- No local representation. Geography-based representation is huge for a country like Canada. Small communities need a voice. Although they may not have an equal voice in Parliament, at least they won't get ignored as they would in a proportional representation system. - No accountability. In a FPTP (first past the post [wikipedia.org]) system, an MP is accountable to their electorate. If you F up, you will be voted out. In a proportional system, the parties decide who the MPs are, so even if an MP Fs up, they may not be replaced by the party. - No attachment to electorate.
Yet another comment that uses a version of PR with certain characteristics to attack all forms of PR including those which do not suffer from these defects.
A couple of examples: 1/ Small Multi-member constituencies with single transferrable vote. If my city, which has 3 MPs, had these pooled into a single consituency, using STV, I would not consider them 'less local' than at present, in fact they would need to compete to be the 'best MP for the city'. 2/ Contituency MPs + Regional 'top-up' MPs with voter decided party-list preferences: Constituency MPs are elected as at present, giving local representation etc as at present; regional MPs are elected on a PR list system where voters can express preferences between candidates within a party list. The ballot papers for the list system don't have to list the party candidates in preference order (could be random etc.). This actually has the advantage that you get both local *and* regional representation.
Anyhow, the point is you can devise various systems which are much more proportional than FPTP (if not perfectly so) and still provide good local representation.
National, party-dictated list-based PR systems (which is effectively what you are attacking) are probably the worst sort except possibly for very small countries. They are also pretty rare and no-one serious has ever proposed such a system for the UK house of commons.
You do nothing of the sort. You vote for the party. The more votes a party has, the further down the list they go. The party leadership choose who's on the list, and in what order.
You seem to be quite uninformed about PR. You describe a feature which most people would regard as a flaw of a *particular sort of PR*, i.e. one involving a party list where no intra-party preferences can be expressed, and then use that to attack PR in general, including systems not involving party lists at all or involving party lists where intra-party voting preferences *can* be expressed. Wikipedia has a reasonable introduction to the main types of PR.
Sure the spec is open, but if nobody supports it you are still gonna have to write something from scratch to read it.
Hardly. All you would need to do is get just one of the existing open source products** which supports it now to compile on a modern system (preferable), or get (say) an old version of Linux to run in a VM. Not necessarily trivial, but nowhere near as difficult as writing something from scratch. And at least it's definitely possible, as opposed to a closed source product where 'compile for a modern system' is not one of your options, and the VM of a closed source OS may not run years later due to license key checks etc.
**Or even just the small subset of code that 'understands' the relevant format.
we're talking about even the smallest of applications you find on Windows Yes, can't live without those spyware-infested dancing cursors etc.
And most of the small free (as in price) programs for Windows which *do* do something useful? Basic utlities whose Linux equivalents come preinstalled or are in the repos.
Ergo, no one but geeks living in a fantasy world... ultimately finds Linux desktop distributions, especially when compared with the hype behind Ubuntu, useful.
This explains why my absolutely non-techie wife only spends about 8 hours a day using Ubuntu. She'd obviously use it a lot more if it wasn't so useless.
if you want to update to a nice new version of an application that happens to be in the 'official' repository somwehere, sorry, but you'll have to upgrade.
Bollocks. Backports repo, PPAs.
Beyond the stuff in the package repositories there is sod-all you can do with it,
Yeah, the mere tens of thousands of items in the repos, which only about cover 99% of the needs of 99% of home users (yes, apart from serious gamers). And of course, if it's not in the standard repos it's totally impossible to find a PPA, or download a deb package and install it by double-clicking.
It's a dick move for sure. Maybe even a little sneaky, but no, it's not fraud. When you purchased the machine, it came with a EULA that specifically said Sony could update the EULA at anytime for any reason.
Even though specific, limited and reasonable EULA clauses may be valid in some cases, unlimited EULA clauses of that sort (effectively 'we can do anything we like') would be legally invalid in many/most jurisdictions (most EU countries and some US states), so removal of functionality could be some sort of fraudulent marketing if they remove something which was advertised as part of the original sale.
Re:I wonder what the DOJ will have to say...
on
Apple To Buy ARM?
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· Score: 1
It's illegal, so saying it will happen is fear mongering.
Past experience shows that large companies frequently break competition laws, based on calculations such as the reward/risk ratio, the lack of political will to pursue them, the precise interpretation of competition law in a given case (e.g. defining the scope of the relevant market) and the amount of time between the breach of competition law and any punishment. So it's certainly wrong to say that just because it's (potentially) illegal, Apple wouldn't attempt to do it.
