Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby, the reason is, there is no law or dogma to never believe in God regardless of evidence, it only looks like a club because everybody else is religious.
If everybody collected stamps and tried to convert others to this hobby constantly, you would see organizations of non-stamp collectors.
Also stop this nonsense idea that atheism is a religion and agnosticisms is a rational opinions. All atheists DAMN WELL KNOW that God could exist theoretically, the difference is that an agnostic is either ignorant about the facts an reasons that make this existence so unprovable or just don't have the balls to admit it.
To put it differently,
Atheists are agnostics in theory, just like agnostics are atheist in practice.
Several people have come here insisting that public domain is not about getting free stuff but accumulating a cultural context to build upon it and create new stuff, it is true but. what if I want to rip or redistribute the original work? is it inherently wrong?
Not long ago, the only way to transfer the experience of traveling to another country was narrating it, repetitively. If you were really good describing scenery with words you could write it down. If you were good at drawing you could try to make some sketches.
Not anymore, now we take pictures and video, we are the multimedia generation. Even better, we can transmit this data to anywhere in the planet almost for free almost instantaneously.
We could understand this as an example of human evolution, as if our sensory organs, mental retention and expressive abilities were directly evolved.
Not long ago, if you saw a play on the theater and wanted to transmit the experience you'd have to reinterpret every character and dialog as best as you could.
Nowadays, if you do the equivalent of going to the theater, going to the movie theater, and wanted transmit this experience to someone all you have to do is give them a torrent of the movie you saw.
Except you aren't allowed to do that.
The same technological evolution that upgraded you from human to super human a second ago is outlawed when it comes to copyright. In fact you can't even remember it for yourself with technology, you have to rely in your biological memory.
Access to the information, each access to the information is now owned by someone.
The typical rebuttal/mockery of this line of thought is that you could access to this information for a modicum price, to call you a cheapo who wouldn't pay for a movie ticket and such.
But if you saw digital recording/replay/transmission as an extension of your own being, as I do, you'd understand that you are basically asking me to accept an intermediary between me and my brain. An intermediary with the capacity to both, impose control or charge for use, any use, every use.
This is particularly obvious to me with things like classical music. The music itself is public domain but the interpretation is not. If I want to remember a piece -legally- my only options are to either only rely on my biological memory or accept a gatekeeper.
That I'm not allowed to digitally store everything I see and hear seems like a horrible intrusion from the government and a obstacle for our evolution.
I know some will find this a delusional rant, but I really fear that unless there is a shift in political power, the first full brain machine interface we'll see will also be the first DRM'ed brain.
What about the right to copy and distribute? People forget that that is also part of copyright law, that is, copyright law recognizes the value of not paying licenses, it recognizes and supports the wish for coping and enables people to copy stuff.
Copyright is supposed to expire.
Does the kindler allows you to freely copy after the license expires? I expect it to have no notion of copyright ever expiring.
What illness Windows? The Windows ecosystem security is hopelessly broken.
Lot's of outdated machines won't upgrade because the upgrades are expensive, and even if they were free they might brake software OR compatibility, and even if they are free and don't break compatibility many of these systems use pirate copies of Windows and they aren't going to expose themselves to unexpected lockouts.
No, the solution is implementing a counter-spaming initiative at the ISP level. With counter spaming I mean spaming the spamers, NO, I don't mean naively counter-spaming their email addresses, I mean spaming their honey pot channels, there was a thunderbird extension for this, basically they follow the links in the spam message and sign up/buy whatever they ask for, credit card numbers, friend email addresses, SSN, etc, all fake of course. Unlike their source email addresses they use to spam, they DO pay attention to information sent this way, because it is the way they make money, it's their biggest weak point, spam that and you take them out of business.
Should be forced to use a browser that opens a new window every time a hyperlink is clicked
Forced? It is an option, and you talk about forced? What a hateful thing to say! You must be filled with hate if you want to remove an option in one program because you don't want people enjoying a different option in an unrelated program.
