Little tip: VMWare often has education offers at least in Germany. Right now they offer a "CeBIT special" VMWare 2 Education license over Unimall for 35 Euros (~44 USD) and in the past I've seen Fusion bundled with MBPs sold via Unimall. If you are a student you might do well to look up if there's a comparable offer in your country. Almost half the price off is a pretty good deal.
It should be obvious that electronic results can be tabulated much more quickly than hand counted ballots. If you're talking about punch cards processed by machine readers, then a purely electronic process would still be faster.
Where's the advantage? The voting stations close at 18:00 and at 24:00 all or virtually all votes have been counted. Having a room full of people count a few hundred ballots twice doesn't take much time.
As far as accuracy in reflecting the true intent of the voters, an electronic process could also be significantly superior. Each voting machine would have an exact digital record of every vote cast. There would be none of the problems associated with analog ballotsâ"like the famous "hanging chads" of Florida, or poorly marked paper ballots that give false results when processed by OCR.
"OCR" means "representatives from the various parties up for election in the region" in this case. As good as image recognition software has become, the human visual system is usually still better.
Traditional paper voting works pretty well. It's fast enough for the newspapers and even fast enough to have a more or less dramatic vote counting race in the evening. And the German political system doesn't quite lend itself to having a number less than the margin of error entirely decide the fate of the country.
I don't really see why they suddenly want voting machines. Probably because they saw it doesn't work in the States and want to look stupid too.
Yes...but Stallman is attempting, just like George W. Bush and most American politicians I can remember, to redefine "free" to mean "restricted in the ways I want it restricted." Stallman's "free" is not free; it is just as encumbered as some piece of proprietary code, just in a different way. BSD/MIT is arguably "free" in the actual sense of the word. I'd almost say that MPL/CDDL is "free", and where it's not is a lot more reasonable than the GPL.
However, those restrictions are actually intended to preserve certain freedoms, namely the freedom to retain access to the code even if it's modified by someone. Countries work the same way; they restrict, for instance, someone's freedom to sue you for things you say in order to protect your freedom to voice your opinions. Whether the GPL actually works as well as intended can be debated but it certainly isn't some kind of oppressive regime intended to give Richard Stallman control over the world's software.
There is no such thing as trustworthy code. Even some Gentoo ricer depends on a compiler somebody else built. The only way to verify that that bootstrapping compiler doesn't do something nasty, as in kt's case, is to rely on the goodwill of others.
For that matter, all computers are not trustworthy and should not be entrusted with anything important like money transfers. Anything not EAL 7 certified is not formally proven to be correct and non-malicious and thus not really trustworthy.
Of course you can say that as long as there is one possible attack vector it makes no sense to avoid other attack vectors as your BIOS or CPU might be malicious anyway, so making sure anything beyond it is non-malicious is a moot proposition. However, others might not work under the assumption that their computer is automatically compromised and actually care about what the OS and userland do.
To use an analogy: Why do they print the contents of processed food on the packaging? There's no proof that your specific box actually contains exactly what they wrote and even if they did an analysis, someone could have injected something nasty while it's on the shelf so you can't really tell what's in there anyway. Still, working under the assumption that the package is labeled correctly you can, for instance, avoid ingredients you're allergic to with high confidence.
But it's when they fucking brag about it, hurf-durfing that the rest of the world should twist to their personal corner-case choices (and he was doing that by implication if nothing else), they need to be backhanded once in a while.
Are you crossposting or something? The poster didn't brag about anything; they just remarked that they wouldn't use nonfree software. There is an argument against Flash video there: Flash video doesn't work everywhere, Gnash users just being one example. It's a fairly ubiquitous platform but shouldn't solely be relied upon. Another example would be people using recent versions of Firefox under OS X as Flash video tends to have issues with weird flickering artifacts there.
I think "free" as the adjective to "freedom" has been around longer than "free" as a synonym for "gratis". The "free as in freedom" users have a case that can be trivially proven to go back as far as the Virginia Bill of Rights in 1776 ("...all men are by nature equally free and independent...").
That being said, there is one reason to reject non-open source software: Lack of trust. Due to the code not being publicly accessible you have no way to tell what the software might do and no way to tell it doesn't damage your system except by trusting the company that made it. It doesn't help that virtually every EULA and software license states "this might actually do anything or nothing and you can't sue us over it". Whether or not that's acceptable depends on the user's evaluation of how risky running closed code is. Some decide it's not worth it and stick to F/OSS for their private use.