A monopoly is a monopoly. Apple has one on the iPhone.
It's not as simple as that. Competition law has a concept of monopolies in particular 'markets'.'iPhone' itself is very unlikely to be defined as a market for competition purposes, since it would be part of the larger smartphone market. So the question would be whether the iPhone was sufficiently dominant in the smartphone market for the relevant competition laws to apply. This is currently an open question.
It creates whole new classes of problem, where an employee is motivated to do poor work in order to get fired so that they don't have to pay for their training.
I'd find it difficult to believe that this is a real problem except in a tiny number of cases, since an employee taking this course of action would end up with some of the following: a) A possible lawsuit from a company which has a lot more money than them ("they deliberately performed poorly to get fired and avoid the training payback"). b) A bad reference (or more likely c). c) No reference at all and a difficult to explain gap in employment history. All of which could be much more disadvantageous than just paying the money back.
The last time I tried Ubuntu (10.4 if memory serves), it let me go all the way through the installation just for me to realize I hadn't *manually* set the boot partition, even though I'd selected to re-format the disk as part of the installation.
Manually having to set a boot partition is NOT something Granny knows, or even needs to know.
A few points: 1/ 10.04 is the current *beta* long term support version so your memory sounds suspect.
2/ You don't *need* a seperate boot partition at all for a simple install; the default setup is to just have a root and swap partition. So it sounds like you wanted something different to the default install and so had to customize it.
3/ 'Granny' doesn't generally install *any* operating system no matter how simple the process is.
The Nazi concept of forcing me to do something against my will. If I value add, I want to be paid for my work performed; I don't want to be forced to give it away. Giving away source code should be a choice, not forced upon you.
There you go again with this 'forced'. I don't think you understand the word. No one is forcing you to GPL *your* code - as you appear to admit by implying you use the BSD license. No one is forcing you to use other people's GPLed code. *If* you modify and distribute other people's GPLed code you have *freely chosen* to accept the conditions that they have *freely chosen* for *their* code. If you don't like their conditions for their code, you don't have to use it. Nobody is forcing anybody to do anything.
Also, being 'forced to do something' is in no way a *specificly* Nazi trait since it could apply to any authoritarian system, and in fact to certain aspects of all democracies (being forced to pay taxes for things you don't agree with, for example), so you appear to have chosen that term purely for flamebait purposes.
I always wondered if Canonical would run into issues around Firefox trademarks. I know that Mozilla policy is sensitive with regards to what things downstream can change and still use the Firefox trademark.
I thought from the Iceweasel case that it was fairly clear that the issue was code changes, not config changes like this one.
If "familiarity" was the issue, then why move the fsck'ing window buttons to the upper left? I don't buy that as an argument.
Given that it's just a configuration issue, I wouldn't be surprised if this is just some form of 'kite-flying' and the buttons will be back in their 'normal' positions in the release candidate.
Sure seems like a requirement to publish the source of any derivative works to me.
That's twice now you've missed out the crucial qualification "if and only if you want to distribute the derivative works". Anybody might think you were deliberately trying to mis-represent the GPL.
If you have to use open source, BSD license seems way less Nazi like to me.
So it's 'Nazi' to release code under your freely chosen license and expect people who have freely chosen to accept that license (by modifying and redistributing that code) to follow that license?
Which precise 'Nazi' trait does this illustrate? Freedom? Choice? Use of standard basic contract and copyright type laws?
The Pro-Choice side views the fetus as an optional inconvenience to the mother and view it is her choice, her morality on if to terminate the pregnancy or not. They view a fetus of 1 week vs. one of 8 months as the same "mass of cells". So they view termination of a fetus as not murder, so when killing a fresh newborn would be considered murder, but when aborting the same fetus one hour before that would not be...
This is a gross distortion of the typical pro-choice view. Very, very few people who would characterise themselves as pro-choice support abortion in the third trimester, or at any point beyond where the fetus is potentially independently viable (in the area of 24 weeks, maybe a bit less), apart from cases where the mother's life is in immediate danger etc. Countries with fairly 'liberal' abortion regimes such as the UK typically have limits such as 20-24 weeks, and in practice the vast majority are performed well before these limits.
And if 100% of what was done with computers scaled like that, you'd have made a great point.
Well, I think you've missed an important part of my point.
What I described is a good illustration of a fairly common scenario - one fairly heavy task going on in the background and a variety of less demanding tasks in the foreground. Although other demanding background tasks would not have increased in speed as much as video rendering, the general principle holds good that with a cheap modern PC you can run something really demanding at the same time as using the PC for several other foreground purposes; going back a ten years this was largely impossible even with higher end machines. So bloat is not cancelling out hardware advances.
