Even with the relatively high value of the cargo, it is still hard to see how the person who delivered it could reasonably expect to be paid for it.
Perhaps the operator never expected payment and is just some psychopath performing an experiment on the prison inmates and guards to observe what would happen. Round one was some drugs, perhaps round two will be a few knives or even a firearm.
If your goal is to instigate mayhem and destruction, a $600 quadcopter could offer a pretty high return on investment (but unfortunately to the detriment of others using them for benign purposes).
I was trying to be kind of funny, by putting the astrophysicist in the same 1993ish timeframe as Windows 3.1. Maybe I should have made Beverly Hills 90210 the soap instead;)
Windows 3.1 was so complicated that even a Boeing propulsion scientist couldn't figure out how to open a word processor.
What a useless statement. An astrophysicist might have had a difficult time setting his VCR to record All My Children while he was away at work. Just because someone is an expert in one field doesn't make them all-knowing.
I was going to point this exact thing out, so it's great to see you already did.
Reading that list astonished me, because it's such a perfect description for how I wish my workplace was. And yet, when I say I wish it was quieter so I can focus on programming, I'm asked why I hate teamwork and collaboration and am told just to wear headphones.
I am sick and tired of videos at "max volume" capping out at around 20% of my system volume. I can't hear shit. Why does this keep happening, and why am I unable to find a more powerful volume control than the standard system one?
For Windows, if the media is coming from Flash, you might check and see if the Flash application volume got turned down. This happens to me on an irregular basis -- I will adjust it up and then at some point it gets turned way back down to around 5%.
If the Flash and Firefox application volumes are up, the system volume is up, and your physical speaker knob is up, then it could be the media was simply recorded very poorly or maybe your soundcard drivers have yet another volume you can adjust.
Then why should it get a benefit of a monopoly rent and free government support at the expense of free expression?
For the same reason that you get it, when it comes to your own works.
What kind of a reason is that? It sounds like you're saying that we should just set limits based on whatever the greediest want -- after all, it means it applies to everybody, so it must be fair, right?
There's a phrase for that: tragedy of the commons. Our shared culture, of which creative works are a large part, is being gobbled up and locked away behind effectively infinite imaginary property laws. Just because anybody can do it doesn't make it right or acceptable.
Oh, I agree if we're talking about some kind of major.minor.revision version number system. Stuff like Firefox doing just integer version numbers makes the version pretty useless for anything other than putting on your webpage in a big font size.
The Windows thing is just build number, which generally is completely meaningless when it comes to compatibility checks or that kind of thing.
Windows 95: 950 Windows 98: 1,998 Windows 98 SE: 2,222 Windows ME: 3,000 Windows 2000: 2195 (the NT folks tried to stay boring) Windows XP: 2,600 Windows Vista: 6000 Windows 7: 7,600 Windows 8: 9,200 (they wanted it to be 8,888, but that is not a multiple of 16).
Windows 10 being 10240 is certainly cute, being 10 * 2^10.
But I wouldn't get too worked up over it. As Raymond says:
There’s not much point in trying to “conserve” build numbers. They’re just numbers. They don’t cost anything. The important thing is that no two builds are given the same build number.
I have a doctor friend who, before becoming a doctor, was a CS grad. He's in his 50's now. When I told him we hired someone from Epic Systems that knew MUMPS, he exclaimed, "They still use that?! MUMPS was going out of style back when I was an undergrad!"
Yep, and MUMPS is still used at Epic, though they call it M and claim to have made customizations and improvements to it. I was offered a job there a few years ago and they go to great expense to attract recent graduates with high starting pay (more than $84,000 in Wisconsin), unbeatable benefits including the most amazing health care plan I've seen, and a pretty cool campus.
Unfortunately it wasn't enough for me to overcome moving to Madison, working long hours, and (most importantly) becoming an expert in an all-but-dead language. When I investigated career paths at the time, the only path MUMPS offers appeared to be (1) work at Epic for a couple of years and then (2) consult for Epic's products for the rest of your career.
If you want to see the very worst 1966 has to offer today:
First things first: We have to make sure that no banker ever loses so much as a Euro, no matter how bad the investment. That's primary in this deal.
