There are no mod points going around today? Muahahahaha now I can troll with impunity!
Hmm let's see, In Soviet Russia, a beowulf cluster of hot grits imagines YOU down Natalie Portman's pants, my new insensitive clod overlord. Wait, that's not trolling, that's just mixing cliche's... Let's try again... Linux == communism, SCO == teh win. I [img src="heart.gif"] the RIAA. How's that?
Uh-oh, if the moderation system gets fixed today, this might be modded off topic. Encrypt your bluetooth communications. No, someone's probably already said that, now the post is redundant. Argh, this is too difficult, I hope they fix Slashdot soon.
A: "From days of long ago, from uncharted regions of the universe, comes a legend; the legend of Voltron, Defender of the Universe, a mighty robot, loved by good, feared by evil. As Voltron's legend grew, peace settled across the galaxy. On Planet Earth, a Galaxy Alliance was formed. Together with the good planets of the solar system, they maintained peace throughout the universe, until a new horrible menace threatened the galaxy. Voltron was needed once more. This is the story of the super force of space explorers, specially trained and sent by the Alliance to bring back Voltron, Defender of the Universe!" (from the Voltron opening narriation)
Finder needs an equivalent to View, List in Windows Explorer. I don't want the full detailed listing, nor the big icons, nor the NeXT-like view. Just a nicely sorted list of filenames with a small icon next to them. While we're at it, View, Thumbnails would be pretty handy too.
Also QuickTime should seriously stop regarding full-screen playback as a "Pro" feature to charge extra for. Windows Media Player may be evil, but at least it can play a full-screen AVI file.
Why wouldn't they? A 15" widescreen (9:16 ratio) has almost identical total surface area to a 14" standard (3:4 ratio) screen, so despite the $150 figure you throw out, the cost to mass-produce them should be quite comparable. Yet of the two, the widescreen sounds more impressive (ooh it's got a widescreen) beats the other screen on the spec sheet (15" > 14"), and to many people looks larger. And going from standard to widescreen without bumping up the diagonal would actually save Apple some money, as a screen with the same diagonal measurement could be produced with a smaller surface area of LCD.
What I don't see is a reason for computer RPGs to use any stats the user can see. Stats were just a crutch for pen&paper RPGs since you couldn't do a proper simulation.
Players of RPGs, particularly computerized ones, since those are more about killing monsters than in-character social interaction, tend to like to min-max and find the best ways to optimize their combat effectiveness. Is the "Glowing Sword of Smiting" you just found better than the "Mithril Mace" you're currently wielding? If the stats are presented, you can easily see the advantages and disadvantages of each. Without them there's a lot of frustrating guesswork, when if your character is really some master warrior, he should be able to figure out which one hits harder, swings faster, or whatever. Also without stats, deciding between different optional skills can be frustrating. If it just says "Makes enchantment spells more effective" players will wonder... Which ones does it improve? How does it make them more effective?
Early on in EverQuest I, a lot of the numbers were hidden from players. Your character sheet would just say "Very Good" for skill with slashing weapons (though the underlying number scrolled by briefly as the skill improved); haste items, bard instruments, etc. varied greatly in quality, though clicking on the item gave no clue of their relative merits. Important attributes like one's movement speed, amount of mana, standing with various factions, or experience points were never displayed in a numeric form. None of this particularly led people to role-play more, instead they just conducted elaborate experiments do determine the underlying values, or scour the Internet for the information, or in some cases even hack the client-server communication to intercept the hidden values. Later on, several of these things were displayed numerically to the players.
Presumably, in their filing and in the court transcript, the plaintiffs mentioned the location of the defendant's Web site, mp3sforfree.com. In providing a direct reference of where on the Internet to find purportedly illegal content, they are themselves providing a link to what is, by their own testimony, a bad, evil site. So why should the plaintiffs be allowed to state the location of dubious Web content, but not the defendant?