Time to render 30 minute Video CD image (at VHS resolution) on 1999 mid-high level PC (cost £1200): 10 hours approx, PC effectively unusable for other purposes.
Time to render 2hr DVD image (at std DVD resolution) on 2008 low end PC (cost £350): 30 mins approx, PC also playing music/video, web browsing, ripping CDs etc. at the same time.
And just how are they going to know whether you have equipment to receive TV set up in your house? They have no right of entry to your property, unless you choose to allow it.
I thought maybe this wouldn't work with LCD TVs but the article claims (with a referenced paper) it does in some cases - however, perhaps less reliably than with CRTs.
Furthermore, I wish companies would stay away from politics altogether: no contributions to parties, no statements about how good or bad is a local government. Follow the local laws, and leave politics to the country's citizens.
There is a problem with this attitude in China. The rule of law there is entirely subservient to the party with not a shred of judicial independance. For example, China has laws 'guaranteeing' various freedoms, but they are completely worthless if you oppose 'the will of the party' in any way. In practice, the law in China is exactly what 'the party' says it is on any given day.
So by 'following local laws' you actually become an arm of 'the Party'.
Thus you *are* involved in politics whether you like it or not. And if you are a company offering information related services, you *will* be required to directly assist the party in its repressive aims, for example by identifying 'subversives', leading to their lengthy imprisonment or ultimately even execution for simply criticizing their goverment.
How do they propose to patch the software? Or are they going to distribute perfect software on the first try?
As per other posts, if the LiveCD/USB/whatever is tied to one website only and allows no local storage access, there is effectively no way to introduce malware even if the browser/OS is vunerable.
Slashdot Mirror
In 2005, Labour won the election in the UK with only 33% of popular vote, yet they had 60% of seats in parliament.
35.3% of popular vote and 55% (356/646) of the seats according to the BBC 2005 website.
Still not acceptable though.
This entails several unsavoury results:
- No local representation. Geography-based representation is huge for a country like Canada. Small communities need a voice. Although they may not have an equal voice in Parliament, at least they won't get ignored as they would in a proportional representation system.
- No accountability. In a FPTP (first past the post [wikipedia.org]) system, an MP is accountable to their electorate. If you F up, you will be voted out. In a proportional system, the parties decide who the MPs are, so even if an MP Fs up, they may not be replaced by the party.
- No attachment to electorate.
Yet another comment that uses a version of PR with certain characteristics to attack all forms of PR including those which do not suffer from these defects.
A couple of examples:
1/ Small Multi-member constituencies with single transferrable vote. If my city, which has 3 MPs, had these pooled into a single consituency, using STV, I would not consider them 'less local' than at present, in fact they would need to compete to be the 'best MP for the city'.
2/ Contituency MPs + Regional 'top-up' MPs with voter decided party-list preferences: Constituency MPs are elected as at present, giving local representation etc as at present; regional MPs are elected on a PR list system where voters can express preferences between candidates within a party list. The ballot papers for the list system don't have to list the party candidates in preference order (could be random etc.). This actually has the advantage that you get both local *and* regional representation.
Anyhow, the point is you can devise various systems which are much more proportional than FPTP (if not perfectly so) and still provide good local representation.
National, party-dictated list-based PR systems (which is effectively what you are attacking) are probably the worst sort except possibly for very small countries. They are also pretty rare and no-one serious has ever proposed such a system for the UK house of commons.
It has a strong majority government now.
Please forward me the memo. The one about how they reset everything so a new government starts with a clean slate. I appear to have missed it.
Greece has also had a single party goverments with clear majorities for the last *14 years*
You do nothing of the sort. You vote for the party. The more votes a party has, the further down the list they go. The party leadership choose who's on the list, and in what order.
You seem to be quite uninformed about PR. You describe a feature which most people would regard as a flaw of a *particular sort of PR*, i.e. one involving a party list where no intra-party preferences can be expressed, and then use that to attack PR in general, including systems not involving party lists at all or involving party lists where intra-party voting preferences *can* be expressed.
Wikipedia has a reasonable introduction to the main types of PR.
Sure the spec is open, but if nobody supports it you are still gonna have to write something from scratch to read it.
Hardly. All you would need to do is get just one of the existing open source products** which supports it now to compile on a modern system (preferable), or get (say) an old version of Linux to run in a VM. Not necessarily trivial, but nowhere near as difficult as writing something from scratch. And at least it's definitely possible, as opposed to a closed source product where 'compile for a modern system' is not one of your options, and the VM of a closed source OS may not run years later due to license key checks etc.