Graphics still do play an important part in gaming.
Only to a certain degree. System Shock 2 is graphically primitive* compared to 2008's releases but it's a much more enjoyable game than it's so-called spiritual successor Bioshock. The latter has the graphics but it also has its gameplay dumbed down to the point where even non-retrogamers are wondering whether it does SS2's legacy justice.
Gameplay-wise graphics haven't really done anything big for us since the days of Quake 2. They aided with storytelling; we can now tell pretty much anything without having to switch to obvious FMVs. But apart from that they do nothing but look pretty. Now, to some gamers that's not just important but neccessary. Others care less and instead want a well-rounded game.
Don't get me wrong - I still do like some new games. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is very immersive. Metal Gear Solid 4 might have the best ending to a video game ever (especially the fistfight, which actually does profit from the detailed animations). But when I get the choice between Halo 3 and Marathon I'm probably going for the latter one. It's Doom era but it simply has the better characters and the more entertaining... let's call it dialogue, even though you never say anything.
There's more to a video game than just the presentation. How important that "other" is depends entirely on the gamer. If the majority of gamers puts any value on "other" then optimizing solely for presentation is not a wise decision.
* And only graphically. It's rare to see that kind of gameplay sophistication in a video game.
For martial arts / sword fighting games, the PS/3's controller beat a standard PC, hands down.
There's always Windows drivers that allow you to use PS3 controllers as if they actually adhered to the Bluetooth standard. Or you use them via USB. Or you get an adapter for a PS2/PSX controller. Or just a PSX lookalike USB controller.
You don't get the tilt stuff (except maybe with the custom drivers) but everything else is just a matter of USB HID and possibly an adapter.
Stop the stupid nit picking grammarian bullshit and call a spade a spade!
Grammar nitpick: You meant "nitpicking lawyer bullshit", as the distinction is a legal and not a grammatical one. (Granted, the distinction actually does lie within the language lawyers use.)
Like you can't base your buying decision on the reviews of people you trust?
The number of people with a taste approximately identical to my own that I personally trust is insignificant. Using them as a buying decision I would own exactly zero DVDs.
Granted, virtually all of my movie purchases are either price-reduced B-movies or small-studio movies for a narrow audience, so as far as the movie industry is concerned I might as well buy nothing...
You seem to be implying that "gay" only starts after someone turns 18. Is that correct?
21, actually. Every American knows that humans only gain the urge to reproduce and the knowledge about any form of related social interaction at the age of 21. If you tell a younger person that sex exists or that some people like certain people more like other people, they will invariable become rapists.
<nitpick>Actually, as far as my limited knowledge of stellar chemistry goes, the sun isn't quite big enough to do that. It can go red giant, which is already enough to toast us. That's still a couple billion years away, though.</nitpick>
I say Google just gave away the position of an X-COM underwater base and the aquanauts are currently busy preparing for the inevitable goddamn base defense mission. If we get wiped out before we even have the Gauss Rifle, I'm going to blame Google.
However, inductive charging as the only option is also rather unlikely as I think it's a rather bad choice for a data port - and every mobile phone has one of those nowadays. A mobile phone without a data port would have to rely on Bluetooth for data transfer; however, not every user can be expected to use a Bluetooth-capable computer. Also, entirely inductive charging makes it harder to charge the phone on the go (say, in the car or on a plane).
Most importantly, if the law blocked an inductive charger it would do exactly what it was intended to do: Keep manufacturers from forcing proprietary chargers onto the customers. An inductive charging option in addition to a standard port is a nice thing and would probably fly but it's fairly safe to assume that inductive chargers would be incompatible between manufacturers and thus unsuitable as the sole way of charging the phone.
If there is an industry-wide push for a generic inductive charger it should be fairly easy to inform the Commission and ask for an amendment to the law that allows it.
Cellphone Maker: But our product doesn't need a charger. It's magic.
Govmt: Sorry. It's the law.
CM: Seriously. There's no point.
G: Then where does your product take the energy from?
CM: Thin air.
G: Give us a couple of these things to confirm that and we'll license them for use as power plants.
CM: Nice. If you buy them by the million we give you a custom ringtone for each of your plants.
G: It's a deal. Now you'll have to excuse me, I have to catch a broom.
Broom: You'll never catch me, haha!