Also, couldn't the precedent that you are guilty by association just for mentioning where something illegal is going on have a chilling effect on journalism? If the paper runs a story that says "nearby residents, tired of drug-dealing and prostitution on Maple Street..." could somebody say "OMG they just told everybody where to find drug-dealing and prostitution!" and launch a successful lawsuit againt the newspaper? Or is this like patents, where everything is magically different because it tacks on "on teh interweb"?
Why should this be a top level domain? It seems like "mobi.slashdot.org" would work just as well as "www.slashdot.mobi", with the added advantages to Website operators of not having to maintain a separate domain, and to users of knowing for sure that the former is actually affiliated with the "slashdot.org" domain (less fake sites, phishing, etc.). So what are the advantages of the TLD approach that caused this to get approved?
What I always use to shut up the right-wingers is how can they be pro-capital punishment and pro-life at the same time. One of their views doesn't jive with the other.
What exactly is so inconsistent about valuing the lives of innocent children more than the lives of mass murderers? How does it not "jive" to believe that people start off with a fundamental human right to live, and can lose that right only if they rob others of it themselves? That they don't just lose it by being an inconvenience to their mother. One might just as easily wonder at the left-wingers, who hold that babies are a dime a dozen, whereas serial killers are something precious whose lives are to be vigorously fought for.
Everyone might have [biases], but it's what you DO with them that makes you who you are. That's why Fox News is horrible and indymedia (huge generalization) is just as bad. If you could seperate your bias from your journalism then you'd be...a professional.
While it's fashionable here to bash Fox News, they're hardly the best example of bias getting in the way of journalistic professionalism. Take a look at media outlets like the New York Times or CBS where political spin manages to supercede news reporting so badly that you have a complete breakdown in journalistic integrity. While Fox News may lean to the right about as much as your typical news organization (ABC, CNN, whatever) does to the left, and imply that they don't with their "fair and balanced" slogan, how exactly does this make them "horrible" and "just as bad" as some fringe news source for political radicals?
You seem to be confused about what a vigilante is, dictionary.com gives me this: "One who takes or advocates the taking of law enforcement into one's own hands." Note it doesn't say anything about them forcing others to agree with their views or take part in them. If you decide to take legal actions in your own hands, then you are, by definition, a vigilante. So it does apply here, just because they don't force anyone to use their lists doesn't change that.
Law is force. This is why you hear phrases like a measure "having the force of law" or police "enforcing the law". The actions of vigilantes also involve force, such as some type of violent retribution against a criminal. If someone was compelling others to use their lists, that would also be a form of force. You concede that they are not doing that, but miss the importance of the distinction.
If I went around seizing other people's money by force, that be unlawful. If I put up a Web page asking for people to donate money of their own volition, it wouldn't. Likewise there is a big difference between just disseminating information to those who willingly choose to make use of it ("207.46.199.30 are a bunch of spammers, you might want to dump emails you get from them"), and kidnapping / executing / whatever anyone who dares have contact with that IP. Spam lists are suggestions, whereas laws have consequences for not following them, like fines or incarceration. If the spam list providers aren't punishing those who decline to adopt their lists, the label of vigilante would appear to be going too far.
It would appear that the company more or less approached him and said. "We get to hijack your domain, steal all your source code, you stop all work on the project, tell your mirrors to do the same, and avoid referring to our company by name. You can either agree to this extortion, or fight it out in court where we have millions to pay a legal staff and you have jack." Okay, they probably spun it with language a bit more favorable to their firm, but that would be the gist of it.
Agents armed with Sig-Sauer 229 pistols and MP5 semi-automatic machine guns swooped in
"Semi-automatic" means fires only one round when the trigger is pulled. "machine guns" means fires lots of rounds when the trigger is pulled. The sentence is an oxymoron, and implies the reporter is just throwing buzzwords around without knowing what he is talking about. To correct the sentence, this is the Secret Service we are talking about. They are not going to mess around with some semi-auto HK94 type of firearm. The phrase the author was looking for is "fully-automatic".
