Is it freedom to be denied the best possible solution?
Human nature, the inborn instinct, doesn't exactly seek out chains. At some point you have to decide whether the absolute theoretical freedom you have is worth not making use of every possible avenue. Would it really have been better for Linux development not to have used BitKeeper and stuck with an older model? Granted, they'd remain freedom-pure, but they probably wouldn't be where they are today.
one should never say "knots per hour" as that is just wrong.
What about "These motors can accelerate the ship at 5 knots per hour" (= 5 nmi/hr^2)? That's completely valid. Of course you weren't talking about acceleration, but "knots per hour" is not always wrong.
Because, horror of horrors, the majority of Slashdot users use Windows.
Of course it's not 90% or 95% or whatever the general population figure is, but it's still something like 70%. (Remember that there are a bunch of lurkers who read the articles and don't participate in the community.)
Besides, if you have another OS, you probably have a worthwhile browser already.
Plus you can do like a modern-day Ragnar Danneskjold and invade Redmond and Lindon periodically...you can take the money for pre-installed Windows licenses and return it in gold bars to Linux users.
I say this as a fellow Christian: don't worry about it. Whoever of you is without sin, let him cast the first stone.
Allow them to do whatever they want on Earth. They've heard that the Bible "says" that homosexuality is "wrong", and no more amount of ranting will change the minds of those that haven't changed yet. (Honestly, has any true gay (not an undecided) gone back in the closet in response to the Bible?) If indeed homosexuality is wrong, God will take care of it soon enough.
You do believe God is capable of taking care of it, right? We're here to spread the Good News, not to make moral judgments in His place.
You've got great points in theory. And if you became an economist, chances are you'd believe in these points better. Because according to economic theory, you're absolutely correct.
Except for the minor part about food shortages when the market stops working. The farmers will suffer as appropriate for their poor choices, but so will the rest of the populace who depends on these non-economically-smart farmers to get their food.
This is kinda like how government lowest-bid-only contracts are a bad idea. Sure, the system will reach equilibrium eventually, but the community can't afford to allow the natural process to occur.
By putting a pure free market on farming, you encourage farmers to produce as much as they can. Human nature is to go for immediate gratification and produce all you can this year. (If it weren't, how come very few people have retirement/emergency savings accounts of their own?)
The incentive here is simply the lack of sufficient incentive the other way. What's your third alternative?
Oh my gosh. There are still people who believe this is wrong?
Sure, let's go and give incentives for farmers to farm the heck out of their land. Then what do you do when the land is useless for a couple of decades? Appropriately rotating crops and leaving the land to rest at times will give more production than killing the land in a few short years. So no, it isn't "not growing crops."
And price fixing in small amounts is also justified, if the natural market price would force many farmers out of business. Sure, once the food supply runs low the demand will increase, but for something like the food of a nation, letting the free market play out isn't quite the best strategy. If you let the farmers grow all they can, the danger is that supply will outrun immediate demand, prices will fall, suppliers will fail, and demand will far outrun the long-term supply.
Aagh! ADC! This is probably the third time I've looked through the registration form just to see the "I also confirm that I am 18 years or older." disclaimer at the bottom. My parents use Windows, so I don't really think I can convince them to sign up. Why do they have that requirement? COPPA only requires you to be 13...
What I was going to request is that away messages shouldn't require a third-party hack to set an auto-response. And iCAR doesn't even set the "Auto-response from" flag, presumably because it isn't able to, as an extension to iChat.
I'm going to rephrase the parent a little less insultingly.
Yours is definitely not a bad comic...like those stupid sprite comics with no plotline. But yours isn't a great comic. And at this early stage, of course you shouldn't expect it to be a great comic, but you haven't set a path yet for making it great. Let me give a few examples.
Penny Arcade has a very creative sense of humor and excellent skill in satire of the computer industry.
User Friendly has a very in-depth plot line and pokes fun at the computer industry and other topics in science very often. (Back when the EA galley-slave scandal broke, it was UF that drew the comic strips of the EA employees on the slave ship.)
WoT Now? is a sprite comic, but the creativity and dialogue more than makes up for the lack of hand-drawn graphics. Moreover, the sprites are custom-made for the comic. WoT Now? is mainly for readers of the Wheel of Time series, which limits its potential readership but also gives a very clear focus.