I used spatial mode for over a year, in both single window and multiple window modes, and it definitively has some advantages. Browser mode makes it awkward to open multiple windows because they are so big, so much that reusing windows becomes more comfortable and thus tabbed windows became a necessary, but tabs are suboptimal for a variety of reasons, the most obvious ones are that you can't see more than one at a time and that you can't drag tabs between, out of and into other windows. And even if you could you then you face the problem of the huge browser windows again.
I got a new, bigger monitor a few moths ago, this made me switch to browser mode because with a big monitor spatial mode becomes a game of hunting for browser windows, and because now I can comfortable manage multiple browser windows, but in an small screen I'd probably switch to spatial mode again.
Spatial mode is bet for simple document handling, drag and drop between folders and applications is a joy in spatial mode. What spatial mode is never *ever* good for is "management" moving, merging and comparing files across different tree branches and across different drives or servers, for that stuff browser mode is better than spatial, but still not as good as Midnight Commander or Gnome Commander.
Spatial mode has some use for some users and that means some people different to you are happy, I hope you can bare with it.
The very use of a product constitutes endorsement, unless you claim you are just testing the product, your continued use of it constitutes endorsement, and yet not having the honesty to accept it!
Like somebody else said, you should talk about it in conferences and, I'd suggest blog about it.
I'm not arguing for that right, I'm arguing for personal responsibility of lack of it in the general public. We have lots of laws preventing people to hurt themselves for their lack of responsibility, I mean, we put warnings about items getting hot in the oven.
Considering that facebook collects more information about the population than a government agency I think it is completely reasonable to put restrictions on what they do with that data, even if the sheeple themselves aren't aware they need such restrictions.
I'll grant the point about construction codes because of the gas pipes although as a IT person it sounds like securing a network WAN by controlling every node what kind of boggled architecture is that?
But I don't buy it about restaurants, nothing should prevent clients to get into the kitchen and asses for themselves the quality of the food, further more that says nothing about prohibitions on gambling, prostitution, marijuana, crack, heroine, cocaine, etc. And not only are many things prohibited to under-aged people, the states prevents me from supplying them with alcohol or the like, effectively telling me how I can raise my children.
I'm not saying this things are good, what I'm saying is that we do accept having the government tell us what we can't do for our own good, so there is nothing funtamentaly wrong about a non profit suing facebook and having the government enforce better privacy controls.
facebook is not a startup in some kid's garage. it's a huge billionaire corporation, it collects more information than the NSA for the FSM's sake! Let the government regulate the hell out of it.
Because, let's be honest, people are too stupid for their own good.
Most people couldn't foresee this move (of course many/.ers did) so we have to sue and regulate on their behalf. Maybe they shouldn't even be allowed to vote, voting should require an IQ test, and a proficiency test in politics and public matters, throw in commerce too.
Or maybe not, I'm exaggerating, but really, what is the logic in not letting people smoke whatever they want but allowing them to sell their life in facebook? On many states prostitution and gambling are banned, adulthood for drinking and sex is based on an arbitrary number with no analysis supporting it and we don't even let people build their homes however they want, we don't even let people eat wherever they want regardless of the hygiene of the places they go.
But not on facebook, on facebook we are to believe every user is intelligent, informed and fully aware of the consequences of their actions.
MS apologists have constantly insisted that the promise was perfectly safe then and that there was nothing left for MS to do, now MS has indirectly admitted they had to extend the terms of the promise because of lack of adoption,
But don't worry NOW you are safe, MS is sooooo cool and Silverlight is so awesome! We all should move all of our development to Silverlight because now we won't get sued, and if MS extends its promise we are going to get sued even less!
The promise is overly specific which offers a great example where the problem is not ambiguity for once.