Hopefully the other aspects of the article are more factual and carefully checked.
If I can ignore the copyrights of the MPAA/RIAA/EULA and use their material as I see fit, then by the same token, I should be able to ignore the GPL and use the code any way I see fit, including using it in a piece of commercial code without making my code GPL as well. Because the MPAA/RIAA/EULA defines in which ways that you are allowed to copy copyrighted material...
For the most part, your copyright-RIAA-MPAA-GPL analogy is pretty good, but it completely misses the mark in adding EULA to the list. Copyrights, the GPL, etc. all deal with who is allowed to make duplicates of a copyrighted work, and under what conditions. The default is "you can't copy copyrighted works", but content creators can then loosen this a bit by stipulating "unless you pay me a lot of money", "unless you distribute the source code too" or whatever appeals to them.
A EULA, on the other hand, tries to define under what conditions you can USE a particular work. Rather than specifying a set of exceptions to the powers the creator has under the law, a EULA is an attempt to grab additional powers over and above what copyright grants, typically by holding a piece of software a user has already bought and paid for hostage and not letting it run until the user "agrees" to a bunch of unilaterally dictated conditions that were never part of the purchase agreement. These demands don't necessarily deal with copying, as copyright does, but make crazy stipulations like "you can't look at how this works", "you must use this only on platform such-and-such", "you can't sell this when you're done with it" and so on.
The reason they are doing "bad things" is because they can't get a job in the first place.
Your assertion that people only turn to crime because of unemployment is flawed. Consider employee theft, embezzlement, book-cooking, and such... all crimes committed by people who are gainfully employed, and thus, according to your reasoning, model citizens.
Would someone please explain to me why this comment would be marked as "Flamebait"? Still trying to get a handle on this mod thing.
I'm guessing it was some mod who doesn't get the concept that the segments in 10.3.9 are separate fields (like an IP address) rather than one big floating point decimal, thinks "10.310 < 10.39, OMG, this poster wants to make OS X go backwards!" and clicked the flamebait button.
Last night I was usiing the old Azureus client on my Mac (which is running Tiger) and it told me the new version was available. I did what it said (click yes I would like to update, click yes I would like to restart) and the new decentralized version was up and running, and seemed to get better throughput than the old one... rather than stopping for a while, torrents without enough seeds would usually slow to a trickle but keep making progress.
I don't know anything about your particular Java problem, I wish I could help. But, I just wanted to chime in to say that despite what a few people have posted, the new Azureus works fine on Macs, including under Tiger.
I'd say "The OS is there for whoever needs it" is a bit of a stretch. People running the beta version can't step up to the production release unless they buy a whole new computer. For all practical purposes, this software is still a beta, no matter what Microsoft's marketing department chooses to label it.
This pastor is a disgrace. The people who are opposed to gay marriage are actually very disturbed people who are in denial.
How amazingly arrogant. To categorically assume that anyone who might dare to think differently than you about a complex and controversial social topic must automatically be doing so because they are "very disturbed" and "in denial". Which side of this debate is supposed to be the closed-minded and intolerant ones again?
The love that two men or two women feel for each other is no different than the love that a heterosexual couple experiences.
What about the love a man feels for his seven wives, or for a goat, or for some member of his immediate family? Some people will say as long as everybody involved is okay with it, whatever floats their boats. Others might find unconventional relationships to be immoral or aberrent. Such questions can be particularly controversial when the issue of marriage is added, since it juxtaposes what is originally a religous ceremony with a lifestyle that is at odds with the teachings of the predominant religion in America. Depending upon one's values, they might find themselves on either side of such a debate, but only those too ignorant to consider others' perspectives, such as yourself, could be accused of covering their ears and screaming loudly, 'I'm not listening!'
I really hate sharing this country with such superstitious and frightened people.