That's what really bothers me about this whole thing -- it's a reminder that Big Finance no longer needs to evaluate the risk of their investments because they'll never again be held accountable for them. Listening to the coverage of the Greece problems gave me flashbacks to the subprime mortgage crisis, among others. Letting bad investments bite these mega-corporations in the ass isn't even on the table.
I try to empathize with the Greek people, since the majority of them are probably being dragged through this due to no fault of their own, but I honestly hoped the EU wouldn't have come to an agreement, and Greece would just have to default on all the loans and declare insolvency. Even that probably wouldn't have put any real burden on the big investors (oh, the IMF owns the colessium now? how nice), but I'm sick and tired of bad investments only being bad for Joe Taxpayer (or in this case, Hans Steuerzahler).
I already have security esstentials and ClamAV and one other one that I don't quite remember right now (bitdefender?) installed. I figured it couldn't hurt to add another one.
Poe's Law strikes again...
Installing one anti-virus suite is a questionable decision. Two is moronic. More than that and you probably should stick to a LeapFrog.
Firefox's plugins are both it's greatest strength and it's greatest weakness. The "API" isn't really an API at all, it's just Javascript running in the browser process where it can hack about with the UI. It's extremely insecure and prone to conflicts, or breakage as the UI changes.
And with great power comes great responsibility.
Addons have nearly unlimited control over the browser, allowing them to do all sorts of amazing and useful things. Part of the price of this is a flexible framework -- using Javascript inside the browser's context instead of some limited DSL or something -- and another part is a more fragile connection to the user interface -- directly creating and manipulating XUL via the DOM -- which really isn't horribly fragile since they've pretty good about keeping element IDs and class names for a long time.
Security between addons isn't an issue, since they're intentionally not sandboxed from each other (and that wouldn't even make sense). Keeping them isolated from web pages is simpler, since that's already required for core browser functionality. The biggest issue is making sure addons themselves don't expose the user (such as Greasemonkey's unsafeWindow), but again, that comes at the expense of the power that addons can wield.
at the expense of requiring add-ons to be rewritten.
This would kill Firefox, so they will never do it, and I'm fine with that. We would undoubtedly get something worse than we have now (e.g., Chrome's limitations).
Completely agree, and it's what makes me more angry than anything else related to the mess that is Firefox today.
They utterly discarded their core user base, the people who loved and brought the browser to the point it was, chasing some pipe dream of market share percentage points. They became convinced that trying to maintain that share was more important than anything else, and so, like an anorexic person, went on a self-destructive rampage trying to achieve that impossible and truly undesirable goal.
Firefox should have let Chrome cater to simpletons, if that's the direction Google wanted to go. We now have four(ish) primary browsers -- Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and IE/Edge -- all of which seem to be made for the clueless. All the edges have been sanded down, extra buttons and knobs removed, and privacy only an afterthought. Instead of a bright standout in that lineup, Firefox is just another loser, trying to blend in with the "cool kids".
Here we go, the usual slashdot moan-fest when there's any Firefox news.
You know what, guys? Get over it.
So just because Firefox might be the least bad browser, we should just grin and bear it? That sounds like a recipe for mediocrity and a successful tyranny of the minority to me.
I love Firefox. I love what it stands for (and especially what it used to stand for). That's why seeing it in this death spiral bothers me so much. If it was some stupid new Chrome or Safari features being discussed, I wouldn't give a damn. We care about Firefox -- that's why we "moan moan moan moan".
everyone still wants to hate Firefox
We hate the direction Firefox is going, and the people who are mismanaging the browser into obscurity.
Is this just a pre-hype for a kickstarter to get people to rush on day one ? come on slashdot this is not news yet...
or am I getting old
Well, if it helps, that shitty Hot Hardware ad-farm doesn't even link to the Kickstarter page. The only links in the article are "tags" to more crap on their site. I was mildly curious about how it attaches to the laptop and where power comes from, but oh well.
It's articles have been posted a few times to Slashdot in the last couple of weeks and every time there's never a link to the real content. The site is useless garbage.
I dislike how this phrase is being used because I think it trivializes the extent to which Jobs was not a good person and introduces an inappropriate levity into the discussion. A much better term would have been acute sociopath.
And another movie about Jobs? Sounds more myopic than biopic. When Hollywood starts making remakes of their failed biographies you know they've scraped through the bottom of the barrel. Most people today only know Jobs as the other Santa who introduced shiny new toys once a year. If you want to read about the interesting stuff, just check out Folklore.org. It's filled with fascinating stories written by the people who created the Macintosh. Steve Jobs even shows up a couple of times.