The promise says they won't sue you for any patent they hold and they insist this promise will be available in the future, but they are not obligated to hold onto the patent, they can sell it to, say, SCO, and then THEY can sue you. After all MS is holding on their promise to not sue you for any patents they hold.
Also, the patent, repeatedly mentions that it only covers "Covered Specifications" capitalized like that, it means that "Covered Specifications" has a ultra specific meaning, I don't know who they mean by "Covered Specifications" but it's obvious for starters that unless you are implementing.NET, you are not covered.
A stripped down lightweight Mono for phones may not be covered because it's not an implementation of the.NET specification.
I know that wouldn't be a problem for aplications, just framework developers, but it may hurt FOSS in the long run, for instance there may not be any free way to run Tomboy in your phone because of this.
Then is the fact that, once you choose Mono you are basically surrendering your Patent portfolio to MS, because if you sue them for infringement, they could pull the framework from under your feet.
Or may not, as I said, a "Comunity Promise" sounds as legally binding as a pinky swear.
...while it may be arrogant of the Firefox team to arbitrarily choose a new direction for their UI (though it is, you know, their project...
No closed source program developer would dare to say that! I guess Firefox is not a serious project then!
My original assertion holds, the Thunderbird teams keeps their users happy, *because* it was easy to fix yet they refused to provide an option, the FFx team showed less respect to their users opinion. THAT's the balance I'm talking about.
We aren't talking about organizations promoting things here. We're talking about internal restrictions on members of those organizations
No we are talking about adding a filter in the aggregator Planet Gnome, the guy can speak all he wants about VMwere elsewhere AND he can keep blogging about it, even in the same blog that he uses for the Gnome stuff, it just wouldn't show up in Planet Gnome.
Planet Gnome is an aggregator, it collects new items from news feeds usually blogs. It can handle rules to filter content by keywords and, more often, by tags.
The C# and CLI patents you list are covered by the legally binding Community Promise
The ones which can be voided at anytime? Sorry I don't buy them.
Again, why doesn't MS offer a royalty-free permanent irrevocable license to those patents? That would shut up critics and since apologists insist MS is never ever ever going to void its promises so why not just license them as any other company would do?
You can't expect them to maintain old versions forever. Besides, you're always free to backport FF3's applicable security fixes to FF2 on your own, if you really want to keep using FF2 that much.
(I don't usually like "do it yourself" as a response to "it's missing a bugfix/feature/whatever", but in the case of no-longer-supported open source software I think it's acceptable.)
Are you being obnoxious on purpose? Because I can't believe you are that dumb.
There is a balance between "maintain old versions forever" and "Firefox attitude of forcing you into changes you don't want to make." even the parent himself mentioned it "the devs allow you to switch the old toolbar back on"
You can maintain only one version AND give everybody the UI they love, just make it an option.
Yes sometimes fundamental changes break compatibility between different interfaces, yes, sometimes too much interface options make a program harder to use or customize.
No, firefox didn't have to shove the awesomebar* down their users throat. There are a lot of united complains about it, we are not talking about a gazillion obscure options, we are talking about one single very popular option that they still didn't care to include and in fact were antagonistic against their loyal user base. That's arrogance.
The Thunderbird team seems to be nicer.
I actually though that was a good idea from the beginning but I don't think they handled the issue rightly.
Slashdot Mirror
Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby, the reason is, there is no law or dogma to never believe in God regardless of evidence, it only looks like a club because everybody else is religious.
If everybody collected stamps and tried to convert others to this hobby constantly, you would see organizations of non-stamp collectors.
Also stop this nonsense idea that atheism is a religion and agnosticisms is a rational opinions. All atheists DAMN WELL KNOW that God could exist theoretically, the difference is that an agnostic is either ignorant about the facts an reasons that make this existence so unprovable or just don't have the balls to admit it.
To put it differently,
Atheists are agnostics in theory, just like agnostics are atheist in practice.
Without these pricks, the fans would have no Zelda.
