a hard enough time putting food on the table and clothing on their backs without dropping two months' paycheck on a piece of electronics. In fact, design flaw #1 on this thing is that it is a piece of electronics.
A computer is a not a magic make-everything-better device.
I am not a radio engineer, but here's what I read from "7.4Mbit/s per MHz per Watt." "At one watt, we can cram 7.4 bits into one cycle of a sine wave. At two watts, we can fit 14.8 bits into one cycle of a sine wave, and so on."
How does that work?
That may be, but I'm not taking my tinfoil hat off yet.
We have radio telescopes that can see objects billions of light years away. Folks can build antennas that let them boost the range of their wi-fi reception to a mile on the cheap. I'm sure a motivated wrongdoer can put together a device that can talk to passport RFID chips from a greater distance than intended.
That seems a bit far-fetched and conspiracy like
No, it seems to me like exactly what you would want to do if you were a huge corporation pushing a huge product but wanted to create a huge viral marketing campaign without *too* much effort on your part.
If it really is what MS is trying to do, I think it's a master stroke on their part. The 360 is launching way ahead of any console in its generation, so Microsoft has plenty of time to sacrifice initial launch sales in favor of higher sales in the long run.
And, of course, we all know that things that have been around for decades never drive people off the handle. Only new forms of torment really bother people.
That makes me wonder - what would the film industry do if someone tried to pass a state law making it illegal for minors to watch, purchase, or rent R-rated movies.
At least where I am, plenty of retailers have a policy on this, but there is no actual law about it.
I'm not convinced that removing the rootkit from your computer would be a violation of the DMCA. However, I only read it once, and that was several years ago, and the damn thing is longer and more tangential than a Tolkien book, so I'm not about to go supporting my claims.
The basis of my argument would be that, if you are just taking the rootkit off, it wouldn't be a circumvention of the copy protection, because the rootkit would be reinstalled as soon as the CD is inserted again. Of course, this means that you couldn't remove the rootkit and then someohow prevent it being installed again - you'd have to get rid of the CD.
I think the much hairier question is, is putting one of these Sony DRM-encumbered CDs in a Macintosh a violation of the DMCA?
I think the word was invented by vegetarians who were sick of people who eat fish claiming to be vegetarians. I've never heard anyone who eats fish say it - half of them say "I don't eat meat except for fish" and the other half seem to think that fish is a vegetable.
So the next question is, is taking up some small amount of your time really theft of property or trespassing? There are already laws on the books that say that you can't market using media where the very act of sending that advertisement forces the receiver to pay - cell phone calls, text messages, fax, etc. A do not call list is a different beast, because it applies to land lines where you do't have to pay for incoming calls. So really all you can claim is that they took some of your time, and maybe annoyed you a bit. You are at liberty to hang up, so you can't hold any time past what it took to find out that this is a telemarketer call against them.
No, he's a pescatarian. (The only meat he eats is fish.)
Darl McBride. Steve Ballmer. Steve Jobs.
Reporting on CEO drug use is not a new thing around here.
But if calling your house is 'invading your property,' and I don't have the right to do so, aren't you implying that nobody has the right to telephone you without your express permission?
a tionally-defensible type laws (like do not call lists) were the exactly kind of thing that Liberitarianism is opposed to.
I always thought that willy-nilly, made-because-folks-like-it-and-not-because-it's-r
Symbolic links make the Unix file system non-hierarchical, resulting in multiple valid path names for a given file. This ambiguity is a source of confusion, especially since some shells work overtime to present a consistent view from programs such as pwd, while other programs and the kernel itself do nothing about the problem.
Situations like directory paths to the same location in the filesystem are the only spot where I can see this abiguity really being a big issue. As long as there's some way for me as a human to tell that one configuration file is just a symlink to another, who cares? Yeah, a less-than-clueful user might make some screw-ups if they're using symlinks improperly, but that's not a compelling argument to me - it could be turned against the delete command, too.
Why not just take away symlinks to directories? They're really most useful for files, anyway.
Wouldn't a do not call list be something that runs counter to liberitarianism?
(No flame, no troll - honest question.)
I think the problem is that, after decades of state-sanctioned monopolies, the land line providers aren't used to competition and aren't quite sure how to handle this shiny new phenomenon. I get the impression that they're just now catching on to the fact that they really do have competitors, and that those competitors are way ahead of them.
