The key is 'take steps to try to win'. WTF does that even mean? Cheating falls under that description.
Let's try "Take steps that comply with the agreed-upon rules of the game to try to win." In Blackjack, for example, these are some of the rules:
A busting dealer beats a busting player, providing the house advantage. Various player advantages (ability to stand below 17, double down, split pairs, bonus for 2-card 21) partly compensate for this.
The player can see his own cards, one of the dealer's cards, and all cards of previous hands since the last shuffle.
Memorizing basic strategy, or the best local play based on a player's cards and the dealer's visible card, just about compensates for the rest of the house advantage. Modifying the strategy based on observed favorable and unfavorable cards since the last shuffle may put the player over the edge. Why should that be cheating? And if it is, why don't the casinos tell their guests?
Schools have [zero tolerance] policies because it relieves them from having to think. Aren't all the grown-ups at a school supposed to be capable of critical thinking?
School administrators are capable of critical thinking. The voters who elect the school board that hires school administrators, not so much.
Just because someone explains how the existing law works to you (for the first time?) doesn't mean they've expressed support for that aspect of it
True. Here's a suggestion: Some users disclaim support for the law that they're explaining by prefacing such explanation with "Under current law" or similar. I, for one, have done this when explaining copyright, particularly some of the parts that I consider contrary to "the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
What do people do most on their PCs these days? Browse. What do people do with a major amount of time on their phone? Browse.
When you want to graduate from browsing to creating, it's easier to do so if you own a PC than if all you have is what The Register refers to as a "fondleslab."
Because not everybody feels up to opening a Chromebook's case to turn its firmware write protect screw, which is what you need to do in order to ensure your Chromebook's firmware doesn't destroy the installed OS when someone turns it on and presses the Space bar.
why i would rather just buy a x86_84 laptop and wipe windows off and put Linux on it
Would you prefer a laptop on which accelerated graphics, audio, network, screen brightness, and suspend work or don't work? Because there are a lot of laptops for which these work in Windows but not GNU/Linux due to missing or broken drivers. See experiences installing Debian on an ASUS Transformer Book T100TA for example.
Why would you deliberately buy a prison for yourself in the first place?
Possibly because it's much easier to physically carry a 11.6" Chromebook than a 14" laptop.
Or because all devices in a particular market segment are jailed. Between when the iPhone came out and when the HTC Dream (first Android phone) came out, which smartphones available in the U.S. market weren't jailed? (I wanted a Nokia 900 around that time, but none of the stores I visited carried it.) Or between 1987 when VGA came out and 2007 when TVs caught up with PC output resolutions, which video game player intended for output to a television-sized monitor wasn't jailed?
Building from source makes software less reliable when the firmware includes technical measures to deliberately make software built from source less reliable. Chromebook stock firmware includes such a measure. In developer mode, it prompts the user to press two keys to erase the entire hard drive, which makes the device's overall data retention less reliable. Consider the following sequence of events on a Chromebook in developer mode.
*someone turns on your Chromebook* *doesn't know what the prompt means* *presses Space as prompted* *presses Enter as prompted* *you have lost all data*
Probably hardware differences. Debian's own wiki acknowledges plenty of problems getting Debian GNU/Linux to behave on, say, an ASUS Transformer Book T100TA.
But now you're making a distinction between PC Linux and Mobile Linux, in what way is that meaningful?
Mobile Linux is most commonly used for viewing works created by others, not for creating works longer than the one or two paragraphs of a Tweet or a Facebook post. This is in large part caused by the limits of a finger-operated input device for entering large amounts of text or indicating fine positions, combined with the hassle of carrying an external mouse and keyboard everywhere you go.
Mobile Linux cannot by default run applications designed for desktop or laptop computers. There exist apps called GNURoot Debian and XServer XSDL that reportedly do a passable job of simulating a desktop environment, but this adds a lot of overhead in CPU (therefore battery) and storage use.
Mobile Linux cannot run applications designed for Wine, even if the application's developer fully supports use in Wine. This is because Wine is designed for CPUs using the x86 or x86-64 instruction set, whereas mobile Linux devices have an ARM or ARM64 CPU.
