The word "hackers" was successfully successfully co-opted long, long, long ago ("a person who illegally gains access to and sometimes tampers with information in a computer system"), so don't fault Apple's (currently correct and appropriate) use of the word, and save us the tiresome lectures.
The quote is correct with the older and alternative definition of hacker; arguably it's wrong with the modern meaning; to reverse-engineer a protocol to allow wider or fair use, is entirely within hacker ethics.
"95.73 percent on June 4 to 94.73 percent on July 6." Means that ~IE has gone from 4.27% to 5.27%.
If IE had 50%, you'd be right about the insignificance of 1%, which could easily be sampling error, but in this case, the 1% of the whole requires an awful lot of low-probability hits, since those without IE are relatively few. The growth in ~IE is roughly 23.4%!
It may be worth mentioning that the GNU Project urges people to refuse to work with Sun, and to instead use the free alternatives to the non-free Sun software.
When I want freedom I'll work with whomever I damn well please.
To "urge" is not to "tell". It's a request, not an order.
We need to replace these proprietary software products, not use them.
You have to use what works, FOSS doesn't have decent replacements for most things, sorry RMS there's work to be done, we don't all get free grant money.
But not everyone needs to write the program, so maybe it's still a possible aim.
I proposed a tax on computer supplies and equipment as one possible way to fund free software development.
I guess the grants don't give him enough free money.
I disagree with him, as you do, but I doubt that he's out for himself, here. More likely: he wants there to be more programmers of free software. That we don't want it to be funded in this way is simply a political difference.
He wants to be the one to tell you what is right and what is wrong as regards software, and what you do with it.
I believe that this is called "trolling". For someone to promote their beliefs is no restraint upon your freedom.
No, the quote is not poorly written; it is your position that is poorly reasoned. To someone who's about to ship an article of merchandise and has to worry about whether or not they'll receive payment, what's relevant is the probability of fraud given whatever information they have about the order; in symbols, if we only take into account the country to which we are shipping, this is
P(fraud | country X).
The probability of a random fraudulent order coming from some country X --
P(country X | fraud)
-- is irrelevant, as it swaps what you know (country) with what you don't know (whether or not the order is fraudulent). Yes, P(Macedonia | fraud) is going to be low because of a small Internet population; nevertheless, P(fraud | Macedonia) can be relatively high if a relatively high PROPORTION of orders from Macedonia are fraudulent.
I think we will see MS engaging in many more examples of fighting fire with fire in the years to come, and 5 years from now Microsoft will probably have released more software under Shared Source, and some under some kind of actual open source license, than any of us would now believe possible. By sharing source and even outright open-sourcing some software, they hope to further stave off the inevitable. It might help a little, in some areas, but far less than they might think. What draws people to Free and Open Source Software is precisely that it is free and open; if it was just shared, nobody would much care about Linux and *BSD; it wouldn't be that much of an improvement on Windows, for many.
I'm English, as are many slashdotters, so your intervention is presumptuous.
Additionally, you're wrong: 'whilst' has a slight connotation of either/or, whereas 'while' doesn't, especially. Substitute 'whilst' and 'while' for 'whereas' in the previous sentence to see this for yourself.
Shut the fuckers down. Have any IPs that hit child porn sites logged and investigated.
If I were using BT, I'd ask "which IPs?", because whilst I agree that access should be stopped, I think that we have become hysterical, and that testing their technology would reassure me that the system worked. Not only that, but it would inhibit mass arrest. Huge numbers of people who access child porn are in fact ill. Cut the link, and the job is done. Imprisonment of the ill is unnecessary if they no longer are able to feed their "fantasy".
"Paradigm" means "pattern", roughly, so that (say) a new physical theory with a radically different foundation maps out a different pattern of thought.
Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions holds that such theories cannot be compared locally with contending theories, and thus the new pattern simply supplants the old pattern globally, sometimes as a result of old-timers dying off, as many refuse to shift paradigm.