At least you admit your intolerance is based out of your hate for those who think differently than you do. But, when it comes to people who think their way is the "plain truth", that everyone else must be "very disturbed" and who "hate" such people, are they really any different from you at all?
There are a couple of flaws with communism in practice that cause it to break down pretty spectacularly. First, there is the problem of "some are more equal than others", that rather than everybody really being equal comrades, a ruling body begins to amass power for itself and be corrupted by it. They tend to be very repressive of anything that could be seen as a threat to their power (religion, democracy demonstrations, free press, etc.)
Then, there is the problem of getting people to do stuff. In a capitalist economy, people work because they want money. Under communism, they are supposed to want to do things for the good of the motherland and whatnot, but since (critical distinction from open source community) they aren't there by choice, not everyone is going to be interested in that. So the aformentioned ruling body starts to implement brutal methods to keep the people in line. Work quotas, secret police, deportations to Siberia, etc.
The whole philosophy is very much the opposite of the ideas upon America is based, like the First Amenedment, or the "American Dream" (achieving a desirable standard of living for oneself through hard work). During the 20th century, communism was also being forcibly spread to nation after nation, with those who tried to leave or oppose it often killed. The communist countries also aligned to form the Warsaw Pact, which threatened to destroy the United States. This combination of different + spreading + repressive + hostile frightened a lot of people.
Not that people RTFA on a normal article, but in this case any geek worth his salt will have Doubleclick blocked in their/etc/hosts, router tables, Adblock filters, or what have you and in the case of the tinfoil hat types, all of the above just to be sure. I really don't think it's worth turning my filters off just to hear Doubleclick spin the history of online advertising to make themselves sound good.
I think for games where the focus is on actual role-play instead of the hack-and-slash grind, perma death makes a lot of sense. Paper and pencil games use this concept. You die, grab a blank character sheet. MUSH'es pretty much follow the same approach.
One MUD I recall offered an interesting balance. The focus was on role-play, but there were MOBs (computer-controlled characters) to fight also. If you lost to them, you got knocked unconscious and suffered some penalties similar to what MMOGs have. On the other hand, if in the course of the role-playing with other characters or GM's, your character wound up dead, you were expected to delete them because they were no longer part of the storyline. This let you do a little of the griding type stuff when there was no RP going on without worrying about dying to out-of-character things like a bad ISP, and it also maintained a similar feel to paper-and-pencil, since if your actions in the context of the RP story lead to you dying, you were dead.
Wouldn't work for MMO's at all however. A lot of times, conflicts involved players role-playing and coming to a consensus about the consequences, which they all then accepted. GMs aren't always around to arbitrate, and letting the game engine decide things turns it from role playing events out into typing "kill soando". It really only works with a community of people are all willing to put roleplay and storyline ahead of their own ub3rn355 which isn't going to happen on a MMO.
What does it mean to send a spam mail anyway? There's fraud, since the claims in spam are bogus. Harassment, as it is thrust upon people who have made clear their intention not to receive such things (if I'm blocking "viagra" changing it to "v1agra" is deliberate harassment). Theft of service, as the victims' bandwidth costs money. Computer tresspass, as spammers build their zombie bot nets. Spammers also engage in misrepresentation, send pornographic material to minors, create a public nuisance, and plenty of other criminal activities.
And yet for each offense, which involves a whole array of illegal activities, this guy gets what, a fraction of a second in prison? And you complain about this punishment being "a little bit extreme"? Hardly. How about we tabulate up every law he broke in the course of his spamming career, and give him nonconcurrent sentences for each offense he's committed. I imagine it would add up to a lot more than 9 years.
Slashdot Mirror
The "The" must be capitalized, as must "University," "Texas" and "Austin." I shit you not. This is the official rule.
Or you could just refer to it as "t.u."...
There are no mod points going around today? Muahahahaha now I can troll with impunity!
