It's not unethical to sell people stuff that they want at a price they deem fair.
On this we just have to agree to disagree. Most frauds are done with this principle in mind. Note that I am not saying you should not do it, just that I will not myself do it.
So... would you refuse to sell a pefectly good used car because some unscrupulous dealer might sell someone else a lemon? Most unscrupulous auto dealers sell lemons, so you should not sell cars?
Seems like a pretty silly moral stand. Can you elaborate on how your choice makes any sense at all, or who it benefits?
A sale only becomes fraud when the *seller* misrepresents his goods and takes advantage of the buyer. When people buy my coins, they determine that they want them without any interaction with me. There's nothing immoral about buying or selling *anything* when there's no coercion going on.
One might argue that verifying Bitcoins is less meaningful a computation than contributing to a BOINC project.
I've played with BOINC before, as well as distributed.net, SETI@home, etc. Sure, those were fun to mess around with. It's all hobbies to me. Meaningfulness is entirely subjective. You might value one activity over another, but your values don't mean a thing to anyone else.
That said, yes, you do get money out of the one but not the other. But lets look at what you gained. You bought goods that before you didn't have a need for, and you now have a hobby that fills some of your spare time, which is partly technology and partly, as you put it, gambling.
If I buy supplies for my model train layout, I'm buying things I don't otherwise have a need for. So what? I take risks with my money all the time. What makes this one worse than any other?
No thanks, I'd rather spend my spare time thinking about solving problems.
Letting some computers run 24/7 doesn't take up much of my time. Bing! There's another litecoin in my account - guess I'll get back to working on my plan for world peace, elimination of malaria, and robotic dominatrixes for all.
All your story tells me is that fossil-fuel electricity is too cheap.
Hydro. We have so much of it here that we sell it to the US at exorbitant rates.
So coin mining and taking risks with your money isn't your thing. Why judge me for my vices? I have earned them.
It's not unethical to sell people stuff that they want at a price they deem fair. I make no claims about Litecoin as an investment. I make my own decisions, other people can do the same.
As for mining - I am paid for verifying transactions on the network. That's honest work.
I really don't understand why you think participating in a marketplace is immoral. So there are some whales out there with big balances... So what? They didn't set Bitcoin's value. If you've been watching the exchanges recently, you sometimes see whales coordinating to cause a sell-off so they can snap up cheap coins. Lately, though, it hasn't been working for them. They dump coins and the market doesn't even blink, and then they're forced to buy back in at a loss.
This kind of manipulation happens in every market. It's human nature. Playing the holier than thou morality card is your choice, I guess. As for me, I'll keep selling coins to people that want them, and building the network by doing the useful work of verifying transactions.
I bought into Litecoin at under $5 with some hobby money some months ago and it's hanging out at $30. I cashed out my original investment (leaving several times that in Litecoin, yay profit), bought ten Radeon cards and some cheap motherboards with the money, threw together some Debian USB sticks in an evening and am now mining on P2Pool for shits and giggles.
In a few weeks the equipment will have paid for itself, even accounting for the insane difficulty increases. Power is cheap here, so I will do pretty well for a while yet. Bonus: the rigs run hot so I'm basically making a little money heating my house.
You can laugh all you want. I'm having a blast, I've made a tidy profit, I have a bunch of new toys to play with, and if Litecoin ever does go ballistic like Bitcoin did I won't be left on the sidelines like you will. Don't really care about the likelihood of *coins taking over the world, or whatever - there is money to be made and I'm happy to make it.
It's a fun hobby. Honestly, it's play money to me and I've multiplied it several times. Not complaining. More fun than hitting the casino like some people I know, even if it's gambling all the same.
If I organized a mass call-in to a government number to protest a policy - causing the number to be 'busy' for the rest of the general public - should all of the participants have their lives destroyed? Of course not.
There is no way one minute of participating in a DDOS protest caused $183,000 of damage. The punishment is life-destroying and completely out of line. Juries are stupid and easily manipulated. I can just see their eyes glazing over when the technical terms started flying.
Fuck your fake best-justice-money-can-buy system, America. You're giving the dickweed politicians in my country ideas that they're too dumb to come up with on their own.
Maybe the kids haven't figured out that you don't have to attend every meeting you are invited to. If you're not contributing to the meeting and not interested enough to listen then you shouldn't have accepted the invitation. If you don't know why you're invited, ask the inviter. Grow a spine.
This. If I went to every meeting I get an outlook request for, I'd spend at least three days a week at a boardroom table rather than doing productive work. 90% of the time, I email the organizer, say "What's up?" and all they wanted was an answer to three or four simple questions. Problem solved, everyone's happy - although some of the meetingy people get sad that you aren't just showing up. They like to have a big audience. Be aware of personality types and who is important to your personal advancement before turning too many invitations down.
Of course, sometimes you're wanted for general insight, or your team is presenting something, or there's a crisis. Don't skip those.
Your job is to train co-workers to only ask you to meetings that matter. Kick ass when you need to be there, don't be there when you shouldn't be.