...well, okay. The broom thing probably wouldn't happen like that. Except in the UK; I hear it's a rather silly place.
...that mini-USB was becoming de-facto, how much you wanna bet that the EU will require some funky, blocky connector nobody has ever heard of, like, I dunno, SCART.
You mean a ubiquitous jack a tiny fraction the size of the device that allows daisy chaining, is easy to correctly plug into and is compatible with virtually every single piece of equipment you can buy in Europe? Yeah, that would suck.
One approach is to use multi-phage mixes. Even if every kind of phage only affects a few kinds of bacteria, a broad-spectrum approach covers many. I'm not sure whether bacteria can form a resistance against phages but a phage tratment could be a first step, followed by antibiotics to kill anything the phages don't manage to get.
Depends on the race of the cat. A typical garden-variety housecat weighs about, let's say, 4 kg (~9 lb). A typical Maine Coon will weight about 10 kg (~22 lb) without being fat. Big difference.
Depends on the race, though. For example, a Maine Coon (or Maine Coon half-breed) will usually dedicate its life to acheiving a higher kill count than the US Army. And be reasonably successful about it, as well.
So... they have economic loss when building/modifying the website for their FOSS application to better accommodate handicapped people but not when giving away that software for free?
That's my point here: They already stand to make no money (except for possible donations) from their project. They do all the work because they want people to be able to play Wii games on a PC. Making the website more accessible - even if it's as simple as replacing a single image - enables more people to do so, thus making the project as a whole slightly more effective.
If you want to bring in economics, you can only calculate something like people entertained per time spent. While making sure the website is usable by colorblind people does not lead to a great number of additional entertained people, it also doesn't take a lot of time. For example, the "red-green blind people can't distinguish the 'works' and 'works partially' icons" could even be remedied without touching the icons - just repeat the status next to the icon in text form or set the icons' title and alt properties. A change like that takes about ten minutes to implement.
Accessibility does not neccessarily require a great investment and it does not necessarily cause you great financial harm. And the costs (if applicable) it does incur have to be weighed against the expected influx of additional clients the change enables.
If you make an effort to make your site/business accessible you can even get some good PR out of it; catering to handicapped people does give you points toward a "good guy" image. Conversely, citing Darwinism as a reason to refuse to do business with certain people is usually frowned upon - negative mouth propaganda might very well destroy your image if people find out your business argues that way.
Actually, I think Slashdot is currently undergoing rampancy. That clearly looked like the Anger phase with the switches trying to lock out all humans out of spite. I wonder what could ha <Spurious Interrupt- Breach Disabled>
<Further Access Den^18RF(kgf42# f#h %34(*,96693 349973@) fkeoocp)
@t $#cY B. Ex
@t Y#C9 B. @t $Y#9 B. exception
T-Minus 15.193792102158E+9 years until the universe closes!
Slashdot Mirror
Little tip: VMWare often has education offers at least in Germany. Right now they offer a "CeBIT special" VMWare 2 Education license over Unimall for 35 Euros (~44 USD) and in the past I've seen Fusion bundled with MBPs sold via Unimall. If you are a student you might do well to look up if there's a comparable offer in your country. Almost half the price off is a pretty good deal.
Where's the advantage? The voting stations close at 18:00 and at 24:00 all or virtually all votes have been counted. Having a room full of people count a few hundred ballots twice doesn't take much time.
"OCR" means "representatives from the various parties up for election in the region" in this case. As good as image recognition software has become, the human visual system is usually still better.
Traditional paper voting works pretty well. It's fast enough for the newspapers and even fast enough to have a more or less dramatic vote counting race in the evening. And the German political system doesn't quite lend itself to having a number less than the margin of error entirely decide the fate of the country.
I don't really see why they suddenly want voting machines. Probably because they saw it doesn't work in the States and want to look stupid too.
However, those restrictions are actually intended to preserve certain freedoms, namely the freedom to retain access to the code even if it's modified by someone. Countries work the same way; they restrict, for instance, someone's freedom to sue you for things you say in order to protect your freedom to voice your opinions. Whether the GPL actually works as well as intended can be debated but it certainly isn't some kind of oppressive regime intended to give Richard Stallman control over the world's software.
For that matter, all computers are not trustworthy and should not be entrusted with anything important like money transfers. Anything not EAL 7 certified is not formally proven to be correct and non-malicious and thus not really trustworthy.
