Linux on the desktop is here. It's called ubuntu, you should try it, because a very large number of people not only have tried it, but use it every day..... for values of 'very large' such that such values are still extremely dwarfed by the number of people using closed-source OSes on their desktop?
And if Hans had pissed off the CIA, State Department, Pentagon and all of their allies in various countries, we might have been even more skeptical of the charges.
That hardly seems possible -- there were people on Slashdot posting that Reiser was innocent after he confessed and lead police to the body.
A sizeable vocal chunk of the Slashdot crowd is unable to reconcile "I like person X's works" and "person X is a criminal and/or douchebag." History is full of terrible human beings who nonetheless achieved great and important things, but you'd never know it here.
What you're saying makes sense, except that it sounds like the asker doesn't work for the government and essentially wants to be a vigilante.
That is to say, he probably doesn't have the authority to install traffic lights, but he might be able to gather data proving someone is breaking the laws.
Not a great solution, but maybe sometimes you see a problem and you want to do what you can.
It's supremely ironic to me how many geeks have come out as roaring advocates for Flash since the Adobe/Apple battle started, when before that most self-respecting techies (rightfully!) loathed Flash.
I think you're glossing over a large pragmatic contingent.
I hate Flash as a user; I've hated working with it as a developer. However, that doesn't change the fact that for at least ten years it has had overwhelming dominance in its segment of the market. Even a product like the iPod that has such total market dominance that its name has essentially become the word for the kind of thing that it is (i.e., people will call a non-iPod mp3 player an iPod) pales, in a market-share sense, before Flash.
It is the product everyone loves to hate, and yet, that no competitor yet has put a serious dent in. It's possible to both hate Flash and admit the reality that it is king of the jungle. I hope that someone will set a pack of lion-hunting dogs on Flash and take it down, but I still live in a world in which that day has not come and shows no real signs of coming despite what anyone has to say about Silverlight or HTML5 or giant JavaScript libraries or anything else.
I'm glad you're having a great time playing EVE, but I don't think a seven year old game is really relevant to a discussion of the state of the art of graphics cards for gaming. Even a year or two is a long time in the world of graphics cards -- seven years is an eternity.
I'm sure, although Star Wars fandom seems to have a more equal (if still seriously unequal) male-female ratio than most kinds of sci-fi-ish fandom. At least, I know a handful of women who are into Star Wars enough to go to conventions like these, some of which are attractive enough that you wouldn't pick them as geeks out of a crowd. (Granted, those few are already married.)
but then they pretty much gain the ability to censor any image that their house happens to be on...
What part of "you can have a legal right to do something that you nonetheless should choose not to do" is so hard for you to understand?
I can stand in the street outside your house with a picket sign that implies you are a pedophile and like to torture kittens. I have the legal right to do this. Should I choose to exercise that right? Or can we agree that this is something I can do, but if I'm not an asshole should choose to not do?
Ummm, isn't this probably intended for stolen phones?
According to the patent filing, yeah. Or any stolen electronic device, such as an iPod.
Speaking as someone who had an iPod Touch stolen this year, I'm not that concerned about it being wiped if it's stolen -- I'd rather it send pictures of the thief to the police or at least waterboard the fucker. Is that so much to ask, Apple?
Because the people who own the homes in question have, essentially, asked for their homes to not be photographed and displayed in this way. Barring a good reason to disregard their wishes, someone who does is an asshole. "I want to make a name for myself" is not a good reason.
Part of the burden of civilized society is that we have the legal right to do a lot of things that considerate people would choose not to do. We shouldn't legislate politeness, but that doesn't mean that we can't or shouldn't condemn its lack.
If there are advertisements in books I pay for, yeah I'd be pissed about that and I think there'd be a backlash over that.
On the other hand, Amazon makes a lot of books available for the Kindle for free. If those books have ads I wouldn't complain, especially if that category got bigger as a result.
In America, at least, boxing has almost fallen off the cultural radar (I blame the rise of pay-per-view) and been replaced by mixed martial arts. The question is, is that any better?
How is installing applications from the repos anything like using an iPhone? With Linux, I can install any application I want from anywhere I want as long as it's compatible (just like most other OS's). I can compile from source, write and run my own code on it, whatever floats my boat.
Correct. However, the poster I was responding to was insisting that if you did any of that and got some malware, it was your own fault and that Linux couldn't be expected to run securely if you ever ran something that didn't come from your distro's repository, and why were people so stupid that they couldn't understand that?
I'm not saying that Oracle has a legitimate case, but I don't see how Android being GPL'd would invalidate any of their claims if you assume they are valid to begin with.
If the idea is that making Android free eliminates Oracle's ability to litigate against it, consider that a stubborn enough man will insist on trying to get blood from a stone, and Larry Ellison is several orders of magnitude more stubborn than that.