I don't care what technologies Mark or the Ubuntu project chooses to use or promote. Their projects, their time, their rules. No one else has any obligation to adopt any of it, or tailor their work to fit with Ubuntu's goals or needs.
I've read the Wayland versus Mir threads, the GNOME3 versus Unity threads, the systemd versus upstart threads, the Ubuntu versus Debian threads. Canonical's rough MO appears to be:
1. Look a project over, participate a bit 2. Integrate it into Ubuntu, sometimes poorly 3. Decide that changes are needed to fix apparent issues, write some (questionable) patches or discuss needs with project 4. Throw a minor fit when project rejects proposed changes (Mark blog post time) 5. Run off and reimplement project in the Ubuntu ecosystem with all kinds of Ubuntu-specific code. 6. Preach about how the community isn't grateful enough and that people are attacking for no reason. (Time for a passive-aggressive Jono Bacon post) 7. Ignore the rest of the ecosystem as it evolves and standardizes on non-Canonical community-built projects (Wayland, systemd) 8. Act shocked that open source communities don't take them too seriously. Ignore valid technical criticism.
Ubuntu owes its success to the communities that actually built 90% of their stack. They show their gratitude by going their own way technologically and expecting everyone to follow their lead. Instead of making GNOME3 rock after riding the GNOME desktop to massive mindshare, they went off and did Unity. Instead of seeing the writing on the wall on the init system front and diving in to Systemd they are sticking to Upstart, because NIH and differentiation. Compromise with the people that they owe their success to? Contribute to the projects that made them the popular distro they are today? Consider the desires and goals of non-Ubuntu developers? Nah, we're Ubuntu, we're visionary thought leaders who secretly idolize Steve Jobs, we don't do that except when we need something.
Ubuntu is standing on the shoulders of giants, but they've given the giants non-standard shoulderpads so that they don't have to touch icky, icky giant shoulders.
They're is like a child who expects Mom and Dad to follow his newly-made-up rules. "All future dinners will be pizza, Mom and Dad! As the most popular kid in third grade, I, Markie Mark, declare this to be our Standard Evening Meal!" Later, on blog: "Tea party-esque parental units are ignoring my plans for NO REASON!"
If the feds have Silk Road's wallets, they now know every bitcoin address they ever used - as well as every bitcoin address used by Silk Road's clients.
Since most Bitcoin users are dumb and don't use shared wallets, it should be simple to follow the blockchain back to people who bought drugs. Everyone has to cash into or out of of Bitcoin somewhere, so it's a matter of looking for transactions from known exchanges, subpoenaing them, getting banking information and fingering the buyers.
Silk Road should really have functioned as a massive shared wallet with no records.
As far as I'm concerned, Riven was the pinnacle of the series. The art was incredibly detailed, the music and sound work top-notch. Scene construction was incredibly dense with story - everything had meaning, everything was a clue. It was obsessively detailed. I remember reading somewhere that the artists didn't do any low-poly models at all; single frames took days to render back in 1996 on then-top-of-line SGI hardware.
I bought the GOG version a few months ago in a fit of nostalgia. It's kind of sad how low-resolution and overcompressed the in-game renders are by current standards. I'd love to see a modern take on Riven - even re-rendered high res stills would be sweet.
You can play with the remnants of the Myst Uru MMO for free here. I think you can even download and run a server if you want.
If he's lying, and his access was trivial, why make a big deal out of this? All they had to do was openly mock Snowden and tell him "come back any time, pay a $1000 fine and get on with your life, you crazy kid - no harm, no foul". Just to make the point that he was no threat, whether true or not.
But no, the morons had to start in with the "TERROR SAFETY DANGER". Holder just validated Snowden's actions in the eyes of a lot of people.
Not that it matters anyway, since Joe and Jane Average have no idea why they should care about any of this.
Except Ubuntu users want cutting edge Debian, not tried and tested Debian...and unfortunately using Debian is not going to make it more cutting edge.
...Now if Debian decided to produce a (stable) cutting edge Desktop version (perhaps working with an existing Distribution team). To complete there ultra stable, you have me sold.
You asked for it, Debian delivers. The Debian CUT Project aims to publish usable snapshots of Debian Testing on a monthly basis. They're pretty new but picking up steam.
Don't accept this garbage. Being a productive employee is far more than just the ability to spew some excellent code in a contest. We have to make our field a profession, not a joke.
Absolutely right. We have a serious image problem.
I've seen so many talented, gung-ho people be so focused on their work that they forget to act like the well-educated professionals they are. They lay all their cards on the table; they fight for the technically correct ideal; they are true believers in what could be accomplished with the amazing tools they work with; they work all night for the cause; they overcaffeinate and burn out regularly; they are brutally honest in meetings with non-technical peers and are despised because of it; they have no idea how to dress like professionals; they may smell bad or clip their toenails on their desk each morning. I've seen and smelt this.