Having taken a look at the screenshots, I can't help but think of words like "garish", "cartoonish" and "Oh, dear, it looks like Rainbow Brite puked all over the screen".
I like to call it the "Fisher Price: My First Computer" syndrome. It's a pandemic on mobile devices, and has recently jumped the species barrier to desktops. Symptoms include:
- Completely flat and simple user-interface made from a small color palette - Simple shapes comprised of 90-degree angles - Uninspired colors and themes made up of primary colors so as not to distract from learning exercises - Huge buttons and other user-interface targets, designed to make it easy to use by those with undeveloped eye-hand coordination - Utter lack of gradients, transparency, translucency, or any other hints as to Z-order, which are confusing to children that haven't developed spacial awareness - No way to perform complex actions (even if necessary) to prevent accidentally making the computing toy inoperable
Additional symptoms can be found in this article, but if you encounter any of the above I strongly suggest you discontinue use of the affected product, and find a replacement not yet affected by this crippling illness.
If so, why don't they just stop hosting malware or scam sites. There are certain keywords for legitimate services or products that are always guaranteed to give top hits in malware.
There's an old saying: "Fool me once, shame on... shame on you. Fool me... You can't get fooled again!"
After several people in my family got bitten by advertising malware, primarily due to clicking the top Google result after searching for popular open source projects such as "firefox" or "open office" or "vlc" (I literally watched as this happened to one of them), I helped them install Firefox if they didn't have it, and AdBlock+ with an auto-updating subscription. The two more tech-savvy I showed NoScript and explained how it use it.
Since then they've had next to no problems with this kind of drive-by malware. They also really love ad-free YouTube videos and a much faster annoyance-free browsing experience.
In the (distant) past I would have felt a little bad about this kind of carte blanche blocking advertising. Not anymore. It's defensive driving for the Web, and the only smart way to use it.
If you mean thing like side-loading just random crap, like if I were a private detective hired by your wife, and had 60 seconds of access to your iPhone, I could sideload some serious backdoor onto your phone to enable me to monitor your texts, phone calls, email, Facebook, and so on... I'm pretty sure no one wants someone else to be able to load that kind of crap on their phones, but if you can do it, they can do it, too.
Well hey, now -- I've seen some wobbly straw men in my time, but that one might just take the cake.
The hostility Apple fans have for those who still want computers (even hand-held ones) to be general purpose computing devices that are actually owned by their owners never ceases to amaze me.
And again, I reiterate what I said earlier. Where do rights come from?
You're missing the whole point of what the founding fathers and the US constitution was attempting to create.
These inalienable rights "come from" nowhere. They exist innately and the constitution was written largely to express this, and to prevent laws from being created which would stifle or try to remove them. The social construct aspect applies insofar as to how to balance things when the desires or actions of one person impact the rights of another person. They certainly don't come from a god.
Even the creation of the Bill of Rights (first 10 amendments to the Constitution) was criticized by several high-profile people of the time because they were concerned that it would be interpreted as a "list of rights", and if a specific right wasn't in that list, then the People didn't have that right. A concession was the Ninth Amendment:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
One of the dissenters of the Bill of Rights was Hamilton, who said, among other things:
It has been several times truly remarked, that bills of rights are in their origin, stipulations between kings and their subjects, abridgments of prerogative in favor of privilege, reservations of rights not surrendered to the prince. [...] Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing, and as they retain every thing, they have no need of particular reservations.
One of the biggest differences between the newly created United States versus other old-world countries was this very thing. The recognition that all people have innate and inalienable rights, not bestowed by society or god or privilege or bloodline, but simply because they are a living, thinking human being.
High ideals, perhaps, and we slipped badly sometimes (slavery probably being the biggest), but every time I see people say things "gay marriage isn't listed in the Constitution" I cringe because they have such a fundamental misunderstanding of the country they live in.
- It seems like an unwritten rule that the tools and websites (third-party and homegrown) that business use for hiring are horrible. I have to assume they're designed to be a gauntlet so that only the most stubborn and persistent candidates make it to the end.