Chromebooks are designed to run web applications. Most cannot run applications designed for GNU/Linux without a firmware replacement because they use a version of the Linux kernel prior to the addition of features that allow for rich container support. See the recent Slashdot story "Linux Apps Are Not Coming To Many Still-Supported Chromebooks".
ISPs applying this technique filter out all incoming connections. The subscriber's modem doesn't even have a publicly routable IP address. Instead, the ISP assigns the subscriber an IP address in the reserved space 100.64.0.0/10 (as documented in RFC 6598), which is routable only within that ISP's network, and translates addresses within that range to a much smaller address space as packets enter and leave the ISP's network.
And as Bert64 wrote, Myanmar is among the countries that have so few IPv4 addresses allocated to them that all ISPs have to run home users behind NAT in order to provide service. Say you have 16,000-odd IP addresses (a/18) but 10 million customers. The pigeonhole principle means you can't put each customer on a separate IP address. At a global scale, with 7 billion people and 4.2 billion IP addresses, you can't give everyone a unique address.
You know they could just click okay and move on with their lives.
Except a lot of them won't. Even with the warning for cleartext HTTP becoming scarier in recent versions of Chromium and Google Chrome, it's still not nearly as conspicuous/"scary" as the warning for a self-signed certificate.
It is - or at least was - generally considered bad taste to log chats on IRC.
Was. I get the impression that since EFnet's popularity peak, many chat communities have become more open to logging as a way of allowing people in less privileged time zones to participate.
Slashdot Mirror
Then we proceed to see whether the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. How else are farmers supposed to keep crows from stealing their corn?
The key is 'take steps to try to win'. WTF does that even mean? Cheating falls under that description.
Let's try "Take steps that comply with the agreed-upon rules of the game to try to win." In Blackjack, for example, these are some of the rules:
Memorizing basic strategy, or the best local play based on a player's cards and the dealer's visible card, just about compensates for the rest of the house advantage. Modifying the strategy based on observed favorable and unfavorable cards since the last shuffle may put the player over the edge. Why should that be cheating? And if it is, why don't the casinos tell their guests?
Schools have [zero tolerance] policies because it relieves them from having to think. Aren't all the grown-ups at a school supposed to be capable of critical thinking?
School administrators are capable of critical thinking. The voters who elect the school board that hires school administrators, not so much.
Just because someone explains how the existing law works to you (for the first time?) doesn't mean they've expressed support for that aspect of it
True. Here's a suggestion: Some users disclaim support for the law that they're explaining by prefacing such explanation with "Under current law" or similar. I, for one, have done this when explaining copyright, particularly some of the parts that I consider contrary to "the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
*turns on your Chromebook with Crouton*
*presses Space as prompted*
*presses Enter as prompted*
Now where's all your data? (explanation)
What do people do most on their PCs these days? Browse. What do people do with a major amount of time on their phone? Browse.
When you want to graduate from browsing to creating, it's easier to do so if you own a PC than if all you have is what The Register refers to as a "fondleslab."
I bet you can engender the same negative reactive by listening to *any* sitcom without a laugh track.
The Simpsons doesn't use a laugh track.
we cancelled our DirecTV and lost access to CBS
Where do you live that a CBS affiliate's ATSC broadcast does not reach?
Ha, but now my job consists mostly of getting developers off servers and onto serverless solutions.
What happens once the provider of a particular "serverless" solution goes mammaries-up?
Because not everybody feels up to opening a Chromebook's case to turn its firmware write protect screw, which is what you need to do in order to ensure your Chromebook's firmware doesn't destroy the installed OS when someone turns it on and presses the Space bar.
why i would rather just buy a x86_84 laptop and wipe windows off and put Linux on it
Would you prefer a laptop on which accelerated graphics, audio, network, screen brightness, and suspend work or don't work? Because there are a lot of laptops for which these work in Windows but not GNU/Linux due to missing or broken drivers. See experiences installing Debian on an ASUS Transformer Book T100TA for example.
Why would you deliberately buy a prison for yourself in the first place?
Possibly because it's much easier to physically carry a 11.6" Chromebook than a 14" laptop.