The best case result is that they end up being treated like talented children with some bad habits. Gold star! Please don't forget your deodorant. Have some free pizza. The code you wrote made us a couple of million dollars last year, you are so awesome! Here's a small raise. If technical people get the "fun" workspace, while executives and accountants get "serious" workspaces at your company, guess what? You're a talented child! If you and your technical peers show up in jeans, while the rest of the staff dresses in slacks or skirts and nice shirts, guess what? Talented child! So very talented!
In the worst case, they are tolerated until they leave, excluded from decision-making processes, and generally disrespected by their non-technical peers.
If you're being paid to work in technology, you're working in the world of business. There are a whole host of social norms in the workplace. If you want to be respected and have a successful career, you do *not* want to be the outlier. If you are, you will be exploited and discarded.
This isn't actually unique to technology people. Some folks just have issues adjusting to the professional world. It's just that businesses are happy to allow technology people as a class to devalue themselves by being an Awesome Place To Work (read: relaxing workplace standards that normal high-value folks expect from each other)
It's hard to act like a pro when you're babied. It's a trap. Dress nice. Be a pro. If your workplace has the preschool programmer culture going on, find a new job.
I like this solution because you don't have to wait for Ghostery to add support for an advertiser, or an updated filter definition for adblock. EVERYTHING gets nuked, except the sites you care enough about to whitelist. It's a better default cookie policy.
You're an addict. You need to get clean. It's that simple.
Whenever you make excuses to yourself (and I know you are), imagine a cracked-out junkie slurring out the excuses with his toungue hanging out. See how seriously he takes himself? Hear how stupid he sounds? That's you making excuses.
I think the most challenging thing for me was completely eliminating caffeinated drinks. It took 3 weeks of real effort. I was a total asshole during that time. Went cold turkey. When the headaches got really bad I started allowing myself one swallow of coffee per day as an emergency measure, but only one, so I had to save it for times when I really needed it. I also went and sat in coffee shops to surround myself with the smell and temptation of coffee, and drank mint tea. Bleah.
Oddly, I started to crave bitter drinks. It's hard to define what caffeine tastes like, but I can pretty much taste something and know whether it's caffeinated now. Solved the craving with Roastaroma teabags. Not quite the same, but good enough.
Results: Anxiety issues that I never knew I had vanished. Focus returned. Productivity went through the roof. You think you're a good programmer, all hopped up on stimulants and pulling long hours? Stop. Purge. Be amazed.
Once I was clear, I found I actually had willpower again. I started swimming. Set your clock a couple of hours earlier, eat a banana, drive to the pool on the way to work, swim as far as you can, then shower and head to the office. Pack a breakfast the night before and eat when you get there. Note: You'll have to go to bed earlier to make this work. It's worth it. Bonus: you'll learn how to swim. I had never swum a proper length when I started this. Use a kickboard if you have to.
Don't screw around with a "3 days a week" thing. If it's a work day, work on yourself. It's either part of your life or it's just a fad. Once you're clear of caffeine, don't allow yourself to skip a workout. It's just not on. Everyone else can bend to you for once - you're turning your life around.
You'll be ready to go, full of energy, and have a clearer mind than you've had in years. Just be sure to tell everyone around you what you are about to do, so they can be understanding when you bark at them by mistake.
I can feed trolls with the best of 'em. Burn, karma, burn!
The fact that the rendering engine would be Gecko on their PC and WebKit on their iPhone just doesn't fucking matter.
Apple limits third party IOS developers to UIWebview, while Safari gets to use the Nitro JIT javascript engine. It's an automatic performance disadvantage for any aftermarket browser. That fucking matters.
It really shows that Mozilla's focus is on themselves and software developers, not on the consumer end user, who has been running Firefox on their PC for years now and Safari on their iPhone for years now and just wants a Firefox interface and bookmark syncing on their iPhone.
No, it shows that Mozilla is smart enough to recognize and avoid pitched battles with Apple. Why fight to have a weird mutant version of their flagship project on a closed device, damaging their brand with artificially limited performance and a rendering engine that doesn't act like Firefox?
If that is Mozilla's focus, then they don't belong on iOS and good riddance.
Mozilla's focus is on opening up the web. You're right - they don't "belong" on closed, controlled iOS. They will, however, try to encourage Apple to let them in.
On iOS, the end user is at the top of the hierarchy, and software developers and content producers all work for the user. The user already has an HTML5 renderer in their iPhone, they already have a TCP/IP stack. You do not need to replace them to build a browser, and in fact, it is much better security that you can't replace them. That is what is best for the consumer: a secure renderer that is highly-optimized specifically for their device.
Who decides what's in your interest? If it's Apple, then Apple is at the top of the hierarchy, not users as you say.
As a user myself, I value the ability to use Firefox over Chrome on my Android device. With Android, I can decide what's in my interests. The defaults work for "most consumers", and for everyone else there is a measure of freedom.
There are plenty of reasons that software monocultures are bad, and Google is your friend there.
There are hundreds of 3rd party browsers on iOS, many with very innovative features. Like Skyfire, which converts Flash Video to ISO standard video on a server and essentially enables you to run Flash on iPhone or iPad. There are browsers that are exploring lots of gestures, or deep social integration.