One One Se7en is a similar example of parody within a series. Note that the drawing quality is very low, yet the comics themselves are amusing.
megatokyo has an unusual setup (American gamer somewhat lost in Japan) that provides enough opportunities for a long plot.
Basically, I think what I'm saying is that unless you want to go for one-shot gags like 117 does -- and you can do it well -- you need some sort of plotline. At the least you need short story arcs. And you'll need a consistent set of characters and a focus of some sort, e.g., the computer industry? A fiction series? A particular setup that would make for a nice short story?
And unless you're going for a special effect near the end of an arc, try to put a good joke in each strip. Your jellyfish joke was either too silly or too complex to work well, for example. It's hard to come up with original and genuinely humorous jokes, but such is the challenge of a cartoonist.
Let's get the prerequisites out of the way first: Would you be volating a social contract hitting the 30sec skip button on Tivo? Yes. Or putting a strip of paper across the bottom of our TV screen to block out those super annoying scrolling banners? For broadcast TV, yes. For cable, possibly. I have found that using the combination of AdBlock and FlashBlock extensions in Firefox has greatly enhanced my browsing experience. That is, until the sites shut down because they don't have enough advertising content.
Has acceptance of web sites crammed with advertising content become part of my social contract with society?
No.
By hosting ads so annoying that you concentrate on them more than the page itself, the site designer isn't holding up his end of the social contract...that he will provide you with an informative page.
In other words...the social contract is that he will add reasonable ads which you are to view so that the advertiser can give him enough money to subsidize his site. If he doesn't give ads that are likely to make you patronize the advertiser, you're not responsible for viewing them.
They obviously aren't obsolete if they are still selling.
Right. I used to be in the abandonware-should-be-public-domain camp until I saw Nintendo rerelease old games, e.g., the SNES Zelda for Game Boy Advance, and many NES games for the E-Reader. Granted, we can talk about the incentive for innovation of a long copyright period, but these works are firmly within their copyright (they're only about 15 years old) and Nintendo has shown that they're definitely not abandoned.
If anything, we should shorten copyright. Abandonware and other arguments don't apply here.
Oh, and "lost revenue" can also mean "they misappropriated our IP, started a company, and consumers who would have bought our modern products bought their console running our games." That's as valid as "they didn't buy our games because someone was selling the exact same stuff". You can't legally compete with someone by pirating their software.
Say it with me now. Its for the purpose of having FUN, not learning.
Don't you think that at some level it will influence people? Especially if they've only heard enough about the subject to see that it's plausible but not enough to know it's untrue...
Suppose I make a game (or movie or book) about, say, World War II, which is very historically accurate but depends heavily on Winston Churchill having a fictional Jewish adopted brother (perhaps to explain Winston's great opposition to anti-Semitism). If this game becomes highly popular and enters the public consciousness, will I not be held responsible if there arises a popular belief that this brother did exist? I cannot simply bill my work as "fiction": because I used so many accurate elements, I have a responsibility either not to cross the line to fiction, or to clearly mark it if I do.
Works like The Guns of the South are historical fiction; that is, the fictional elements are easily recognizable. Nobody will believe that the story actually happened. However, works like The Guns of August are expected to be true (though in quite a less formal style than, say, a textbook or encyclopedia). Tuchman has no right to wave away an important inaccuracy in her book by claiming it's "just a book".
Linux is the manifestation of Ayn Rand's 'rebellion of the intellect' projected in Atlas Shrugged.
I was surprised for a second to see what is half-correctly described as a "Communist" project in the role of something from Rand. Then I realized that you're correct. The strike doesn't need to involve a laissez-faire economy; it just requires a radical change from the corrupt status quo. If that's a change from a monopolized market economy to an open-source change of ideas, so be it. The strikers still refuse to work with the Old Guard.
The one thing they need now is the concept of "intellectual property." Companies today, e.g., SCO, go so far as to claim that IP cannot be voluntarily freed (remember "the GPL violates the copyright clause of the Constitution"?), just as those from AS tried to force Rearden to release his rights to Rearden Metal. Those from Galt's Gulch set up a system strongly based on private property; the OSS hackers have a system based on voluntary and unrecompensed donations to the community. It may be the opposite economy, but it's the same underlying idea.