I agree that ID is a "weak" theory/conjecture, but it is as "scientific" as other speculative hard-to-test concepts considered scientific ideas such as String Theory, Multiple Universes (Anthropic Principle), time travel, etc. The latter are often considered "scientific ideas", and ID should be included in these.
The difference is that the proponents all of these ideas - string theory, multiple universes, etc. will admit that their ideas are unscientific. If you complain to a string theorist that string theory is not falsifiable, he will respond, "True, we haven't found an experiment that could falsify it yet, but we're working on it." If you tell a scientist who likes to write about time travel that all her ideas are just speculation, she will respond, "OF COURSE it's speculation, you doofus!"
If you point out that ID is not falsifiable to an ID proponent, they'll either dodge the question by throwing up a smokescreen of botched scientific experiments related to evolution, or they will throw up a smokescreen of gobbledygook about how eyeballs prove it or whatever.
The reason why many members the first group of things get to be in the science is that the people who are working on these ideas are trying to turn it into science, while ID doesn't get to be in the science club because the ID people merely came up with a baroque consipracy theory and called it a day.
Hear hear. I started using Linux back in high school because it was "cool," but I moved to Linux being my primary desktop OS in college when I decided to be a software pirate.
Wintel is not a hospitable place for people who are neither rich nor unethical.
They started that Linux port years ago. I think the chances of them finishing it before they run out of money are slim to none at this point. The BeOS version is no longer being sold, and has not been sold for years.
Whatever it was, whatever it may be, right here and right now, Gobe Productive is for Windows only.
Yeah, because, you know, nobody else has been complaining about how slow and bloated OO.o is, or how slow and bloated StarOffice was. OO.o is perfect. Everyone in the Linux community is just perfectly satisified with their choice of office software. I know I am.
AbiWord: Not an office suite! (Though a much better start for a word processor than OO.o writer.)
Lotus SmartSuite: Windows-only.
Gobe Productive: Windows-only.
Moore's law has absolutely nothing to say about whether or not we should have 5.7GHz CPUs by now. Moore's Law refers to transistor counts, not clock speed.
Seriously. I have a 300kbit internet connection (not as fast as standard cable modem service, but faster than 2/3 of Americans), and I hit the "stop" button and take my surfing somewhere else when I encounter Flash sites. I'm sick of the load times. I'm sick of the craptacular web design that seems to be endemic to Flash websites. I'm sick of overdone Flash sites that run poorly on my three-year-old computer. I'm sick of Flash sites bitching that I don't have the latest version installed. I'm sick of sites with text that's too small to read and that I can't make larger because they did the text rendering with Flash. I'm sick of sites that force me to make my browser window larger when I'm using a small window or that only fill a small portion of the window when I'm using a large browser window because Flash sites run one size and one size only.
Businesses that have Flash-based websites with no non-Flash option usually lose my business. I won't even stick around to see the sales pitch. I'll go find a competitor who didn't start their relationship with me by annoying me with some animation-rich but content-deprived piece of self-absorbed fluff.
Flash is for Homestar Runner, not overdesigned menu sets and half-implmeneted-and-mostly-broken re-implementations of things that are already built into HTML such as the button and the scroll bar. It's a toy for web designers who think their primary job responsibility is mucking around with Flash, not making websites that don't suck.
Slashdot used to run quite a few opinion and rant pieces written by the editors. Probably the most well-known of these is JonKatz's "Voices from the Hellmouth" series of essays on his thoughts on the whole high school shooting thing of the late 1990s.
Yeah, this hasn't happened on Slashdot in quite a while, but honestly, I'm glad to see it happen again, and I hope that this means it will happen more in the future.
Of course, I think the reason why it ended in the first place is that the comments section for every single opnion piece that Slashdot ran was filled to the brim with slashbots' knee-jerk rants and flaming of whichever editor wrote the article, to the point that the opinion pieces brought Slashdot comments sections to a new low in that absolutely no intelligent discourse would happen whatsoever.
Given that your flame of CmdrTaco hit "+5, Insightful" so quickly, I have a feeling that things haven't changed much since the first time the slashbot crowd killed opinion pieces on Slashdot. So yean, even if I want them back, I admit they probably shouldn't come back.
It seems that any issue involving kid's safety has the effect of turning of brain cells in some school officials.
Screaming "Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children!?" in a public forum is a well-established and time honored way to grant yourself a license to kill, and I would appreciate it if you would refrain from harshly (and falsely) mischaracterizing this great and noble tradition in the future.