Cute little user-interface experiments are one thing, but that's all niche-market small time stuff. Deep social integration and gestures? Tee hee. Calling a UIWebview wrapper a browser is kind of endearing.
Mozilla is missing out on all of that because they are pouty, entitled developers who want their feet rubbed and cheeks kissed before they deign to bless us with their bloated, mangled code.
You realize that Firefox is the best browser on the memory usage front, and near tops in performance right? If your gut feeling about Mozilla is based on a 2006-era opinion, you might want to look at what they've done lately.
And of course, Mozilla knows better than Apple what Apple users want. As if.
Most users want options and the ability to use their devices as they see fit. Mozilla has only ever supported users' rights. Apple can't say that.
And finally, Mozilla's hypocrisy: note that the one and only HTML renderer on Firefox OS is Gecko. And Firefox OS has zero 3rd party browsers as of right now.
Hey now, third party browsers can just wrap Gecko (actually, it's more like just opening an IFRAME, since the UI is all HTML.) In your world, using the system renderer is a good thing, right? What are you complaining about?/s
In all seriousness though, it could be done with some work. I
"By all means, let's make rules that discourage violence against everyone - childredn, the elderly, women, men, pets, gingers, neckbeards," pretty clearly trivializes the specific problem of violence against women, and implies that the same laws that handle the (nonexistent) problem of violence against "neckbeards" are somehow sufficient to deal with the pervasive problem of violence against women.
Actually, I've witnessed a good friend of mine who self-identifies as a neckbeard get beaten up by some loser at a bar for sitting in the wrong place. I mean, Reddit has/r/neckbeardrights, for goodness' sake. Did you mean to disparage the neckbeard community? Are you so callous as to ignore the problem of violence against neckbeards... on Slashdot, no less? Are individual neckbeards less important than individual women? Should there be laws that punish crimes against female neckbeards (they must exist) extra, extra harshly?
In all seriousness, the fact that people are being violently victimized is the problem. As far as the law is concerned, the sex, hair colour, or facial hair configuration of the victim should not make any difference.
Man beats woman? The crime is (probably) assault/battery, not assault/battery-against-a-female. Neckbeard stomped by jock? There should not be elevated penalties for the jock because he dared target a valuable system administrator. The crime is the crime and penalties should be established based on the crime, not the characteristics of the victim.
When society starts putting ranking groups of people based on who is more likely to be a victim, or deciding who should be punished more based on who they are, we are on the road to legally untouchable government officials and caste-style segregation. Either individuals have common rights and common justice or we're all screwed.
It's not very productive to read what you want to read instead of what was actually posted.
I'm all for making laws that deal with specific situations in which violence (against X, Y, or Z) crop up, and I said so.
I don't see where, unless you mean "Violence typically occurs where society needs new rules and new norms." If by that you meant "I believe that specific laws are needed to deal with violence against women" you chose a pretty unclear way of expressing that idea (especially in the context of your last sentence...)
Second-last sentence. Maybe not the height of eloquence, but it's there. And no, tossing a silly example in there doesn't invalidate anything else I said.
It is not very productive to ignore that different kinds of violence have different causes and thus probably different solutions, and that some kinds of violence are more pervasive than others.
It's not very productive to read what you want to read instead of what was actually posted.
I'm all for making laws that deal with specific situations in which violence (against X, Y, or Z) crop up, and I said so.
I'm not defending the specific policy in question here, but your knee-jerk "all violence is bad response" is a sign that you might want to consider more nuanced ways of thinking about the world.
Your nuance detector appears to be broken, though your vague insult generator is certainly functional...:)
I'm getting tired of "Violence against women" being portrayed as a special case worthy of special laws at the expense of everyone else.
Violence in general is the problem. All violence has victims. Violence typically occurs where society needs new rules and new norms. Right now there is lots of violence against against women, more in some cultures than others. It's ugly.
Still, when we start getting laws designed to combat violence against group X that end up doing violence to the rights and freedoms of people outsideof group X, we're doing it wrong.
By all means, let's make rules that discourage violence against everyone - childredn, the elderly, women, men, pets, gingers, neckbeards. Short of widespread deployment of G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate, though, humans will keep bashing each other. There's a limit to prevention.
I'm not deciding for anyone but myself. You're the one taking it too far.
The problem with people like you is that your only concern is for how something like pervasive surveillance of communications might affect you personally. You don't bother to really think through the potential effects of your selfishness on society. Most people are equally uninformed, passive, and selfish, so you no doubt feel that your opinions are validated by your peers. You have the luxury of ignorance and you're taking full advantage of it.
Congratulations on being a very small part of a very large threat to our future as a civilized species. You may have picked the winning team - only time will tell - but you're a loser in my books.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not unethical to sell people stuff that they want at a price they deem fair.
On this we just have to agree to disagree. Most frauds are done with this principle in mind.
Note that I am not saying you should not do it, just that I will not myself do it.
So... would you refuse to sell a pefectly good used car because some unscrupulous dealer might sell someone else a lemon? Most unscrupulous auto dealers sell lemons, so you should not sell cars?