When we see the blinkenlights of New York go out from the next Windows vulnerability, we will know that our job is done.
Most of the time he means "inconsistent" where he writes "incorrect".
"XSane Image scanning program"
should be "XSane image scanning program" to match the other three. But I think what he's saying is that every Menu Item is capitalized in Title Case, except for these four.
misspells "Shut Down" as "Shutdown"
because every previous alert wrote "Shut Down." He's only complaining about consistency.
Gnome footprint logo
Ubuntu's designers can change this, right? I don't suppose the logo is hard-coded into GNOME (and even if it were, it's open source).
What I'd really like to know is how did students running filesharing apps for trading music get authorized to use Internet2? Sure, it's by the universities, but shouldn't we kinda keep it to research projects for the timebeing?
Well, if you consider it a "bother", then I agree, it's really not worth it. If you can enjoy math and science for the sake of doing work in them, that's different. Because it's definitely not going to "pay off" in the traditional sense.
over here, if a kid loves math, chess or generally science, it is branded as a nerd or freak and subject to the heavy beating by the other kids.
I am almost completely sure that you don't speak from personal experience. Even the schools in Louisiana of all places are quite conducive to this kind of talent.
The only problem America has is a generation of kids (all kids) who like to condemn themselves to failure and then blame it on "society". If you try to be good at math, chess, or generally science, you will be. If you go around looking for bullies then don't complain when you get beat up.
Yes, it's a bit stereotypical and often applied to kids, but if we start using it generally everyone will know what we mean, and it's definitely a lot easier to reclaim than "hacker".
Slashdot Mirror
Atlas Shrugged. I think Ayn Rand would've shot herself rather than release a book uncopyrighted.
Is it freedom to be denied the best possible solution?
Human nature, the inborn instinct, doesn't exactly seek out chains. At some point you have to decide whether the absolute theoretical freedom you have is worth not making use of every possible avenue. Would it really have been better for Linux development not to have used BitKeeper and stuck with an older model? Granted, they'd remain freedom-pure, but they probably wouldn't be where they are today.
one should never say "knots per hour" as that is just wrong.
What about "These motors can accelerate the ship at 5 knots per hour" (= 5 nmi/hr^2)? That's completely valid. Of course you weren't talking about acceleration, but "knots per hour" is not always wrong.
Because, horror of horrors, the majority of Slashdot users use Windows.
Of course it's not 90% or 95% or whatever the general population figure is, but it's still something like 70%. (Remember that there are a bunch of lurkers who read the articles and don't participate in the community.)
Besides, if you have another OS, you probably have a worthwhile browser already.
Plus you can do like a modern-day Ragnar Danneskjold and invade Redmond and Lindon periodically...you can take the money for pre-installed Windows licenses and return it in gold bars to Linux users.
last time i installed windows...
Of course not. What about last time you tried for a job at MS?
Being gay is wrong. It says so in the Bible.
I say this as a fellow Christian: don't worry about it. Whoever of you is without sin, let him cast the first stone.
Allow them to do whatever they want on Earth. They've heard that the Bible "says" that homosexuality is "wrong", and no more amount of ranting will change the minds of those that haven't changed yet. (Honestly, has any true gay (not an undecided) gone back in the closet in response to the Bible?) If indeed homosexuality is wrong, God will take care of it soon enough.
You do believe God is capable of taking care of it, right? We're here to spread the Good News, not to make moral judgments in His place.
You've got great points in theory. And if you became an economist, chances are you'd believe in these points better. Because according to economic theory, you're absolutely correct.
Except for the minor part about food shortages when the market stops working. The farmers will suffer as appropriate for their poor choices, but so will the rest of the populace who depends on these non-economically-smart farmers to get their food.
This is kinda like how government lowest-bid-only contracts are a bad idea. Sure, the system will reach equilibrium eventually, but the community can't afford to allow the natural process to occur.
By putting a pure free market on farming, you encourage farmers to produce as much as they can. Human nature is to go for immediate gratification and produce all you can this year. (If it weren't, how come very few people have retirement/emergency savings accounts of their own?)