- Automated tools that scan resumes looking for specific things have led to people putting all sorts of crap on their resume, just in hopes of getting a foot in the door. This leads to interviews like "So it says you have a lot of experience in SQL. Can you elaborate on that?" Candidate: "Oh, yeah, I took an online class a few years ago and I did some SELECTs!"
- Most recruiters have a clear conflict of interest and some of them take a scattergun approach that interviewers need to filter through.
- Wishy-washy managers always want to wait and put off giving an offer "in case something better comes along" (I've heard that many times in post-interview discussions).
- Internal politics when there's any kind of restriction on how many open seats will be filled leads to infighting between groups, delaying an offer because nobody knows who they'd work for yet.
I could go on and on, but suffice to say that HR at most places is filled with depressing things, but the hiring process is one of the worst.
No, Google Code was project hosting, this is (effectively) just repo hosting.
The difference between project hosting and a "service to host and edit source code repositories" is a few wiki pages for a description and documentation. They closed down Google Code claiming competition and saturation from sites like GitHub and BitBucket, but now they're starting a new service that still directly competes with those?
I can only assume the primary problem with Google Code which caused its closure was the lack of "cloud" in the name.
Completely agreed. And moving the "number of comments" link to the title bar was just batshit, since now you can't just scan down the page seeing what stories are popular.
A bit rough around the edges, but I put together a userstyle to adjust these two things. It looks like this. Feel free to fix/adapt it: @-moz-document domain("slashdot.org") {
#firehose article header span.topic {
top: 45px;
}
Slashdot Mirror
Even with the relatively high value of the cargo, it is still hard to see how the person who delivered it could reasonably expect to be paid for it.
Perhaps the operator never expected payment and is just some psychopath performing an experiment on the prison inmates and guards to observe what would happen. Round one was some drugs, perhaps round two will be a few knives or even a firearm.
If your goal is to instigate mayhem and destruction, a $600 quadcopter could offer a pretty high return on investment (but unfortunately to the detriment of others using them for benign purposes).
Wait, who uses VCRs anymore?!
I was trying to be kind of funny, by putting the astrophysicist in the same 1993ish timeframe as Windows 3.1. Maybe I should have made Beverly Hills 90210 the soap instead ;)
Windows 3.1 was so complicated that even a Boeing propulsion scientist couldn't figure out how to open a word processor.
What a useless statement. An astrophysicist might have had a difficult time setting his VCR to record All My Children while he was away at work. Just because someone is an expert in one field doesn't make them all-knowing.
Raymond has also posted several articles about the history of the Explorer interface, including one about the origin of the Start Button and one about the taskbar.
I was going to point this exact thing out, so it's great to see you already did.
Reading that list astonished me, because it's such a perfect description for how I wish my workplace was. And yet, when I say I wish it was quieter so I can focus on programming, I'm asked why I hate teamwork and collaboration and am told just to wear headphones.
I am sick and tired of videos at "max volume" capping out at around 20% of my system volume. I can't hear shit. Why does this keep happening, and why am I unable to find a more powerful volume control than the standard system one?
For Windows, if the media is coming from Flash, you might check and see if the Flash application volume got turned down. This happens to me on an irregular basis -- I will adjust it up and then at some point it gets turned way back down to around 5%.
If the Flash and Firefox application volumes are up, the system volume is up, and your physical speaker knob is up, then it could be the media was simply recorded very poorly or maybe your soundcard drivers have yet another volume you can adjust.
Then why should it get a benefit of a monopoly rent and free government support at the expense of free expression?
For the same reason that you get it, when it comes to your own works.
What kind of a reason is that? It sounds like you're saying that we should just set limits based on whatever the greediest want -- after all, it means it applies to everybody, so it must be fair, right?
There's a phrase for that: tragedy of the commons. Our shared culture, of which creative works are a large part, is being gobbled up and locked away behind effectively infinite imaginary property laws. Just because anybody can do it doesn't make it right or acceptable.
Oh, I agree if we're talking about some kind of major.minor.revision version number system. Stuff like Firefox doing just integer version numbers makes the version pretty useless for anything other than putting on your webpage in a big font size.
The Windows thing is just build number, which generally is completely meaningless when it comes to compatibility checks or that kind of thing.
It's Windows 10 and the build number for the RTM is exactly 1024 * 10, and it takes 10 bits to reach 1024.
It's something of a tradition for Windows releases to have cute build numbers.