Of course you can say that as long as there is one possible attack vector it makes no sense to avoid other attack vectors as your BIOS or CPU might be malicious anyway, so making sure anything beyond it is non-malicious is a moot proposition. However, others might not work under the assumption that their computer is automatically compromised and actually care about what the OS and userland do.
To use an analogy: Why do they print the contents of processed food on the packaging? There's no proof that your specific box actually contains exactly what they wrote and even if they did an analysis, someone could have injected something nasty while it's on the shelf so you can't really tell what's in there anyway. Still, working under the assumption that the package is labeled correctly you can, for instance, avoid ingredients you're allergic to with high confidence.
Are you crossposting or something? The poster didn't brag about anything; they just remarked that they wouldn't use nonfree software. There is an argument against Flash video there: Flash video doesn't work everywhere, Gnash users just being one example. It's a fairly ubiquitous platform but shouldn't solely be relied upon. Another example would be people using recent versions of Firefox under OS X as Flash video tends to have issues with weird flickering artifacts there.
As if that stopped manufacturers from "implementing" 802.11n.
I think "free" as the adjective to "freedom" has been around longer than "free" as a synonym for "gratis". The "free as in freedom" users have a case that can be trivially proven to go back as far as the Virginia Bill of Rights in 1776 ("...all men are by nature equally free and independent...").
That being said, there is one reason to reject non-open source software: Lack of trust. Due to the code not being publicly accessible you have no way to tell what the software might do and no way to tell it doesn't damage your system except by trusting the company that made it. It doesn't help that virtually every EULA and software license states "this might actually do anything or nothing and you can't sue us over it". Whether or not that's acceptable depends on the user's evaluation of how risky running closed code is. Some decide it's not worth it and stick to F/OSS for their private use.
Only to a certain degree. System Shock 2 is graphically primitive* compared to 2008's releases but it's a much more enjoyable game than it's so-called spiritual successor Bioshock. The latter has the graphics but it also has its gameplay dumbed down to the point where even non-retrogamers are wondering whether it does SS2's legacy justice.
Gameplay-wise graphics haven't really done anything big for us since the days of Quake 2. They aided with storytelling; we can now tell pretty much anything without having to switch to obvious FMVs. But apart from that they do nothing but look pretty. Now, to some gamers that's not just important but neccessary. Others care less and instead want a well-rounded game.
Don't get me wrong - I still do like some new games. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is very immersive. Metal Gear Solid 4 might have the best ending to a video game ever (especially the fistfight, which actually does profit from the detailed animations). But when I get the choice between Halo 3 and Marathon I'm probably going for the latter one. It's Doom era but it simply has the better characters and the more entertaining... let's call it dialogue, even though you never say anything.
There's more to a video game than just the presentation. How important that "other" is depends entirely on the gamer. If the majority of gamers puts any value on "other" then optimizing solely for presentation is not a wise decision.
* And only graphically. It's rare to see that kind of gameplay sophistication in a video game.
There's always Windows drivers that allow you to use PS3 controllers as if they actually adhered to the Bluetooth standard. Or you use them via USB. Or you get an adapter for a PS2/PSX controller. Or just a PSX lookalike USB controller.
You don't get the tilt stuff (except maybe with the custom drivers) but everything else is just a matter of USB HID and possibly an adapter.
Grammar nitpick: You meant "nitpicking lawyer bullshit", as the distinction is a legal and not a grammatical one. (Granted, the distinction actually does lie within the language lawyers use.)
The number of people with a taste approximately identical to my own that I personally trust is insignificant. Using them as a buying decision I would own exactly zero DVDs.
Granted, virtually all of my movie purchases are either price-reduced B-movies or small-studio movies for a narrow audience, so as far as the movie industry is concerned I might as well buy nothing...
21, actually. Every American knows that humans only gain the urge to reproduce and the knowledge about any form of related social interaction at the age of 21. If you tell a younger person that sex exists or that some people like certain people more like other people, they will invariable become rapists.
Might happen as a reaction to a potty-mouthed gamer spewing antiquated insults.
Gamer 1: "You're gay!"
Gamer 2: "Yes, I am. So?"
Nobody bothers to really learn about Microsoft, they just look at him and the citations.
<nitpick>Actually, as far as my limited knowledge of stellar chemistry goes, the sun isn't quite big enough to do that. It can go red giant, which is already enough to toast us. That's still a couple billion years away, though.</nitpick>
I say Google just gave away the position of an X-COM underwater base and the aquanauts are currently busy preparing for the inevitable goddamn base defense mission. If we get wiped out before we even have the Gauss Rifle, I'm going to blame Google.