The incentive here is simply the lack of sufficient incentive the other way. What's your third alternative?
So just as farmers get paid for not growing crops
Oh my gosh. There are still people who believe this is wrong?
Sure, let's go and give incentives for farmers to farm the heck out of their land. Then what do you do when the land is useless for a couple of decades? Appropriately rotating crops and leaving the land to rest at times will give more production than killing the land in a few short years. So no, it isn't "not growing crops."
And price fixing in small amounts is also justified, if the natural market price would force many farmers out of business. Sure, once the food supply runs low the demand will increase, but for something like the food of a nation, letting the free market play out isn't quite the best strategy. If you let the farmers grow all they can, the danger is that supply will outrun immediate demand, prices will fall, suppliers will fail, and demand will far outrun the long-term supply.
Aagh! ADC! This is probably the third time I've looked through the registration form just to see the "I also confirm that I am 18 years or older." disclaimer at the bottom. My parents use Windows, so I don't really think I can convince them to sign up. Why do they have that requirement? COPPA only requires you to be 13...
What I was going to request is that away messages shouldn't require a third-party hack to set an auto-response. And iCAR doesn't even set the "Auto-response from" flag, presumably because it isn't able to, as an extension to iChat.
"AIM Profiles in iChat AV" isn't exactly a huge innovation
No, it's not. But we got 17,438 requests for that feature from users. It doesn't have to be big to be important to our customers.
Make that 17,439. Where do you request this?
fly-by-night
It flies by day, also.
put it under the god damned public domain
Holden Caulfield? Is that you?
I'm going to rephrase the parent a little less insultingly.
Yours is definitely not a bad comic...like those stupid sprite comics with no plotline. But yours isn't a great comic. And at this early stage, of course you shouldn't expect it to be a great comic, but you haven't set a path yet for making it great. Let me give a few examples.
Penny Arcade has a very creative sense of humor and excellent skill in satire of the computer industry.
User Friendly has a very in-depth plot line and pokes fun at the computer industry and other topics in science very often. (Back when the EA galley-slave scandal broke, it was UF that drew the comic strips of the EA employees on the slave ship.)
WoT Now? is a sprite comic, but the creativity and dialogue more than makes up for the lack of hand-drawn graphics. Moreover, the sprites are custom-made for the comic. WoT Now? is mainly for readers of the Wheel of Time series, which limits its potential readership but also gives a very clear focus.
One One Se7en is a similar example of parody within a series. Note that the drawing quality is very low, yet the comics themselves are amusing.
megatokyo has an unusual setup (American gamer somewhat lost in Japan) that provides enough opportunities for a long plot.
Basically, I think what I'm saying is that unless you want to go for one-shot gags like 117 does -- and you can do it well -- you need some sort of plotline. At the least you need short story arcs. And you'll need a consistent set of characters and a focus of some sort, e.g., the computer industry? A fiction series? A particular setup that would make for a nice short story?
And unless you're going for a special effect near the end of an arc, try to put a good joke in each strip. Your jellyfish joke was either too silly or too complex to work well, for example. It's hard to come up with original and genuinely humorous jokes, but such is the challenge of a cartoonist.
Let's get the prerequisites out of the way first:
Would you be volating a social contract hitting the 30sec skip button on Tivo? Yes.
Or putting a strip of paper across the bottom of our TV screen to block out those super annoying scrolling banners? For broadcast TV, yes. For cable, possibly.
I have found that using the combination of AdBlock and FlashBlock extensions in Firefox has greatly enhanced my browsing experience. That is, until the sites shut down because they don't have enough advertising content.
Has acceptance of web sites crammed with advertising content become part of my social contract with society?
No.
By hosting ads so annoying that you concentrate on them more than the page itself, the site designer isn't holding up his end of the social contract...that he will provide you with an informative page.
In other words...the social contract is that he will add reasonable ads which you are to view so that the advertiser can give him enough money to subsidize his site. If he doesn't give ads that are likely to make you patronize the advertiser, you're not responsible for viewing them.
They obviously aren't obsolete if they are still selling.