I doubt the lawyers a.k.a. the pricks had that much influence in Miyamoto to start making games.
Also there is this concept I wish american companies were more aware about: Doujinshi.
Without you I'd never knew about this movie!
Several people have come here insisting that public domain is not about getting free stuff but accumulating a cultural context to build upon it and create new stuff, it is true but. what if I want to rip or redistribute the original work? is it inherently wrong?
Not long ago, the only way to transfer the experience of traveling to another country was narrating it, repetitively. If you were really good describing scenery with words you could write it down. If you were good at drawing you could try to make some sketches.
Not anymore, now we take pictures and video, we are the multimedia generation. Even better, we can transmit this data to anywhere in the planet almost for free almost instantaneously.
We could understand this as an example of human evolution, as if our sensory organs, mental retention and expressive abilities were directly evolved.
Not long ago, if you saw a play on the theater and wanted to transmit the experience you'd have to reinterpret every character and dialog as best as you could.
Nowadays, if you do the equivalent of going to the theater, going to the movie theater, and wanted transmit this experience to someone all you have to do is give them a torrent of the movie you saw.
Except you aren't allowed to do that.
The same technological evolution that upgraded you from human to super human a second ago is outlawed when it comes to copyright. In fact you can't even remember it for yourself with technology, you have to rely in your biological memory.
Access to the information, each access to the information is now owned by someone.
The typical rebuttal/mockery of this line of thought is that you could access to this information for a modicum price, to call you a cheapo who wouldn't pay for a movie ticket and such.
But if you saw digital recording/replay/transmission as an extension of your own being, as I do, you'd understand that you are basically asking me to accept an intermediary between me and my brain. An intermediary with the capacity to both, impose control or charge for use, any use, every use.
This is particularly obvious to me with things like classical music. The music itself is public domain but the interpretation is not. If I want to remember a piece -legally- my only options are to either only rely on my biological memory or accept a gatekeeper.
That I'm not allowed to digitally store everything I see and hear seems like a horrible intrusion from the government and a obstacle for our evolution.
I know some will find this a delusional rant, but I really fear that unless there is a shift in political power, the first full brain machine interface we'll see will also be the first DRM'ed brain.
Simple, because the government is NOT the collective of private citizens not anymore, not sure it ever was.
What about the right to copy and distribute? People forget that that is also part of copyright law, that is, copyright law recognizes the value of not paying licenses, it recognizes and supports the wish for coping and enables people to copy stuff.
Copyright is supposed to expire.
Does the kindler allows you to freely copy after the license expires? I expect it to have no notion of copyright ever expiring.
What illness Windows? The Windows ecosystem security is hopelessly broken.
Lot's of outdated machines won't upgrade because the upgrades are expensive, and even if they were free they might brake software OR compatibility, and even if they are free and don't break compatibility many of these systems use pirate copies of Windows and they aren't going to expose themselves to unexpected lockouts.
No, the solution is implementing a counter-spaming initiative at the ISP level. With counter spaming I mean spaming the spamers, NO, I don't mean naively counter-spaming their email addresses, I mean spaming their honey pot channels, there was a thunderbird extension for this, basically they follow the links in the spam message and sign up/buy whatever they ask for, credit card numbers, friend email addresses, SSN, etc, all fake of course. Unlike their source email addresses they use to spam, they DO pay attention to information sent this way, because it is the way they make money, it's their biggest weak point, spam that and you take them out of business.
Should be forced to use a browser that opens a new window every time a hyperlink is clicked
Forced? It is an option, and you talk about forced? What a hateful thing to say! You must be filled with hate if you want to remove an option in one program because you don't want people enjoying a different option in an unrelated program.
I used spatial mode for over a year, in both single window and multiple window modes, and it definitively has some advantages. Browser mode makes it awkward to open multiple windows because they are so big, so much that reusing windows becomes more comfortable and thus tabbed windows became a necessary, but tabs are suboptimal for a variety of reasons, the most obvious ones are that you can't see more than one at a time and that you can't drag tabs between, out of and into other windows. And even if you could you then you face the problem of the huge browser windows again.