Windows 95: 950
Windows 98: 1,998
Windows 98 SE: 2,222
Windows ME: 3,000
Windows 2000: 2195 (the NT folks tried to stay boring)
Windows XP: 2,600
Windows Vista: 6000
Windows 7: 7,600
Windows 8: 9,200 (they wanted it to be 8,888, but that is not a multiple of 16).
Windows 10 being 10240 is certainly cute, being 10 * 2^10.
But I wouldn't get too worked up over it. As Raymond says:
There’s not much point in trying to “conserve” build numbers. They’re just numbers. They don’t cost anything. The important thing is that no two builds are given the same build number.
I have a doctor friend who, before becoming a doctor, was a CS grad. He's in his 50's now. When I told him we hired someone from Epic Systems that knew MUMPS, he exclaimed, "They still use that?! MUMPS was going out of style back when I was an undergrad!"
Yep, and MUMPS is still used at Epic, though they call it M and claim to have made customizations and improvements to it. I was offered a job there a few years ago and they go to great expense to attract recent graduates with high starting pay (more than $84,000 in Wisconsin), unbeatable benefits including the most amazing health care plan I've seen, and a pretty cool campus.
Unfortunately it wasn't enough for me to overcome moving to Madison, working long hours, and (most importantly) becoming an expert in an all-but-dead language. When I investigated career paths at the time, the only path MUMPS offers appeared to be (1) work at Epic for a couple of years and then (2) consult for Epic's products for the rest of your career.
If you want to see the very worst 1966 has to offer today:
A Case of the MUMPS
MUMPS Madness
Revenge of MUMPS Madness!
MUMPS
It's kind of like the worst parts of COBOL, Javascript and PHP were all mixed together and then baked at 400* until charred and smoking.
First things first: We have to make sure that no banker ever loses so much as a Euro, no matter how bad the investment. That's primary in this deal.
That's what really bothers me about this whole thing -- it's a reminder that Big Finance no longer needs to evaluate the risk of their investments because they'll never again be held accountable for them. Listening to the coverage of the Greece problems gave me flashbacks to the subprime mortgage crisis, among others. Letting bad investments bite these mega-corporations in the ass isn't even on the table.
I try to empathize with the Greek people, since the majority of them are probably being dragged through this due to no fault of their own, but I honestly hoped the EU wouldn't have come to an agreement, and Greece would just have to default on all the loans and declare insolvency. Even that probably wouldn't have put any real burden on the big investors (oh, the IMF owns the colessium now? how nice), but I'm sick and tired of bad investments only being bad for Joe Taxpayer (or in this case, Hans Steuerzahler).
I already have security esstentials and ClamAV and one other one that I don't quite remember right now (bitdefender?) installed. I figured it couldn't hurt to add another one.
Poe's Law strikes again...
Installing one anti-virus suite is a questionable decision. Two is moronic. More than that and you probably should stick to a LeapFrog.
takes down key sites like facebook and twitter
So not a total loss then, good!
It would almost be worth dealing with fallout and eating beans for 20 years if we can start over and avoid Facebook and Twitter this time.
Firefox's plugins are both it's greatest strength and it's greatest weakness. The "API" isn't really an API at all, it's just Javascript running in the browser process where it can hack about with the UI. It's extremely insecure and prone to conflicts, or breakage as the UI changes.
And with great power comes great responsibility.
Addons have nearly unlimited control over the browser, allowing them to do all sorts of amazing and useful things. Part of the price of this is a flexible framework -- using Javascript inside the browser's context instead of some limited DSL or something -- and another part is a more fragile connection to the user interface -- directly creating and manipulating XUL via the DOM -- which really isn't horribly fragile since they've pretty good about keeping element IDs and class names for a long time.
Security between addons isn't an issue, since they're intentionally not sandboxed from each other (and that wouldn't even make sense). Keeping them isolated from web pages is simpler, since that's already required for core browser functionality. The biggest issue is making sure addons themselves don't expose the user (such as Greasemonkey's unsafeWindow), but again, that comes at the expense of the power that addons can wield.
at the expense of requiring add-ons to be rewritten.
This would kill Firefox, so they will never do it, and I'm fine with that. We would undoubtedly get something worse than we have now (e.g., Chrome's limitations).
They should have done nothing.
Completely agree, and it's what makes me more angry than anything else related to the mess that is Firefox today.