Seems like a pretty silly moral stand. Can you elaborate on how your choice makes any sense at all, or who it benefits?
A sale only becomes fraud when the *seller* misrepresents his goods and takes advantage of the buyer. When people buy my coins, they determine that they want them without any interaction with me. There's nothing immoral about buying or selling *anything* when there's no coercion going on.
I didn't even know that NASA held a raffle.
I was going to use it for barbecue parties. You guys were all invited.
Grilling steak on the igniter towers? Jumping into the noise suppression pit to cool off?
Awesome.
One might argue that verifying Bitcoins is less meaningful a computation than contributing to a BOINC project.
I've played with BOINC before, as well as distributed.net, SETI@home, etc. Sure, those were fun to mess around with. It's all hobbies to me. Meaningfulness is entirely subjective. You might value one activity over another, but your values don't mean a thing to anyone else.
That said, yes, you do get money out of the one but not the other. But lets look at what you gained. You bought goods that before you didn't have a need for, and you now have a hobby that fills some of your spare time, which is partly technology and partly, as you put it, gambling.
If I buy supplies for my model train layout, I'm buying things I don't otherwise have a need for. So what? I take risks with my money all the time. What makes this one worse than any other?
No thanks, I'd rather spend my spare time thinking about solving problems.
Letting some computers run 24/7 doesn't take up much of my time. Bing! There's another litecoin in my account - guess I'll get back to working on my plan for world peace, elimination of malaria, and robotic dominatrixes for all.
All your story tells me is that fossil-fuel electricity is too cheap.
Hydro. We have so much of it here that we sell it to the US at exorbitant rates.
So coin mining and taking risks with your money isn't your thing. Why judge me for my vices? I have earned them.
It's not unethical to sell people stuff that they want at a price they deem fair. I make no claims about Litecoin as an investment. I make my own decisions, other people can do the same.
As for mining - I am paid for verifying transactions on the network. That's honest work.
I really don't understand why you think participating in a marketplace is immoral. So there are some whales out there with big balances... So what? They didn't set Bitcoin's value. If you've been watching the exchanges recently, you sometimes see whales coordinating to cause a sell-off so they can snap up cheap coins. Lately, though, it hasn't been working for them. They dump coins and the market doesn't even blink, and then they're forced to buy back in at a loss.
This kind of manipulation happens in every market. It's human nature. Playing the holier than thou morality card is your choice, I guess. As for me, I'll keep selling coins to people that want them, and building the network by doing the useful work of verifying transactions.
I bought into Litecoin at under $5 with some hobby money some months ago and it's hanging out at $30. I cashed out my original investment (leaving several times that in Litecoin, yay profit), bought ten Radeon cards and some cheap motherboards with the money, threw together some Debian USB sticks in an evening and am now mining on P2Pool for shits and giggles.
In a few weeks the equipment will have paid for itself, even accounting for the insane difficulty increases. Power is cheap here, so I will do pretty well for a while yet. Bonus: the rigs run hot so I'm basically making a little money heating my house.
You can laugh all you want. I'm having a blast, I've made a tidy profit, I have a bunch of new toys to play with, and if Litecoin ever does go ballistic like Bitcoin did I won't be left on the sidelines like you will. Don't really care about the likelihood of *coins taking over the world, or whatever - there is money to be made and I'm happy to make it.
It's a fun hobby. Honestly, it's play money to me and I've multiplied it several times. Not complaining. More fun than hitting the casino like some people I know, even if it's gambling all the same.
If I organized a mass call-in to a government number to protest a policy - causing the number to be 'busy' for the rest of the general public - should all of the participants have their lives destroyed? Of course not.
There is no way one minute of participating in a DDOS protest caused $183,000 of damage. The punishment is life-destroying and completely out of line. Juries are stupid and easily manipulated. I can just see their eyes glazing over when the technical terms started flying.
Fuck your fake best-justice-money-can-buy system, America. You're giving the dickweed politicians in my country ideas that they're too dumb to come up with on their own.
Timeless Isle.
Maybe the kids haven't figured out that you don't have to attend every meeting you are invited to. If you're not contributing to the meeting and not interested enough to listen then you shouldn't have accepted the invitation. If you don't know why you're invited, ask the inviter. Grow a spine.
This. If I went to every meeting I get an outlook request for, I'd spend at least three days a week at a boardroom table rather than doing productive work. 90% of the time, I email the organizer, say "What's up?" and all they wanted was an answer to three or four simple questions. Problem solved, everyone's happy - although some of the meetingy people get sad that you aren't just showing up. They like to have a big audience. Be aware of personality types and who is important to your personal advancement before turning too many invitations down.
Of course, sometimes you're wanted for general insight, or your team is presenting something, or there's a crisis. Don't skip those.
Your job is to train co-workers to only ask you to meetings that matter. Kick ass when you need to be there, don't be there when you shouldn't be.
I don't care what technologies Mark or the Ubuntu project chooses to use or promote. Their projects, their time, their rules. No one else has any obligation to adopt any of it, or tailor their work to fit with Ubuntu's goals or needs.