I got a new, bigger monitor a few moths ago, this made me switch to browser mode because with a big monitor spatial mode becomes a game of hunting for browser windows, and because now I can comfortable manage multiple browser windows, but in an small screen I'd probably switch to spatial mode again.
Spatial mode is bet for simple document handling, drag and drop between folders and applications is a joy in spatial mode. What spatial mode is never *ever* good for is "management" moving, merging and comparing files across different tree branches and across different drives or servers, for that stuff browser mode is better than spatial, but still not as good as Midnight Commander or Gnome Commander.
Spatial mode has some use for some users and that means some people different to you are happy, I hope you can bare with it.
Scientology != Free and Open
I just realized how close that looks to:
"Scientology! = Free and Open"
The very use of a product constitutes endorsement, unless you claim you are just testing the product, your continued use of it constitutes endorsement, and yet not having the honesty to accept it!
Like somebody else said, you should talk about it in conferences and, I'd suggest blog about it.
I'm not arguing for that right, I'm arguing for personal responsibility of lack of it in the general public. We have lots of laws preventing people to hurt themselves for their lack of responsibility, I mean, we put warnings about items getting hot in the oven.
Considering that facebook collects more information about the population than a government agency I think it is completely reasonable to put restrictions on what they do with that data, even if the sheeple themselves aren't aware they need such restrictions.
The original erlang interrpreter was developed in prolog.
But it was not a negation, it was meant as a sarcasm mark or --more probably-- a wink.
That comment is sexist!
In before, I know a kick-ass D&D DM girl. The problem with stereotypes is that they don't describe the people but the population.
I'll grant the point about construction codes because of the gas pipes although as a IT person it sounds like securing a network WAN by controlling every node what kind of boggled architecture is that?
But I don't buy it about restaurants, nothing should prevent clients to get into the kitchen and asses for themselves the quality of the food, further more that says nothing about prohibitions on gambling, prostitution, marijuana, crack, heroine, cocaine, etc. And not only are many things prohibited to under-aged people, the states prevents me from supplying them with alcohol or the like, effectively telling me how I can raise my children.
I'm not saying this things are good, what I'm saying is that we do accept having the government tell us what we can't do for our own good, so there is nothing funtamentaly wrong about a non profit suing facebook and having the government enforce better privacy controls.
facebook is not a startup in some kid's garage. it's a huge billionaire corporation, it collects more information than the NSA for the FSM's sake! Let the government regulate the hell out of it.
Because, let's be honest, people are too stupid for their own good.
Most people couldn't foresee this move (of course many /.ers did) so we have to sue and regulate on their behalf. Maybe they shouldn't even be allowed to vote, voting should require an IQ test, and a proficiency test in politics and public matters, throw in commerce too.
Or maybe not, I'm exaggerating, but really, what is the logic in not letting people smoke whatever they want but allowing them to sell their life in facebook? On many states prostitution and gambling are banned, adulthood for drinking and sex is based on an arbitrary number with no analysis supporting it and we don't even let people build their homes however they want, we don't even let people eat wherever they want regardless of the hygiene of the places they go.
But not on facebook, on facebook we are to believe every user is intelligent, informed and fully aware of the consequences of their actions.
MS apologists have constantly insisted that the promise was perfectly safe then and that there was nothing left for MS to do, now MS has indirectly admitted they had to extend the terms of the promise because of lack of adoption,
But don't worry NOW you are safe, MS is sooooo cool and Silverlight is so awesome! We all should move all of our development to Silverlight because now we won't get sued, and if MS extends its promise we are going to get sued even less!
The promise is overly specific which offers a great example where the problem is not ambiguity for once.