They utterly discarded their core user base, the people who loved and brought the browser to the point it was, chasing some pipe dream of market share percentage points. They became convinced that trying to maintain that share was more important than anything else, and so, like an anorexic person, went on a self-destructive rampage trying to achieve that impossible and truly undesirable goal.
Firefox should have let Chrome cater to simpletons, if that's the direction Google wanted to go. We now have four(ish) primary browsers -- Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and IE/Edge -- all of which seem to be made for the clueless. All the edges have been sanded down, extra buttons and knobs removed, and privacy only an afterthought. Instead of a bright standout in that lineup, Firefox is just another loser, trying to blend in with the "cool kids".
Here we go, the usual slashdot moan-fest when there's any Firefox news.
You know what, guys? Get over it.
So just because Firefox might be the least bad browser, we should just grin and bear it? That sounds like a recipe for mediocrity and a successful tyranny of the minority to me.
I love Firefox. I love what it stands for (and especially what it used to stand for). That's why seeing it in this death spiral bothers me so much. If it was some stupid new Chrome or Safari features being discussed, I wouldn't give a damn. We care about Firefox -- that's why we "moan moan moan moan".
everyone still wants to hate Firefox
We hate the direction Firefox is going, and the people who are mismanaging the browser into obscurity.
Is this just a pre-hype for a kickstarter to get people to rush on day one ? ...
come on slashdot this is not news yet
or am I getting old
Well, if it helps, that shitty Hot Hardware ad-farm doesn't even link to the Kickstarter page. The only links in the article are "tags" to more crap on their site. I was mildly curious about how it attaches to the laptop and where power comes from, but oh well.
It's articles have been posted a few times to Slashdot in the last couple of weeks and every time there's never a link to the real content. The site is useless garbage.
We're all dicks.
I dislike how this phrase is being used because I think it trivializes the extent to which Jobs was not a good person and introduces an inappropriate levity into the discussion. A much better term would have been acute sociopath.
And another movie about Jobs? Sounds more myopic than biopic. When Hollywood starts making remakes of their failed biographies you know they've scraped through the bottom of the barrel. Most people today only know Jobs as the other Santa who introduced shiny new toys once a year. If you want to read about the interesting stuff, just check out Folklore.org. It's filled with fascinating stories written by the people who created the Macintosh. Steve Jobs even shows up a couple of times.
You can say the word "systemd", It's not a four-letter word. Seven letters. Count them.
Heretic! Blasphemer! Shun the non-believer!
Having taken a look at the screenshots, I can't help but think of words like "garish", "cartoonish" and "Oh, dear, it looks like Rainbow Brite puked all over the screen".
I like to call it the "Fisher Price: My First Computer" syndrome. It's a pandemic on mobile devices, and has recently jumped the species barrier to desktops. Symptoms include:
- Completely flat and simple user-interface made from a small color palette
- Simple shapes comprised of 90-degree angles
- Uninspired colors and themes made up of primary colors so as not to distract from learning exercises
- Huge buttons and other user-interface targets, designed to make it easy to use by those with undeveloped eye-hand coordination
- Utter lack of gradients, transparency, translucency, or any other hints as to Z-order, which are confusing to children that haven't developed spacial awareness
- No way to perform complex actions (even if necessary) to prevent accidentally making the computing toy inoperable
Additional symptoms can be found in this article, but if you encounter any of the above I strongly suggest you discontinue use of the affected product, and find a replacement not yet affected by this crippling illness.
If so, why don't they just stop hosting malware or scam sites. There are certain keywords for legitimate services or products that are always guaranteed to give top hits in malware.
There's an old saying: "Fool me once, shame on... shame on you. Fool me... You can't get fooled again!"
After several people in my family got bitten by advertising malware, primarily due to clicking the top Google result after searching for popular open source projects such as "firefox" or "open office" or "vlc" (I literally watched as this happened to one of them), I helped them install Firefox if they didn't have it, and AdBlock+ with an auto-updating subscription. The two more tech-savvy I showed NoScript and explained how it use it.
Since then they've had next to no problems with this kind of drive-by malware. They also really love ad-free YouTube videos and a much faster annoyance-free browsing experience.
In the (distant) past I would have felt a little bad about this kind of carte blanche blocking advertising. Not anymore. It's defensive driving for the Web, and the only smart way to use it.