Or because all devices in a particular market segment are jailed. Between when the iPhone came out and when the HTC Dream (first Android phone) came out, which smartphones available in the U.S. market weren't jailed? (I wanted a Nokia 900 around that time, but none of the stores I visited carried it.) Or between 1987 when VGA came out and 2007 when TVs caught up with PC output resolutions, which video game player intended for output to a television-sized monitor wasn't jailed?
The features did exist. They just got pulled from the market back in 2012.
Building from source makes software less reliable when the firmware includes technical measures to deliberately make software built from source less reliable. Chromebook stock firmware includes such a measure. In developer mode, it prompts the user to press two keys to erase the entire hard drive, which makes the device's overall data retention less reliable. Consider the following sequence of events on a Chromebook in developer mode.
*someone turns on your Chromebook*
*doesn't know what the prompt means*
*presses Space as prompted*
*presses Enter as prompted*
*you have lost all data*
Probably hardware differences. Debian's own wiki acknowledges plenty of problems getting Debian GNU/Linux to behave on, say, an ASUS Transformer Book T100TA.
But now you're making a distinction between PC Linux and Mobile Linux, in what way is that meaningful?
Mobile Linux is most commonly used for viewing works created by others, not for creating works longer than the one or two paragraphs of a Tweet or a Facebook post. This is in large part caused by the limits of a finger-operated input device for entering large amounts of text or indicating fine positions, combined with the hassle of carrying an external mouse and keyboard everywhere you go.
Mobile Linux cannot by default run applications designed for desktop or laptop computers. There exist apps called GNURoot Debian and XServer XSDL that reportedly do a passable job of simulating a desktop environment, but this adds a lot of overhead in CPU (therefore battery) and storage use.
Mobile Linux cannot run applications designed for Wine, even if the application's developer fully supports use in Wine. This is because Wine is designed for CPUs using the x86 or x86-64 instruction set, whereas mobile Linux devices have an ARM or ARM64 CPU.
Chromebooks are designed to run web applications. Most cannot run applications designed for GNU/Linux without a firmware replacement because they use a version of the Linux kernel prior to the addition of features that allow for rich container support. See the recent Slashdot story "Linux Apps Are Not Coming To Many Still-Supported Chromebooks".
ISPs applying this technique filter out all incoming connections. The subscriber's modem doesn't even have a publicly routable IP address. Instead, the ISP assigns the subscriber an IP address in the reserved space 100.64.0.0/10 (as documented in RFC 6598), which is routable only within that ISP's network, and translates addresses within that range to a much smaller address space as packets enter and leave the ISP's network.
And as Bert64 wrote, Myanmar is among the countries that have so few IPv4 addresses allocated to them that all ISPs have to run home users behind NAT in order to provide service. Say you have 16,000-odd IP addresses (a /18) but 10 million customers. The pigeonhole principle means you can't put each customer on a separate IP address. At a global scale, with 7 billion people and 4.2 billion IP addresses, you can't give everyone a unique address.
Banning computers would be a trolley problem, as it would cost more lives than it saves.
Among people with no legs, ankle twisting would be replaced with wrist twisting. (Case in point: Swedish vrist means ankle.)
If you cut off everyone's legs at birth [...] no one would ever twist their ankle.
Nobody would get tired legs while waiting in line either. So many positives I can't believe we're not doing it yet.
Turns out there's an animated series about a community of people with no legs. It's called Weebles .
"Time for a new ISP" doesn't help if all the other home ISPs in the same city have the same dain bramage. Please reread the Bert64 comment I linked.
You know they could just click okay and move on with their lives.
Except a lot of them won't. Even with the warning for cleartext HTTP becoming scarier in recent versions of Chromium and Google Chrome, it's still not nearly as conspicuous/"scary" as the warning for a self-signed certificate.
It is - or at least was - generally considered bad taste to log chats on IRC.
Was. I get the impression that since EFnet's popularity peak, many chat communities have become more open to logging as a way of allowing people in less privileged time zones to participate.
Why not just keep your own stuff for ZERO money per month
How do you keep data safe from fire, flood, or other disasters that affect your home "for ZERO money per month"?