1) Oracle is suing Java over Android. 2) Oracle hired a really good lawyer, so they must be serious. 3) I sure hate software patents. 4) Oracle would like all copies of Android destroyed, but this isn't likely. 5) Sun might settle out of court. 6) Did I mention I hate software patents? 7) You should try to make life harder for Oracle, since I hate software patents.
With all due respect to the author, half the posts on this Slashdot thread will probably have as much to say and contain as much useful information -- but really, maybe whoever wrote/published the article summary is more to blame for claims the article just doesn't live up to.
So consequently there is a right involved, whether or not he's an asshole, he does have a point.
That being the case, I still submit to you that he could choose to demonstrate his rights or make any number of other more important points without being an asshole.
I support his right to be an asshole, and I support my right to call him an asshole for doing it. I also support the right of other people to non-violently produce consequences for his being an asshole if they believe he's an asshole; for example, not hiring him for work for which he's otherwise qualified.
All these things work out in their way in a free society. Yay, civilization.
Which part of 'the only way the average Linux user is going to be running malicious software is if their distro ships it to them' is proving so hard for Windows users to understand?
What you're saying is that Linux is totally bulletproof, as long as you run it as much as possible like an iPhone -- trusting only applications that your OS provider says are okay, and that it's not reasonable to examine it in a situation where that's not the case.
So yeah, I can understand why some people would have a hard time making sense of your claim that the most secure, most free OS should be run as walled garden if you expect it to be secure.
MSNBC, sure. If you think most of the news outlets are liberal, that says something about you, not about most news outlets: basically, that you think the center or a lack of bias is somewhere much more right of where it actually is.
If that were true, a (now-gone) filibuster-proof majority would have gotten way more done. (Whether or not you think that would have been a good thing.)
One of my college professors used to work (as a volunteer) Chicago elections. He claimed that sometimes, whole trucks full of paper ballots would mysteriously vanish.
This, I think is the key: all the parts of McAfee's business that aren't antivirus.
For example, a company I'm currently contracting for uses a McAfee product to encrypt/secure all the hard drives of their desktops, among other things. Maybe there's some kind of value in being able to optimize that process or build some/more of it into hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux on the desktop is here. It's called ubuntu, you should try it, because a very large number of people not only have tried it, but use it every day.. ... for values of 'very large' such that such values are still extremely dwarfed by the number of people using closed-source OSes on their desktop?
And if Hans had pissed off the CIA, State Department, Pentagon and all of their allies in various countries, we might have been even more skeptical of the charges.
That hardly seems possible -- there were people on Slashdot posting that Reiser was innocent after he confessed and lead police to the body.
A sizeable vocal chunk of the Slashdot crowd is unable to reconcile "I like person X's works" and "person X is a criminal and/or douchebag." History is full of terrible human beings who nonetheless achieved great and important things, but you'd never know it here.
The .net platform is no better suited to mobile devices than Java is.
Except in that, at this point, Microsoft is less likely to sue you than Oracle is.
How strange does it feel for that to be true? But it is.
What you're saying makes sense, except that it sounds like the asker doesn't work for the government and essentially wants to be a vigilante.
That is to say, he probably doesn't have the authority to install traffic lights, but he might be able to gather data proving someone is breaking the laws.
Not a great solution, but maybe sometimes you see a problem and you want to do what you can.
Sure, but who would click on an article entitled 'Medieval Anti-Theft Psych-Out Technique'?
It's supremely ironic to me how many geeks have come out as roaring advocates for Flash since the Adobe/Apple battle started, when before that most self-respecting techies (rightfully!) loathed Flash.
I think you're glossing over a large pragmatic contingent.
I hate Flash as a user; I've hated working with it as a developer. However, that doesn't change the fact that for at least ten years it has had overwhelming dominance in its segment of the market. Even a product like the iPod that has such total market dominance that its name has essentially become the word for the kind of thing that it is (i.e., people will call a non-iPod mp3 player an iPod) pales, in a market-share sense, before Flash.
It is the product everyone loves to hate, and yet, that no competitor yet has put a serious dent in. It's possible to both hate Flash and admit the reality that it is king of the jungle. I hope that someone will set a pack of lion-hunting dogs on Flash and take it down, but I still live in a world in which that day has not come and shows no real signs of coming despite what anyone has to say about Silverlight or HTML5 or giant JavaScript libraries or anything else.
I'm glad you're having a great time playing EVE, but I don't think a seven year old game is really relevant to a discussion of the state of the art of graphics cards for gaming. Even a year or two is a long time in the world of graphics cards -- seven years is an eternity.
I'm sure, although Star Wars fandom seems to have a more equal (if still seriously unequal) male-female ratio than most kinds of sci-fi-ish fandom. At least, I know a handful of women who are into Star Wars enough to go to conventions like these, some of which are attractive enough that you wouldn't pick them as geeks out of a crowd. (Granted, those few are already married.)
It also can't actually waterboard people. :) Perhaps I didn't make that obviously tongue-in-cheek enough.
but then they pretty much gain the ability to censor any image that their house happens to be on...