**Or even just the small subset of code that 'understands' the relevant format.
linux mint is spyware laden shit, have fun with that
Any evidence for this? I've searched with no relevant results.
Or is this just an obscure joke or troll?
There's only one type of person sadder than those who use 'M$', and that's the type that complains about it.
No, wait, there *is* one sadder type of person. The type that complains about people who complain about people who use 'M$'.
I'll get my coat...
we're talking about even the smallest of applications you find on Windows
Yes, can't live without those spyware-infested dancing cursors etc.
And most of the small free (as in price) programs for Windows which *do* do something useful? Basic utlities whose Linux equivalents come preinstalled or are in the repos.
Ergo, no one but geeks living in a fantasy world ... ultimately finds Linux desktop distributions, especially when compared with the hype behind Ubuntu, useful.
This explains why my absolutely non-techie wife only spends about 8 hours a day using Ubuntu. She'd obviously use it a lot more if it wasn't so useless.
if you want to update to a nice new version of an application that happens to be in the 'official' repository somwehere, sorry, but you'll have to upgrade.
Bollocks.
Backports repo, PPAs.
Beyond the stuff in the package repositories there is sod-all you can do with it,
Yeah, the mere tens of thousands of items in the repos, which only about cover 99% of the needs of 99% of home users (yes, apart from serious gamers). And of course, if it's not in the standard repos it's totally impossible to find a PPA, or download a deb package and install it by double-clicking.
It's a dick move for sure. Maybe even a little sneaky, but no, it's not fraud. When you purchased the machine, it came with a EULA that specifically said Sony could update the EULA at anytime for any reason.
Even though specific, limited and reasonable EULA clauses may be valid in some cases, unlimited EULA clauses of that sort (effectively 'we can do anything we like') would be legally invalid in many/most jurisdictions (most EU countries and some US states), so removal of functionality could be some sort of fraudulent marketing if they remove something which was advertised as part of the original sale.
It's illegal, so saying it will happen is fear mongering.
Past experience shows that large companies frequently break competition laws, based on calculations such as the reward/risk ratio, the lack of political will to pursue them, the precise interpretation of competition law in a given case (e.g. defining the scope of the relevant market) and the amount of time between the breach of competition law and any punishment.
So it's certainly wrong to say that just because it's (potentially) illegal, Apple wouldn't attempt to do it.
A monopoly is a monopoly. Apple has one on the iPhone.
It's not as simple as that. Competition law has a concept of monopolies in particular 'markets'.'iPhone' itself is very unlikely to be defined as a market for competition purposes, since it would be part of the larger smartphone market. So the question would be whether the iPhone was sufficiently dominant in the smartphone market for the relevant competition laws to apply. This is currently an open question.
Anyone with mod points should correct this; it's clearly not off topic, so it looks like it was modded down on political grounds.
It creates whole new classes of problem, where an employee is motivated to do poor work in order to get fired so that they don't have to pay for their training.
I'd find it difficult to believe that this is a real problem except in a tiny number of cases, since an employee taking this course of action would end up with some of the following:
a) A possible lawsuit from a company which has a lot more money than them ("they deliberately performed poorly to get fired and avoid the training payback").
b) A bad reference (or more likely c).
c) No reference at all and a difficult to explain gap in employment history.
All of which could be much more disadvantageous than just paying the money back.
"sudo make me a sandwich"
The last time I tried Ubuntu (10.4 if memory serves), it let me go all the way through the installation just for me to realize I hadn't *manually* set the boot partition, even though I'd selected to re-format the disk as part of the installation.
Manually having to set a boot partition is NOT something Granny knows, or even needs to know.
A few points:
1/ 10.04 is the current *beta* long term support version so your memory sounds suspect.
2/ You don't *need* a seperate boot partition at all for a simple install; the default setup is to just have a root and swap partition. So it sounds like you wanted something different to the default install and so had to customize it.
3/ 'Granny' doesn't generally install *any* operating system no matter how simple the process is.
The Nazi concept of forcing me to do something against my will. If I value add, I want to be paid for my work performed; I don't want to be forced to give it away. Giving away source code should be a choice, not forced upon you.
There you go again with this 'forced'. I don't think you understand the word. No one is forcing you to GPL *your* code - as you appear to admit by implying you use the BSD license. No one is forcing you to use other people's GPLed code.