I've read the Wayland versus Mir threads, the GNOME3 versus Unity threads, the systemd versus upstart threads, the Ubuntu versus Debian threads. Canonical's rough MO appears to be:
1. Look a project over, participate a bit
2. Integrate it into Ubuntu, sometimes poorly
3. Decide that changes are needed to fix apparent issues, write some (questionable) patches or discuss needs with project
4. Throw a minor fit when project rejects proposed changes (Mark blog post time)
5. Run off and reimplement project in the Ubuntu ecosystem with all kinds of Ubuntu-specific code.
6. Preach about how the community isn't grateful enough and that people are attacking for no reason. (Time for a passive-aggressive Jono Bacon post)
7. Ignore the rest of the ecosystem as it evolves and standardizes on non-Canonical community-built projects (Wayland, systemd)
8. Act shocked that open source communities don't take them too seriously. Ignore valid technical criticism.
Ubuntu owes its success to the communities that actually built 90% of their stack. They show their gratitude by going their own way technologically and expecting everyone to follow their lead. Instead of making GNOME3 rock after riding the GNOME desktop to massive mindshare, they went off and did Unity. Instead of seeing the writing on the wall on the init system front and diving in to Systemd they are sticking to Upstart, because NIH and differentiation. Compromise with the people that they owe their success to? Contribute to the projects that made them the popular distro they are today? Consider the desires and goals of non-Ubuntu developers? Nah, we're Ubuntu, we're visionary thought leaders who secretly idolize Steve Jobs, we don't do that except when we need something.
Ubuntu is standing on the shoulders of giants, but they've given the giants non-standard shoulderpads so that they don't have to touch icky, icky giant shoulders.
They're is like a child who expects Mom and Dad to follow his newly-made-up rules. "All future dinners will be pizza, Mom and Dad! As the most popular kid in third grade, I, Markie Mark, declare this to be our Standard Evening Meal!" Later, on blog: "Tea party-esque parental units are ignoring my plans for NO REASON!"
If the feds have Silk Road's wallets, they now know every bitcoin address they ever used - as well as every bitcoin address used by Silk Road's clients.
Since most Bitcoin users are dumb and don't use shared wallets, it should be simple to follow the blockchain back to people who bought drugs. Everyone has to cash into or out of of Bitcoin somewhere, so it's a matter of looking for transactions from known exchanges, subpoenaing them, getting banking information and fingering the buyers.
Silk Road should really have functioned as a massive shared wallet with no records.
I wonder what Atlantis knew when they shut down?
heck.. what I want the answer to is what the fuck happened to space combat, and the X-Wing & Wing Commander promises of good games!
Star Citizen will hopefully answer that question.
As far as I'm concerned, Riven was the pinnacle of the series. The art was incredibly detailed, the music and sound work top-notch. Scene construction was incredibly dense with story - everything had meaning, everything was a clue. It was obsessively detailed. I remember reading somewhere that the artists didn't do any low-poly models at all; single frames took days to render back in 1996 on then-top-of-line SGI hardware.
I bought the GOG version a few months ago in a fit of nostalgia. It's kind of sad how low-resolution and overcompressed the in-game renders are by current standards. I'd love to see a modern take on Riven - even re-rendered high res stills would be sweet.
You can play with the remnants of the Myst Uru MMO for free here. I think you can even download and run a server if you want.
Lossless FLAC provides no advantage over the 'CD standard' of uncompressed AIFF.
And if they were releasing it in uncompressed AIFF I'd be just as happy. Moving right along...
No need to go crazy about lossy compression. I may just have to donate to this one.
If he's lying, and his access was trivial, why make a big deal out of this? All they had to do was openly mock Snowden and tell him "come back any time, pay a $1000 fine and get on with your life, you crazy kid - no harm, no foul". Just to make the point that he was no threat, whether true or not.
But no, the morons had to start in with the "TERROR SAFETY DANGER". Holder just validated Snowden's actions in the eyes of a lot of people.
Not that it matters anyway, since Joe and Jane Average have no idea why they should care about any of this.
Except Ubuntu users want cutting edge Debian, not tried and tested Debian...and unfortunately using Debian is not going to make it more cutting edge.
You asked for it, Debian delivers. The Debian CUT Project aims to publish usable snapshots of Debian Testing on a monthly basis. They're pretty new but picking up steam.
Don't accept this garbage. Being a productive employee is far more than just the ability to spew some excellent code in a contest. We have to make our field a profession, not a joke.
Absolutely right. We have a serious image problem.
I've seen so many talented, gung-ho people be so focused on their work that they forget to act like the well-educated professionals they are. They lay all their cards on the table; they fight for the technically correct ideal; they are true believers in what could be accomplished with the amazing tools they work with; they work all night for the cause; they overcaffeinate and burn out regularly; they are brutally honest in meetings with non-technical peers and are despised because of it; they have no idea how to dress like professionals; they may smell bad or clip their toenails on their desk each morning. I've seen and smelt this.