The promise says they won't sue you for any patent they hold and they insist this promise will be available in the future, but they are not obligated to hold onto the patent, they can sell it to, say, SCO, and then THEY can sue you. After all MS is holding on their promise to not sue you for any patents they hold.
Also, the patent, repeatedly mentions that it only covers "Covered Specifications" capitalized like that, it means that "Covered Specifications" has a ultra specific meaning, I don't know who they mean by "Covered Specifications" but it's obvious for starters that unless you are implementing .NET, you are not covered.
A stripped down lightweight Mono for phones may not be covered because it's not an implementation of the .NET specification.
I know that wouldn't be a problem for aplications, just framework developers, but it may hurt FOSS in the long run, for instance there may not be any free way to run Tomboy in your phone because of this.
Then is the fact that, once you choose Mono you are basically surrendering your Patent portfolio to MS, because if you sue them for infringement, they could pull the framework from under your feet.
Or may not, as I said, a "Comunity Promise" sounds as legally binding as a pinky swear.
Send in the drones!
As a developer, not a lawyer, I am used to licenses, not "covenants not to sue", that sounds about as legally binding as a pinky swear.
So I consult my lawyers, the EFF, FSF and Groklaw. Guess what? They don't think it holds water, therefore no, I can't believe you, GB2MS.
PS: And to think MS *could* close the loopholes, if they really wanted.
The Community Promise can't be voided.
It can, for starters by selling the patent to a spawned company, IANAL but I'm sure there are other ways, after all it's not even a license.
Again, why doesn't MS offer a royalty-free permanent irrevocable license to those patents
They did.
A "promise" a license makes not, that why they made a "promise" not a license.
...while it may be arrogant of the Firefox team to arbitrarily choose a new direction for their UI (though it is, you know, their project...
No closed source program developer would dare to say that! I guess Firefox is not a serious project then!
My original assertion holds, the Thunderbird teams keeps their users happy, *because* it was easy to fix yet they refused to provide an option, the FFx team showed less respect to their users opinion. THAT's the balance I'm talking about.
We aren't talking about organizations promoting things here. We're talking about internal restrictions on members of those organizations
No we are talking about adding a filter in the aggregator Planet Gnome, the guy can speak all he wants about VMwere elsewhere AND he can keep blogging about it, even in the same blog that he uses for the Gnome stuff, it just wouldn't show up in Planet Gnome.
Planet Gnome is an aggregator, it collects new items from news feeds usually blogs. It can handle rules to filter content by keywords and, more often, by tags.
The C# and CLI patents you list are covered by the legally binding Community Promise
The ones which can be voided at anytime? Sorry I don't buy them.
Again, why doesn't MS offer a royalty-free permanent irrevocable license to those patents? That would shut up critics and since apologists insist MS is never ever ever going to void its promises so why not just license them as any other company would do?
Why does MS leave the door open?
You can't expect them to maintain old versions forever. Besides, you're always free to backport FF3's applicable security fixes to FF2 on your own, if you really want to keep using FF2 that much.
(I don't usually like "do it yourself" as a response to "it's missing a bugfix/feature/whatever", but in the case of no-longer-supported open source software I think it's acceptable.)
Are you being obnoxious on purpose? Because I can't believe you are that dumb.
There is a balance between "maintain old versions forever" and "Firefox attitude of forcing you into changes you don't want to make." even the parent himself mentioned it "the devs allow you to switch the old toolbar back on"
You can maintain only one version AND give everybody the UI they love, just make it an option.
Yes sometimes fundamental changes break compatibility between different interfaces, yes, sometimes too much interface options make a program harder to use or customize.
No, firefox didn't have to shove the awesomebar* down their users throat. There are a lot of united complains about it, we are not talking about a gazillion obscure options, we are talking about one single very popular option that they still didn't care to include and in fact were antagonistic against their loyal user base. That's arrogance.
The Thunderbird team seems to be nicer.
I actually though that was a good idea from the beginning but I don't think they handled the issue rightly.