*If* you modify and distribute other people's GPLed code you have *freely chosen* to accept the conditions that they have *freely chosen* for *their* code. If you don't like their conditions for their code, you don't have to use it. Nobody is forcing anybody to do anything.
Also, being 'forced to do something' is in no way a *specificly* Nazi trait since it could apply to any authoritarian system, and in fact to certain aspects of all democracies (being forced to pay taxes for things you don't agree with, for example), so you appear to have chosen that term purely for flamebait purposes.
I always wondered if Canonical would run into issues around Firefox trademarks. I know that Mozilla policy is sensitive with regards to what things downstream can change and still use the Firefox trademark.
I thought from the Iceweasel case that it was fairly clear that the issue was code changes, not config changes like this one.
If "familiarity" was the issue, then why move the fsck'ing window buttons to the upper left? I don't buy that as an argument.
Given that it's just a configuration issue, I wouldn't be surprised if this is just some form of 'kite-flying' and the buttons will be back in their 'normal' positions in the release candidate.
Sure seems like a requirement to publish the source of any derivative works to me.
That's twice now you've missed out the crucial qualification "if and only if you want to distribute the derivative works". Anybody might think you were deliberately trying to mis-represent the GPL.
If you have to use open source, BSD license seems way less Nazi like to me.
So it's 'Nazi' to release code under your freely chosen license and expect people who have freely chosen to accept that license (by modifying and redistributing that code) to follow that license?
Which precise 'Nazi' trait does this illustrate? Freedom? Choice? Use of standard basic contract and copyright type laws?
The Pro-Choice side views the fetus as an optional inconvenience to the mother and view it is her choice, her morality on if to terminate the pregnancy or not. They view a fetus of 1 week vs. one of 8 months as the same "mass of cells". So they view termination of a fetus as not murder, so when killing a fresh newborn would be considered murder, but when aborting the same fetus one hour before that would not be...
This is a gross distortion of the typical pro-choice view. Very, very few people who would characterise themselves as pro-choice support abortion in the third trimester, or at any point beyond where the fetus is potentially independently viable (in the area of 24 weeks, maybe a bit less), apart from cases where the mother's life is in immediate danger etc.
Countries with fairly 'liberal' abortion regimes such as the UK typically have limits such as 20-24 weeks, and in practice the vast majority are performed well before these limits.
And if 100% of what was done with computers scaled like that, you'd have made a great point.
Well, I think you've missed an important part of my point.
What I described is a good illustration of a fairly common scenario - one fairly heavy task going on in the background and a variety of less demanding tasks in the foreground. Although other demanding background tasks would not have increased in speed as much as video rendering, the general principle holds good that with a cheap modern PC you can run something really demanding at the same time as using the PC for several other foreground purposes; going back a ten years this was largely impossible even with higher end machines. So bloat is not cancelling out hardware advances.
Time to render 30 minute Video CD image (at VHS resolution) on 1999 mid-high level PC (cost £1200): 10 hours approx, PC effectively unusable for other purposes.
Time to render 2hr DVD image (at std DVD resolution) on 2008 low end PC (cost £350): 30 mins approx, PC also playing music/video, web browsing, ripping CDs etc. at the same time.
The effect of 'bloat' is often overstated.
And just how are they going to know whether you have equipment to receive TV set up in your house? They have no right of entry to your property, unless you choose to allow it.
If you have a CRT TV they can 'tune in' to your picture from outside your house (that's how detector vans work). See this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking
I thought maybe this wouldn't work with LCD TVs but the article claims (with a referenced paper) it does in some cases - however, perhaps less reliably than with CRTs.
Furthermore, I wish companies would stay away from politics altogether: no contributions to parties, no statements about how good or bad is a local government. Follow the local laws, and leave politics to the country's citizens.
There is a problem with this attitude in China. The rule of law there is entirely subservient to the party with not a shred of judicial independance. For example, China has laws 'guaranteeing' various freedoms, but they are completely worthless if you oppose 'the will of the party' in any way. In practice, the law in China is exactly what 'the party' says it is on any given day.
So by 'following local laws' you actually become an arm of 'the Party'.
Thus you *are* involved in politics whether you like it or not. And if you are a company offering information related services, you *will* be required to directly assist the party in its repressive aims, for example by identifying 'subversives', leading to their lengthy imprisonment or ultimately even execution for simply criticizing their goverment.
How do they propose to patch the software? Or are they going to distribute perfect software on the first try?
As per other posts, if the LiveCD/USB/whatever is tied to one website only and allows no local storage access, there is effectively no way to introduce malware even if the browser/OS is vunerable.