If you mean thing like side-loading just random crap, like if I were a private detective hired by your wife, and had 60 seconds of access to your iPhone, I could sideload some serious backdoor onto your phone to enable me to monitor your texts, phone calls, email, Facebook, and so on ... I'm pretty sure no one wants someone else to be able to load that kind of crap on their phones, but if you can do it, they can do it, too.
Well hey, now -- I've seen some wobbly straw men in my time, but that one might just take the cake.
The hostility Apple fans have for those who still want computers (even hand-held ones) to be general purpose computing devices that are actually owned by their owners never ceases to amaze me.
And again, I reiterate what I said earlier. Where do rights come from?
You're missing the whole point of what the founding fathers and the US constitution was attempting to create.
These inalienable rights "come from" nowhere. They exist innately and the constitution was written largely to express this, and to prevent laws from being created which would stifle or try to remove them. The social construct aspect applies insofar as to how to balance things when the desires or actions of one person impact the rights of another person. They certainly don't come from a god.
Even the creation of the Bill of Rights (first 10 amendments to the Constitution) was criticized by several high-profile people of the time because they were concerned that it would be interpreted as a "list of rights", and if a specific right wasn't in that list, then the People didn't have that right. A concession was the Ninth Amendment:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
One of the dissenters of the Bill of Rights was Hamilton, who said, among other things:
It has been several times truly remarked, that bills of rights are in their origin, stipulations between kings and their subjects, abridgments of prerogative in favor of privilege, reservations of rights not surrendered to the prince. [...] Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing, and as they retain every thing, they have no need of particular reservations.
One of the biggest differences between the newly created United States versus other old-world countries was this very thing. The recognition that all people have innate and inalienable rights, not bestowed by society or god or privilege or bloodline, but simply because they are a living, thinking human being.
High ideals, perhaps, and we slipped badly sometimes (slavery probably being the biggest), but every time I see people say things "gay marriage isn't listed in the Constitution" I cringe because they have such a fundamental misunderstanding of the country they live in.
This is hardly surprising:
- It seems like an unwritten rule that the tools and websites (third-party and homegrown) that business use for hiring are horrible. I have to assume they're designed to be a gauntlet so that only the most stubborn and persistent candidates make it to the end.
- Automated tools that scan resumes looking for specific things have led to people putting all sorts of crap on their resume, just in hopes of getting a foot in the door. This leads to interviews like "So it says you have a lot of experience in SQL. Can you elaborate on that?" Candidate: "Oh, yeah, I took an online class a few years ago and I did some SELECTs!"
- Most recruiters have a clear conflict of interest and some of them take a scattergun approach that interviewers need to filter through.
- Wishy-washy managers always want to wait and put off giving an offer "in case something better comes along" (I've heard that many times in post-interview discussions).
- Internal politics when there's any kind of restriction on how many open seats will be filled leads to infighting between groups, delaying an offer because nobody knows who they'd work for yet.
I could go on and on, but suffice to say that HR at most places is filled with depressing things, but the hiring process is one of the worst.
No, Google Code was project hosting, this is (effectively) just repo hosting.
The difference between project hosting and a "service to host and edit source code repositories" is a few wiki pages for a description and documentation. They closed down Google Code claiming competition and saturation from sites like GitHub and BitBucket, but now they're starting a new service that still directly competes with those?
I can only assume the primary problem with Google Code which caused its closure was the lack of "cloud" in the name.
Completely agreed. And moving the "number of comments" link to the title bar was just batshit, since now you can't just scan down the page seeing what stories are popular.
A bit rough around the edges, but I put together a userstyle to adjust these two things. It looks like this. Feel free to fix/adapt it:
@-moz-document domain("slashdot.org") {
#firehose article header span.topic {
top: 45px;
}
#firehose article .comment-bubble {
right: auto;
top: auto;
left: 30px;
bottom: 5px;
border: none;
background-color: inherit;
font-size: 90%;
width: 38px;
height: 25px;
line-height: 1.6rem;
}
#firehose article span.comment-bubble::after {
border-color: rgb(1, 103, 101) transparent transparent;
border-width: 5px 5px 0 0;
bottom: -5px;
}
}
I have a feeling that we're seeing the start of a very gradual rollout of Beta. Fuck that noise.