The best case result is that they end up being treated like talented children with some bad habits. Gold star! Please don't forget your deodorant. Have some free pizza. The code you wrote made us a couple of million dollars last year, you are so awesome! Here's a small raise. If technical people get the "fun" workspace, while executives and accountants get "serious" workspaces at your company, guess what? You're a talented child! If you and your technical peers show up in jeans, while the rest of the staff dresses in slacks or skirts and nice shirts, guess what? Talented child! So very talented!
In the worst case, they are tolerated until they leave, excluded from decision-making processes, and generally disrespected by their non-technical peers.
If you're being paid to work in technology, you're working in the world of business. There are a whole host of social norms in the workplace. If you want to be respected and have a successful career, you do *not* want to be the outlier. If you are, you will be exploited and discarded.
This isn't actually unique to technology people. Some folks just have issues adjusting to the professional world. It's just that businesses are happy to allow technology people as a class to devalue themselves by being an Awesome Place To Work (read: relaxing workplace standards that normal high-value folks expect from each other)
It's hard to act like a pro when you're babied. It's a trap. Dress nice. Be a pro. If your workplace has the preschool programmer culture going on, find a new job.
It lets the sites set their cookies, waits a few seconds (or until tab is closed), then nukes 'em. There's a whitelist for sites you actually use.
https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/self-destructing-cookies/
I like this solution because you don't have to wait for Ghostery to add support for an advertiser, or an updated filter definition for adblock. EVERYTHING gets nuked, except the sites you care enough about to whitelist. It's a better default cookie policy.
You're an addict. You need to get clean. It's that simple.
Whenever you make excuses to yourself (and I know you are), imagine a cracked-out junkie slurring out the excuses with his toungue hanging out. See how seriously he takes himself? Hear how stupid he sounds? That's you making excuses.
I think the most challenging thing for me was completely eliminating caffeinated drinks. It took 3 weeks of real effort. I was a total asshole during that time. Went cold turkey. When the headaches got really bad I started allowing myself one swallow of coffee per day as an emergency measure, but only one, so I had to save it for times when I really needed it. I also went and sat in coffee shops to surround myself with the smell and temptation of coffee, and drank mint tea. Bleah.
Oddly, I started to crave bitter drinks. It's hard to define what caffeine tastes like, but I can pretty much taste something and know whether it's caffeinated now. Solved the craving with Roastaroma teabags. Not quite the same, but good enough.
Results: Anxiety issues that I never knew I had vanished. Focus returned. Productivity went through the roof. You think you're a good programmer, all hopped up on stimulants and pulling long hours? Stop. Purge. Be amazed.
Once I was clear, I found I actually had willpower again. I started swimming. Set your clock a couple of hours earlier, eat a banana, drive to the pool on the way to work, swim as far as you can, then shower and head to the office. Pack a breakfast the night before and eat when you get there. Note: You'll have to go to bed earlier to make this work. It's worth it. Bonus: you'll learn how to swim. I had never swum a proper length when I started this. Use a kickboard if you have to.
Don't screw around with a "3 days a week" thing. If it's a work day, work on yourself. It's either part of your life or it's just a fad. Once you're clear of caffeine, don't allow yourself to skip a workout. It's just not on. Everyone else can bend to you for once - you're turning your life around.
You'll be ready to go, full of energy, and have a clearer mind than you've had in years. Just be sure to tell everyone around you what you are about to do, so they can be understanding when you bark at them by mistake.
I can feed trolls with the best of 'em. Burn, karma, burn!
The fact that the rendering engine would be Gecko on their PC and WebKit on their iPhone just doesn't fucking matter.
Apple limits third party IOS developers to UIWebview, while Safari gets to use the Nitro JIT javascript engine. It's an automatic performance disadvantage for any aftermarket browser. That fucking matters.
It really shows that Mozilla's focus is on themselves and software developers, not on the consumer end user, who has been running Firefox on their PC for years now and Safari on their iPhone for years now and just wants a Firefox interface and bookmark syncing on their iPhone.
No, it shows that Mozilla is smart enough to recognize and avoid pitched battles with Apple. Why fight to have a weird mutant version of their flagship project on a closed device, damaging their brand with artificially limited performance and a rendering engine that doesn't act like Firefox?
If that is Mozilla's focus, then they don't belong on iOS and good riddance.
Mozilla's focus is on opening up the web. You're right - they don't "belong" on closed, controlled iOS. They will, however, try to encourage Apple to let them in.
On iOS, the end user is at the top of the hierarchy, and software developers and content producers all work for the user. The user already has an HTML5 renderer in their iPhone, they already have a TCP/IP stack. You do not need to replace them to build a browser, and in fact, it is much better security that you can't replace them. That is what is best for the consumer: a secure renderer that is highly-optimized specifically for their device.
Who decides what's in your interest? If it's Apple, then Apple is at the top of the hierarchy, not users as you say.
As a user myself, I value the ability to use Firefox over Chrome on my Android device. With Android, I can decide what's in my interests. The defaults work for "most consumers", and for everyone else there is a measure of freedom.
There are plenty of reasons that software monocultures are bad, and Google is your friend there.