Hmm let's see, In Soviet Russia, a beowulf cluster of hot grits imagines YOU down Natalie Portman's pants, my new insensitive clod overlord. Wait, that's not trolling, that's just mixing cliche's... Let's try again... Linux == communism, SCO == teh win. I [img src="heart.gif"] the RIAA. How's that?
Uh-oh, if the moderation system gets fixed today, this might be modded off topic. Encrypt your bluetooth communications. No, someone's probably already said that, now the post is redundant. Argh, this is too difficult, I hope they fix Slashdot soon.
Q: Who the heck is Volton?
A: "From days of long ago, from uncharted regions of the universe, comes a legend; the legend of Voltron, Defender of the Universe, a mighty robot, loved by good, feared by evil. As Voltron's legend grew, peace settled across the galaxy. On Planet Earth, a Galaxy Alliance was formed. Together with the good planets of the solar system, they maintained peace throughout the universe, until a new horrible menace threatened the galaxy. Voltron was needed once more. This is the story of the super force of space explorers, specially trained and sent by the Alliance to bring back Voltron, Defender of the Universe!" (from the Voltron opening narriation)
Finder needs an equivalent to View, List in Windows Explorer. I don't want the full detailed listing, nor the big icons, nor the NeXT-like view. Just a nicely sorted list of filenames with a small icon next to them. While we're at it, View, Thumbnails would be pretty handy too.
Also QuickTime should seriously stop regarding full-screen playback as a "Pro" feature to charge extra for. Windows Media Player may be evil, but at least it can play a full-screen AVI file.
Why would Apple make a widescreen laptop?
Why wouldn't they? A 15" widescreen (9:16 ratio) has almost identical total surface area to a 14" standard (3:4 ratio) screen, so despite the $150 figure you throw out, the cost to mass-produce them should be quite comparable. Yet of the two, the widescreen sounds more impressive (ooh it's got a widescreen) beats the other screen on the spec sheet (15" > 14"), and to many people looks larger. And going from standard to widescreen without bumping up the diagonal would actually save Apple some money, as a screen with the same diagonal measurement could be produced with a smaller surface area of LCD.
What I don't see is a reason for computer RPGs to use any stats the user can see. Stats were just a crutch for pen&paper RPGs since you couldn't do a proper simulation.
Players of RPGs, particularly computerized ones, since those are more about killing monsters than in-character social interaction, tend to like to min-max and find the best ways to optimize their combat effectiveness. Is the "Glowing Sword of Smiting" you just found better than the "Mithril Mace" you're currently wielding? If the stats are presented, you can easily see the advantages and disadvantages of each. Without them there's a lot of frustrating guesswork, when if your character is really some master warrior, he should be able to figure out which one hits harder, swings faster, or whatever. Also without stats, deciding between different optional skills can be frustrating. If it just says "Makes enchantment spells more effective" players will wonder... Which ones does it improve? How does it make them more effective?
Early on in EverQuest I, a lot of the numbers were hidden from players. Your character sheet would just say "Very Good" for skill with slashing weapons (though the underlying number scrolled by briefly as the skill improved); haste items, bard instruments, etc. varied greatly in quality, though clicking on the item gave no clue of their relative merits. Important attributes like one's movement speed, amount of mana, standing with various factions, or experience points were never displayed in a numeric form. None of this particularly led people to role-play more, instead they just conducted elaborate experiments do determine the underlying values, or scour the Internet for the information, or in some cases even hack the client-server communication to intercept the hidden values. Later on, several of these things were displayed numerically to the players.
Presumably, in their filing and in the court transcript, the plaintiffs mentioned the location of the defendant's Web site, mp3sforfree.com. In providing a direct reference of where on the Internet to find purportedly illegal content, they are themselves providing a link to what is, by their own testimony, a bad, evil site. So why should the plaintiffs be allowed to state the location of dubious Web content, but not the defendant?