Richard Feynman's "QED" is a brilliant Layman's introduction to Quantum Electrodynamics, which is worth reading even if you know a thing or two about Quantum Theory.
Feynman's "Lectures on Physics Volume III" is an excellent first serious text. He is truly a master of explanation. In fact, read volumes I & II if you have the time (classical mechanics and classical electrodynamics).
Although HQ have a lot of power, our mod points make the bulk of slashdot.
Hence to a large approximation, "Slashdot should ban these moderators" should read "use your Meta-Mod powers to punish (eventually disallow) these moderators".
It's an issue of personal and collective responsibility.
Thank-you. I don't think that I've been perfect though. I did say that your logic in our previous discussion was lacking when in fact there were really crossed wires due to coming from different perspectives; had I taken more care, I would not have said that.
I think that I'm probably just being cynical, really; I've read too many articles on jury-stuffing, and it lends me to looking at the interests and dynamics likely to be involved, being aware that logical skill is unusual, and that those who have it don't always share others' emotional responses, so that they are less-known quantities.
In your case, though, I suspect that the prosecution thought that maybe you would sympathise with the former boyfriend. They have no easy way of telling how extreme or moderate you are.
I know that their prices are too high. I know that music piracy is cutting into their profits some, but not as much as they make it out to be. I know that if CDs were priced at $5 or whatever, many P2P downloaders say they would buy instead, but would they? Or would they say it's still too high, or just buy the one every other month that they really really want, while downloading three or four others?
They might but more stuff as they do as well as continuing to download, but I suspect that the labels have in fact judged the price-point correctly for maximising their profits, so I doubt that the demand would increase by enough to render them the profits that they're used to. The artists might get a better deal, 'though: direct distribution is more feasible, so they're likely to end up with a larger slice of the remaining pie. Whether it's more or less in total is, of course, a matter of speculation, and maybe some reseach; how much do they get out of cheaper CDs at the moment?
Well you could try swapping away jurors who are perceived to be neutral, but it'd be foolish. Being the first person to swap a jury member puts you at a slight disadvantage, since the bad guys now have one more swap than you. And you probably don't have any control over the replacement juror either.
The thing is that truth-seeking is not neutrality, but is rather a stance that upsets calculations of strategy on both sides, since a truth-seeker on the jury upsets normal social dynamics. Consider an Aspergic scientist on the dury when you're attempting to establish whether someone is of good character: this character would inhibit the others from jumping to conclusions in either direction. Not only that, but his/her responses to the evidence presented would not be the normal response, so that far from being "neutral", his interpretation of events would be highly non-standard.
My point is that this character would make the jury harder to predict, and would therefore be likely to be eliminated by at least one side, and probably both. If it's a close call, you don't want to be landed with an unknown factor.
Also, I would posit that those who are strongly motivated by truth are rare, so the probability of replacement with another is small, so there isn't much risk if you do replace them!
When it's all about "sides", something important is missing. Both sides selecting jurors has to result in "balance of prejudice" and not "commitment to truth". In fact the latter quality could be seen as dangerous to both sides: an unknown quantity; better to have someone "on your team"!
Well, for the record, I think that Microsoft should aim for an ethical policy and to obey the law, but for fines to result in raising the price seems... a little odd to me.
In truth, they've recalculated the price point, and the fines they've been subjected to are a good PR reason to charge the higher price. The fines cannot be the real reason, unless people's tastes have changed as a result of them.
Bad economics with psuedo-moral justification isn't that rare though, is it?
Why so? Simple: the optimum for your good depends upon a prediction of the future, and the current state of the market, not the past. The best price-point for MS cannot really be different because of the fines that they've suffered: that's set by supply and demand curves, surely? Certainly if Microsoft's fines ate into its finances so much as to force them onto a lower-risk path, they might change, but MS still have a lot of money.
Just about the only mechanism that I can see for the difference is if MS won hatred or sympathy sufficent to change what customers would be willing to spend on software.