Right. I used to be in the abandonware-should-be-public-domain camp until I saw Nintendo rerelease old games, e.g., the SNES Zelda for Game Boy Advance, and many NES games for the E-Reader. Granted, we can talk about the incentive for innovation of a long copyright period, but these works are firmly within their copyright (they're only about 15 years old) and Nintendo has shown that they're definitely not abandoned.
If anything, we should shorten copyright. Abandonware and other arguments don't apply here.
Oh, and "lost revenue" can also mean "they misappropriated our IP, started a company, and consumers who would have bought our modern products bought their console running our games." That's as valid as "they didn't buy our games because someone was selling the exact same stuff". You can't legally compete with someone by pirating their software.
Of course. I think that great-grandparent was interpreting "incorrect" with "spelled incorrectly", hence his links to the dictionary.
Say it with me now. Its for the purpose of having FUN, not learning.
Don't you think that at some level it will influence people? Especially if they've only heard enough about the subject to see that it's plausible but not enough to know it's untrue...
Suppose I make a game (or movie or book) about, say, World War II, which is very historically accurate but depends heavily on Winston Churchill having a fictional Jewish adopted brother (perhaps to explain Winston's great opposition to anti-Semitism). If this game becomes highly popular and enters the public consciousness, will I not be held responsible if there arises a popular belief that this brother did exist? I cannot simply bill my work as "fiction": because I used so many accurate elements, I have a responsibility either not to cross the line to fiction, or to clearly mark it if I do.
Works like The Guns of the South are historical fiction; that is, the fictional elements are easily recognizable. Nobody will believe that the story actually happened. However, works like The Guns of August are expected to be true (though in quite a less formal style than, say, a textbook or encyclopedia). Tuchman has no right to wave away an important inaccuracy in her book by claiming it's "just a book".
Linux is the manifestation of Ayn Rand's 'rebellion of the intellect' projected in Atlas Shrugged.
I was surprised for a second to see what is half-correctly described as a "Communist" project in the role of something from Rand. Then I realized that you're correct. The strike doesn't need to involve a laissez-faire economy; it just requires a radical change from the corrupt status quo. If that's a change from a monopolized market economy to an open-source change of ideas, so be it. The strikers still refuse to work with the Old Guard.
The one thing they need now is the concept of "intellectual property." Companies today, e.g., SCO, go so far as to claim that IP cannot be voluntarily freed (remember "the GPL violates the copyright clause of the Constitution"?), just as those from AS tried to force Rearden to release his rights to Rearden Metal. Those from Galt's Gulch set up a system strongly based on private property; the OSS hackers have a system based on voluntary and unrecompensed donations to the community. It may be the opposite economy, but it's the same underlying idea.
When we see the blinkenlights of New York go out from the next Windows vulnerability, we will know that our job is done.
Most of the time he means "inconsistent" where he writes "incorrect".
"XSane Image scanning program"
should be "XSane image scanning program" to match the other three. But I think what he's saying is that every Menu Item is capitalized in Title Case, except for these four.
misspells "Shut Down" as "Shutdown"
because every previous alert wrote "Shut Down." He's only complaining about consistency.
Gnome footprint logo
Ubuntu's designers can change this, right? I don't suppose the logo is hard-coded into GNOME (and even if it were, it's open source).
What I'd really like to know is how did students running filesharing apps for trading music get authorized to use Internet2? Sure, it's by the universities, but shouldn't we kinda keep it to research projects for the timebeing?
Well, if you consider it a "bother", then I agree, it's really not worth it. If you can enjoy math and science for the sake of doing work in them, that's different. Because it's definitely not going to "pay off" in the traditional sense.
over here, if a kid loves math, chess or generally science, it is branded as a nerd or freak and subject to the heavy beating by the other kids.
I am almost completely sure that you don't speak from personal experience. Even the schools in Louisiana of all places are quite conducive to this kind of talent.
The only problem America has is a generation of kids (all kids) who like to condemn themselves to failure and then blame it on "society". If you try to be good at math, chess, or generally science, you will be. If you go around looking for bullies then don't complain when you get beat up.
What about "(computer) whiz"?
Yes, it's a bit stereotypical and often applied to kids, but if we start using it generally everyone will know what we mean, and it's definitely a lot easier to reclaim than "hacker".
Oh, and what of "geek" and "nerd"?