Also, couldn't the precedent that you are guilty by association just for mentioning where something illegal is going on have a chilling effect on journalism? If the paper runs a story that says "nearby residents, tired of drug-dealing and prostitution on Maple Street..." could somebody say "OMG they just told everybody where to find drug-dealing and prostitution!" and launch a successful lawsuit againt the newspaper? Or is this like patents, where everything is magically different because it tacks on "on teh interweb"?
Why should this be a top level domain? It seems like "mobi.slashdot.org" would work just as well as "www.slashdot.mobi", with the added advantages to Website operators of not having to maintain a separate domain, and to users of knowing for sure that the former is actually affiliated with the "slashdot.org" domain (less fake sites, phishing, etc.). So what are the advantages of the TLD approach that caused this to get approved?
What I always use to shut up the right-wingers is how can they be pro-capital punishment and pro-life at the same time. One of their views doesn't jive with the other.
What exactly is so inconsistent about valuing the lives of innocent children more than the lives of mass murderers? How does it not "jive" to believe that people start off with a fundamental human right to live, and can lose that right only if they rob others of it themselves? That they don't just lose it by being an inconvenience to their mother. One might just as easily wonder at the left-wingers, who hold that babies are a dime a dozen, whereas serial killers are something precious whose lives are to be vigorously fought for.
As an idea of what to expect in the way of edits, here's what CN did to the two episodes of NGE that they've aired before:
Episode 1
Episode 2
Everyone might have [biases], but it's what you DO with them that makes you who you are. That's why Fox News is horrible and indymedia (huge generalization) is just as bad. If you could seperate your bias from your journalism then you'd be...a professional.
While it's fashionable here to bash Fox News, they're hardly the best example of bias getting in the way of journalistic professionalism. Take a look at media outlets like the New York Times or CBS where political spin manages to supercede news reporting so badly that you have a complete breakdown in journalistic integrity. While Fox News may lean to the right about as much as your typical news organization (ABC, CNN, whatever) does to the left, and imply that they don't with their "fair and balanced" slogan, how exactly does this make them "horrible" and "just as bad" as some fringe news source for political radicals?
You seem to be confused about what a vigilante is, dictionary.com gives me this: "One who takes or advocates the taking of law enforcement into one's own hands." Note it doesn't say anything about them forcing others to agree with their views or take part in them. If you decide to take legal actions in your own hands, then you are, by definition, a vigilante. So it does apply here, just because they don't force anyone to use their lists doesn't change that.
Law is force. This is why you hear phrases like a measure "having the force of law" or police "enforcing the law". The actions of vigilantes also involve force, such as some type of violent retribution against a criminal. If someone was compelling others to use their lists, that would also be a form of force. You concede that they are not doing that, but miss the importance of the distinction.
If I went around seizing other people's money by force, that be unlawful. If I put up a Web page asking for people to donate money of their own volition, it wouldn't. Likewise there is a big difference between just disseminating information to those who willingly choose to make use of it ("207.46.199.30 are a bunch of spammers, you might want to dump emails you get from them"), and kidnapping / executing / whatever anyone who dares have contact with that IP. Spam lists are suggestions, whereas laws have consequences for not following them, like fines or incarceration. If the spam list providers aren't punishing those who decline to adopt their lists, the label of vigilante would appear to be going too far.
It would appear that the company more or less approached him and said. "We get to hijack your domain, steal all your source code, you stop all work on the project, tell your mirrors to do the same, and avoid referring to our company by name. You can either agree to this extortion, or fight it out in court where we have millions to pay a legal staff and you have jack." Okay, they probably spun it with language a bit more favorable to their firm, but that would be the gist of it.
From TFA:
Agents armed with Sig-Sauer 229 pistols and MP5 semi-automatic machine guns swooped in
"Semi-automatic" means fires only one round when the trigger is pulled. "machine guns" means fires lots of rounds when the trigger is pulled. The sentence is an oxymoron, and implies the reporter is just throwing buzzwords around without knowing what he is talking about. To correct the sentence, this is the Secret Service we are talking about. They are not going to mess around with some semi-auto HK94 type of firearm. The phrase the author was looking for is "fully-automatic".