Interesting view of theft...that then implies that identity theft is not theft. They still have their identity, it just has been infringed upon by someone else. Now I'm not saying my parent post was implying that music 'piracy' was not wrong but it give copyright infringement a different perspective. Right now people seem to view downloading a few songs or pirated video games in the same way they would view stealing Bill Gates identity.
You're absolutely right. Identity "theft" is not quite as bad as theft. If you could steal my identity, that would be heinous indeed! Copyright infringement is clearly a lesser crime, as true identity theft would involve murder.
It's important to realise that something can be bad for reasons other than the category that it is in. In this case, one could say "property vs identity has a 1:1000 importance ratio" and "copyright infringement vs theft has an importance ratio of 1:100" (say), so that identity infringment is still 10 times worse than ordinary theft!
The numbers here are made up, but I'm sure that you get the idea. If you think that the numbers underrate the seriousness of serious crimes, square or cube them, but allow for the fact that some identity _is_ caught up in property for most people, whether or not it "should" be: consider if your house were burgled.
Slashdot Mirror
If IE had 50%, you'd be right about the insignificance of 1%, which could easily be sampling error, but in this case, the 1% of the whole requires an awful lot of low-probability hits, since those without IE are relatively few. The growth in ~IE is roughly 23.4%!
The second probability is far from irrelevent. In fact, the first probability is proprtional to it!
I'm English, as are many slashdotters, so your intervention is presumptuous.
Additionally, you're wrong: 'whilst' has a slight connotation of either/or, whereas 'while' doesn't, especially. Substitute 'whilst' and 'while' for 'whereas' in the previous sentence to see this for yourself.
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:
Nah, it's "umo\t"! No 'n' required.
Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions holds that such theories cannot be compared locally with contending theories, and thus the new pattern simply supplants the old pattern globally, sometimes as a result of old-timers dying off, as many refuse to shift paradigm.
Mods: the proper catagory for this is "funny".
Have you seen this?
Feynman's "Lectures on Physics Volume III" is an excellent first serious text. He is truly a master of explanation. In fact, read volumes I & II if you have the time (classical mechanics and classical electrodynamics).
Hence to a large approximation, "Slashdot should ban these moderators" should read "use your Meta-Mod powers to punish (eventually disallow) these moderators".
It's an issue of personal and collective responsibility.
Thank-you. I don't think that I've been perfect though. I did say that your logic in our previous discussion was lacking when in fact there were really crossed wires due to coming from different perspectives; had I taken more care, I would not have said that.
In your case, though, I suspect that the prosecution thought that maybe you would sympathise with the former boyfriend. They have no easy way of telling how extreme or moderate you are.
My point is that this character would make the jury harder to predict, and would therefore be likely to be eliminated by at least one side, and probably both. If it's a close call, you don't want to be landed with an unknown factor.
Also, I would posit that those who are strongly motivated by truth are rare, so the probability of replacement with another is small, so there isn't much risk if you do replace them!
When it's all about "sides", something important is missing. Both sides selecting jurors has to result in "balance of prejudice" and not "commitment to truth". In fact the latter quality could be seen as dangerous to both sides: an unknown quantity; better to have someone "on your team"!
In truth, they've recalculated the price point, and the fines they've been subjected to are a good PR reason to charge the higher price. The fines cannot be the real reason, unless people's tastes have changed as a result of them.
Bad economics with psuedo-moral justification isn't that rare though, is it?
Just about the only mechanism that I can see for the difference is if MS won hatred or sympathy sufficent to change what customers would be willing to spend on software.
It's important to realise that something can be bad for reasons other than the category that it is in. In this case, one could say "property vs identity has a 1:1000 importance ratio" and "copyright infringement vs theft has an importance ratio of 1:100" (say), so that identity infringment is still 10 times worse than ordinary theft!
The numbers here are made up, but I'm sure that you get the idea. If you think that the numbers underrate the seriousness of serious crimes, square or cube them, but allow for the fact that some identity _is_ caught up in property for most people, whether or not it "should" be: consider if your house were burgled.