There are hundreds of 3rd party browsers on iOS, many with very innovative features. Like Skyfire, which converts Flash Video to ISO standard video on a server and essentially enables you to run Flash on iPhone or iPad. There are browsers that are exploring lots of gestures, or deep social integration.
Cute little user-interface experiments are one thing, but that's all niche-market small time stuff. Deep social integration and gestures? Tee hee. Calling a UIWebview wrapper a browser is kind of endearing.
Mozilla is missing out on all of that because they are pouty, entitled developers who want their feet rubbed and cheeks kissed before they deign to bless us with their bloated, mangled code.
You realize that Firefox is the best browser on the memory usage front, and near tops in performance right? If your gut feeling about Mozilla is based on a 2006-era opinion, you might want to look at what they've done lately.
And of course, Mozilla knows better than Apple what Apple users want. As if.
Most users want options and the ability to use their devices as they see fit. Mozilla has only ever supported users' rights. Apple can't say that.
And finally, Mozilla's hypocrisy: note that the one and only HTML renderer on Firefox OS is Gecko. And Firefox OS has zero 3rd party browsers as of right now.
Hey now, third party browsers can just wrap Gecko (actually, it's more like just opening an IFRAME, since the UI is all HTML.) In your world, using the system renderer is a good thing, right? What are you complaining about? /s
In all seriousness though, it could be done with some work. I
"By all means, let's make rules that discourage violence against everyone - childredn, the elderly, women, men, pets, gingers, neckbeards," pretty clearly trivializes the specific problem of violence against women, and implies that the same laws that handle the (nonexistent) problem of violence against "neckbeards" are somehow sufficient to deal with the pervasive problem of violence against women.
Actually, I've witnessed a good friend of mine who self-identifies as a neckbeard get beaten up by some loser at a bar for sitting in the wrong place. I mean, Reddit has /r/neckbeardrights, for goodness' sake. Did you mean to disparage the neckbeard community? Are you so callous as to ignore the problem of violence against neckbeards... on Slashdot, no less? Are individual neckbeards less important than individual women? Should there be laws that punish crimes against female neckbeards (they must exist) extra, extra harshly?
In all seriousness, the fact that people are being violently victimized is the problem. As far as the law is concerned, the sex, hair colour, or facial hair configuration of the victim should not make any difference.
Man beats woman? The crime is (probably) assault/battery, not assault/battery-against-a-female. Neckbeard stomped by jock? There should not be elevated penalties for the jock because he dared target a valuable system administrator. The crime is the crime and penalties should be established based on the crime, not the characteristics of the victim.
When society starts putting ranking groups of people based on who is more likely to be a victim, or deciding who should be punished more based on who they are, we are on the road to legally untouchable government officials and caste-style segregation. Either individuals have common rights and common justice or we're all screwed.
It's not very productive to read what you want to read instead of what was actually posted.
I'm all for making laws that deal with specific situations in which violence (against X, Y, or Z) crop up, and I said so.
I don't see where, unless you mean "Violence typically occurs where society needs new rules and new norms." If by that you meant "I believe that specific laws are needed to deal with violence against women" you chose a pretty unclear way of expressing that idea (especially in the context of your last sentence...)
Second-last sentence. Maybe not the height of eloquence, but it's there. And no, tossing a silly example in there doesn't invalidate anything else I said.
You're a straight white guy, aren't you?
If I was, what would that say about me, Mr. or Ms. Coward?
It is not very productive to ignore that different kinds of violence have different causes and thus probably different solutions, and that some kinds of violence are more pervasive than others.
It's not very productive to read what you want to read instead of what was actually posted.
I'm all for making laws that deal with specific situations in which violence (against X, Y, or Z) crop up, and I said so.
I'm not defending the specific policy in question here, but your knee-jerk "all violence is bad response" is a sign that you might want to consider more nuanced ways of thinking about the world.
Your nuance detector appears to be broken, though your vague insult generator is certainly functional... :)
I'm getting tired of "Violence against women" being portrayed as a special case worthy of special laws at the expense of everyone else.
Violence in general is the problem. All violence has victims. Violence typically occurs where society needs new rules and new norms. Right now there is lots of violence against against women, more in some cultures than others. It's ugly.
Still, when we start getting laws designed to combat violence against group X that end up doing violence to the rights and freedoms of people outsideof group X, we're doing it wrong.
By all means, let's make rules that discourage violence against everyone - childredn, the elderly, women, men, pets, gingers, neckbeards. Short of widespread deployment of G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate, though, humans will keep bashing each other. There's a limit to prevention.
I'm not deciding for anyone but myself. You're the one taking it too far.
The problem with people like you is that your only concern is for how something like pervasive surveillance of communications might affect you personally. You don't bother to really think through the potential effects of your selfishness on society. Most people are equally uninformed, passive, and selfish, so you no doubt feel that your opinions are validated by your peers. You have the luxury of ignorance and you're taking full advantage of it.
Congratulations on being a very small part of a very large threat to our future as a civilized species. You may have picked the winning team - only time will tell - but you're a loser in my books.