Hopefully the other aspects of the article are more factual and carefully checked.
If I can ignore the copyrights of the MPAA/RIAA/EULA and use their material as I see fit, then by the same token, I should be able to ignore the GPL and use the code any way I see fit, including using it in a piece of commercial code without making my code GPL as well. Because the MPAA/RIAA/EULA defines in which ways that you are allowed to copy copyrighted material...
For the most part, your copyright-RIAA-MPAA-GPL analogy is pretty good, but it completely misses the mark in adding EULA to the list. Copyrights, the GPL, etc. all deal with who is allowed to make duplicates of a copyrighted work, and under what conditions. The default is "you can't copy copyrighted works", but content creators can then loosen this a bit by stipulating "unless you pay me a lot of money", "unless you distribute the source code too" or whatever appeals to them.
A EULA, on the other hand, tries to define under what conditions you can USE a particular work. Rather than specifying a set of exceptions to the powers the creator has under the law, a EULA is an attempt to grab additional powers over and above what copyright grants, typically by holding a piece of software a user has already bought and paid for hostage and not letting it run until the user "agrees" to a bunch of unilaterally dictated conditions that were never part of the purchase agreement. These demands don't necessarily deal with copying, as copyright does, but make crazy stipulations like "you can't look at how this works", "you must use this only on platform such-and-such", "you can't sell this when you're done with it" and so on.
For example, how big is the Firefox universe? Is it a galaxy? A group of star systems? A single system?
The Firefox universe consists of Firefox, Mozilla, Thunderbird, Bugzilla, and Camino...
The reason they are doing "bad things" is because they can't get a job in the first place.
Your assertion that people only turn to crime because of unemployment is flawed. Consider employee theft, embezzlement, book-cooking, and such... all crimes committed by people who are gainfully employed, and thus, according to your reasoning, model citizens.
Would someone please explain to me why this comment would be marked as "Flamebait"? Still trying to get a handle on this mod thing.
I'm guessing it was some mod who doesn't get the concept that the segments in 10.3.9 are separate fields (like an IP address) rather than one big floating point decimal, thinks "10.310 < 10.39, OMG, this poster wants to make OS X go backwards!" and clicked the flamebait button.
Last night I was usiing the old Azureus client on my Mac (which is running Tiger) and it told me the new version was available. I did what it said (click yes I would like to update, click yes I would like to restart) and the new decentralized version was up and running, and seemed to get better throughput than the old one... rather than stopping for a while, torrents without enough seeds would usually slow to a trickle but keep making progress.
I don't know anything about your particular Java problem, I wish I could help. But, I just wanted to chime in to say that despite what a few people have posted, the new Azureus works fine on Macs, including under Tiger.
I'd say "The OS is there for whoever needs it" is a bit of a stretch. People running the beta version can't step up to the production release unless they buy a whole new computer. For all practical purposes, this software is still a beta, no matter what Microsoft's marketing department chooses to label it.
This pastor is a disgrace. The people who are opposed to gay marriage are actually very disturbed people who are in denial.
How amazingly arrogant. To categorically assume that anyone who might dare to think differently than you about a complex and controversial social topic must automatically be doing so because they are "very disturbed" and "in denial". Which side of this debate is supposed to be the closed-minded and intolerant ones again?
The love that two men or two women feel for each other is no different than the love that a heterosexual couple experiences.
What about the love a man feels for his seven wives, or for a goat, or for some member of his immediate family? Some people will say as long as everybody involved is okay with it, whatever floats their boats. Others might find unconventional relationships to be immoral or aberrent. Such questions can be particularly controversial when the issue of marriage is added, since it juxtaposes what is originally a religous ceremony with a lifestyle that is at odds with the teachings of the predominant religion in America. Depending upon one's values, they might find themselves on either side of such a debate, but only those too ignorant to consider others' perspectives, such as yourself, could be accused of covering their ears and screaming loudly, 'I'm not listening!'