However, inductive charging as the only option is also rather unlikely as I think it's a rather bad choice for a data port - and every mobile phone has one of those nowadays. A mobile phone without a data port would have to rely on Bluetooth for data transfer; however, not every user can be expected to use a Bluetooth-capable computer. Also, entirely inductive charging makes it harder to charge the phone on the go (say, in the car or on a plane).
Most importantly, if the law blocked an inductive charger it would do exactly what it was intended to do: Keep manufacturers from forcing proprietary chargers onto the customers. An inductive charging option in addition to a standard port is a nice thing and would probably fly but it's fairly safe to assume that inductive chargers would be incompatible between manufacturers and thus unsuitable as the sole way of charging the phone.
If there is an industry-wide push for a generic inductive charger it should be fairly easy to inform the Commission and ask for an amendment to the law that allows it.
Cellphone Maker: But our product doesn't need a charger. It's magic.
...well, okay. The broom thing probably wouldn't happen like that. Except in the UK; I hear it's a rather silly place.
Govmt: Sorry. It's the law.
CM: Seriously. There's no point.
G: Then where does your product take the energy from?
CM: Thin air.
G: Give us a couple of these things to confirm that and we'll license them for use as power plants.
CM: Nice. If you buy them by the million we give you a custom ringtone for each of your plants.
G: It's a deal. Now you'll have to excuse me, I have to catch a broom.
Broom: You'll never catch me, haha!
You mean a ubiquitous jack a tiny fraction the size of the device that allows daisy chaining, is easy to correctly plug into and is compatible with virtually every single piece of equipment you can buy in Europe? Yeah, that would suck.
Bad idea. That's a whole new port we'll have to add to our PCs. I just don't see that port in my future.
How about Centronics?
One approach is to use multi-phage mixes. Even if every kind of phage only affects a few kinds of bacteria, a broad-spectrum approach covers many. I'm not sure whether bacteria can form a resistance against phages but a phage tratment could be a first step, followed by antibiotics to kill anything the phages don't manage to get.
Depends on the race of the cat. A typical garden-variety housecat weighs about, let's say, 4 kg (~9 lb). A typical Maine Coon will weight about 10 kg (~22 lb) without being fat. Big difference.
Depends on the race, though. For example, a Maine Coon (or Maine Coon half-breed) will usually dedicate its life to acheiving a higher kill count than the US Army. And be reasonably successful about it, as well.
Tyrannical government? Wii.
FTFY
So... they have economic loss when building/modifying the website for their FOSS application to better accommodate handicapped people but not when giving away that software for free?
That's my point here: They already stand to make no money (except for possible donations) from their project. They do all the work because they want people to be able to play Wii games on a PC. Making the website more accessible - even if it's as simple as replacing a single image - enables more people to do so, thus making the project as a whole slightly more effective.
If you want to bring in economics, you can only calculate something like people entertained per time spent. While making sure the website is usable by colorblind people does not lead to a great number of additional entertained people, it also doesn't take a lot of time. For example, the "red-green blind people can't distinguish the 'works' and 'works partially' icons" could even be remedied without touching the icons - just repeat the status next to the icon in text form or set the icons' title and alt properties. A change like that takes about ten minutes to implement.
Accessibility does not neccessarily require a great investment and it does not necessarily cause you great financial harm. And the costs (if applicable) it does incur have to be weighed against the expected influx of additional clients the change enables.
If you make an effort to make your site/business accessible you can even get some good PR out of it; catering to handicapped people does give you points toward a "good guy" image. Conversely, citing Darwinism as a reason to refuse to do business with certain people is usually frowned upon - negative mouth propaganda might very well destroy your image if people find out your business argues that way.
So is giving away an emulator for free. Yet they still do it. Amazing.
Actually, I think Slashdot is currently undergoing rampancy. That clearly looked like the Anger phase with the switches trying to lock out all humans out of spite. I wonder what could ha
<Spurious Interrupt- Breach Disabled >
<Further Access Den^18RF(kgf42# f#h %34(*,96693 349973@) fkeoocp)
@t $#cY B. Ex
@t Y#C9 B.
@t $Y#9 B. exception
T-Minus 15.193792102158E+9 years until the universe closes!