What part of "you can have a legal right to do something that you nonetheless should choose not to do" is so hard for you to understand?
I can stand in the street outside your house with a picket sign that implies you are a pedophile and like to torture kittens. I have the legal right to do this. Should I choose to exercise that right? Or can we agree that this is something I can do, but if I'm not an asshole should choose to not do?
Ummm, isn't this probably intended for stolen phones?
According to the patent filing, yeah. Or any stolen electronic device, such as an iPod.
Speaking as someone who had an iPod Touch stolen this year, I'm not that concerned about it being wiped if it's stolen -- I'd rather it send pictures of the thief to the police or at least waterboard the fucker. Is that so much to ask, Apple?
but why would he be an asshole ?
Because the people who own the homes in question have, essentially, asked for their homes to not be photographed and displayed in this way. Barring a good reason to disregard their wishes, someone who does is an asshole. "I want to make a name for myself" is not a good reason.
Part of the burden of civilized society is that we have the legal right to do a lot of things that considerate people would choose not to do. We shouldn't legislate politeness, but that doesn't mean that we can't or shouldn't condemn its lack.
If there are advertisements in books I pay for, yeah I'd be pissed about that and I think there'd be a backlash over that.
On the other hand, Amazon makes a lot of books available for the Kindle for free. If those books have ads I wouldn't complain, especially if that category got bigger as a result.
In America, at least, boxing has almost fallen off the cultural radar (I blame the rise of pay-per-view) and been replaced by mixed martial arts. The question is, is that any better?
How is installing applications from the repos anything like using an iPhone? With Linux, I can install any application I want from anywhere I want as long as it's compatible (just like most other OS's). I can compile from source, write and run my own code on it, whatever floats my boat.
Correct. However, the poster I was responding to was insisting that if you did any of that and got some malware, it was your own fault and that Linux couldn't be expected to run securely if you ever ran something that didn't come from your distro's repository, and why were people so stupid that they couldn't understand that?
I'm not saying that Oracle has a legitimate case, but I don't see how Android being GPL'd would invalidate any of their claims if you assume they are valid to begin with.
If the idea is that making Android free eliminates Oracle's ability to litigate against it, consider that a stubborn enough man will insist on trying to get blood from a stone, and Larry Ellison is several orders of magnitude more stubborn than that.
I'll sum up the article:
1) Oracle is suing Java over Android.
2) Oracle hired a really good lawyer, so they must be serious.
3) I sure hate software patents.
4) Oracle would like all copies of Android destroyed, but this isn't likely.
5) Sun might settle out of court.
6) Did I mention I hate software patents?
7) You should try to make life harder for Oracle, since I hate software patents.
With all due respect to the author, half the posts on this Slashdot thread will probably have as much to say and contain as much useful information -- but really, maybe whoever wrote/published the article summary is more to blame for claims the article just doesn't live up to.
So consequently there is a right involved, whether or not he's an asshole, he does have a point.
That being the case, I still submit to you that he could choose to demonstrate his rights or make any number of other more important points without being an asshole.
I support his right to be an asshole, and I support my right to call him an asshole for doing it. I also support the right of other people to non-violently produce consequences for his being an asshole if they believe he's an asshole; for example, not hiring him for work for which he's otherwise qualified.
All these things work out in their way in a free society. Yay, civilization.
Which part of 'the only way the average Linux user is going to be running malicious software is if their distro ships it to them' is proving so hard for Windows users to understand?
What you're saying is that Linux is totally bulletproof, as long as you run it as much as possible like an iPhone -- trusting only applications that your OS provider says are okay, and that it's not reasonable to examine it in a situation where that's not the case.
So yeah, I can understand why some people would have a hard time making sense of your claim that the most secure, most free OS should be run as walled garden if you expect it to be secure.
Uh, no.
MSNBC, sure. If you think most of the news outlets are liberal, that says something about you, not about most news outlets: basically, that you think the center or a lack of bias is somewhere much more right of where it actually is.
It's all fun and games until a majority of people in your town start thinking of the National Enquirer as a reliable source of news.
To be fair, they did a pretty good job with that John Edwards story.
Although I'm not sure that I shouldn't be horrified about what that being true means.
One explanation for what you perceive could be that there's a vast conspiracy controlling most of the news media.
Another, much simpler, explanation could be that you're wrong.
Occam's Razor FTW?
If that were true, a (now-gone) filibuster-proof majority would have gotten way more done. (Whether or not you think that would have been a good thing.)
I'm not sure there's a great solution.
One of my college professors used to work (as a volunteer) Chicago elections. He claimed that sometimes, whole trucks full of paper ballots would mysteriously vanish.
(Cue Chicago-bashing.)
This, I think is the key: all the parts of McAfee's business that aren't antivirus.
For example, a company I'm currently contracting for uses a McAfee product to encrypt/secure all the hard drives of their desktops, among other things. Maybe there's some kind of value in being able to optimize that process or build some/more of it into hardware.