I really hate sharing this country with such superstitious and frightened people.
At least you admit your intolerance is based out of your hate for those who think differently than you do. But, when it comes to people who think their way is the "plain truth", that everyone else must be "very disturbed" and who "hate" such people, are they really any different from you at all?
There are a couple of flaws with communism in practice that cause it to break down pretty spectacularly. First, there is the problem of "some are more equal than others", that rather than everybody really being equal comrades, a ruling body begins to amass power for itself and be corrupted by it. They tend to be very repressive of anything that could be seen as a threat to their power (religion, democracy demonstrations, free press, etc.)
Then, there is the problem of getting people to do stuff. In a capitalist economy, people work because they want money. Under communism, they are supposed to want to do things for the good of the motherland and whatnot, but since (critical distinction from open source community) they aren't there by choice, not everyone is going to be interested in that. So the aformentioned ruling body starts to implement brutal methods to keep the people in line. Work quotas, secret police, deportations to Siberia, etc.
The whole philosophy is very much the opposite of the ideas upon America is based, like the First Amenedment, or the "American Dream" (achieving a desirable standard of living for oneself through hard work). During the 20th century, communism was also being forcibly spread to nation after nation, with those who tried to leave or oppose it often killed. The communist countries also aligned to form the Warsaw Pact, which threatened to destroy the United States. This combination of different + spreading + repressive + hostile frightened a lot of people.
Not that people RTFA on a normal article, but in this case any geek worth his salt will have Doubleclick blocked in their /etc/hosts, router tables, Adblock filters, or what have you and in the case of the tinfoil hat types, all of the above just to be sure. I really don't think it's worth turning my filters off just to hear Doubleclick spin the history of online advertising to make themselves sound good.
I think for games where the focus is on actual role-play instead of the hack-and-slash grind, perma death makes a lot of sense. Paper and pencil games use this concept. You die, grab a blank character sheet. MUSH'es pretty much follow the same approach.
One MUD I recall offered an interesting balance. The focus was on role-play, but there were MOBs (computer-controlled characters) to fight also. If you lost to them, you got knocked unconscious and suffered some penalties similar to what MMOGs have. On the other hand, if in the course of the role-playing with other characters or GM's, your character wound up dead, you were expected to delete them because they were no longer part of the storyline. This let you do a little of the griding type stuff when there was no RP going on without worrying about dying to out-of-character things like a bad ISP, and it also maintained a similar feel to paper-and-pencil, since if your actions in the context of the RP story lead to you dying, you were dead.
Wouldn't work for MMO's at all however. A lot of times, conflicts involved players role-playing and coming to a consensus about the consequences, which they all then accepted. GMs aren't always around to arbitrate, and letting the game engine decide things turns it from role playing events out into typing "kill soando". It really only works with a community of people are all willing to put roleplay and storyline ahead of their own ub3rn355 which isn't going to happen on a MMO.
What does it mean to send a spam mail anyway? There's fraud, since the claims in spam are bogus. Harassment, as it is thrust upon people who have made clear their intention not to receive such things (if I'm blocking "viagra" changing it to "v1agra" is deliberate harassment). Theft of service, as the victims' bandwidth costs money. Computer tresspass, as spammers build their zombie bot nets. Spammers also engage in misrepresentation, send pornographic material to minors, create a public nuisance, and plenty of other criminal activities.
And yet for each offense, which involves a whole array of illegal activities, this guy gets what, a fraction of a second in prison? And you complain about this punishment being "a little bit extreme"? Hardly. How about we tabulate up every law he broke in the course of his spamming career, and give him nonconcurrent sentences for each offense he's committed. I imagine it would add up to a lot more than 9 years.