All it means is that the RIAA sent another exec to supervise so the number of RIAA approved consumers doubled immediately.
Seriously I don't buy for a second that the litigation caused any significant number of people to subscribe to a RIAA approved service in Sweden. This is just a hoax to make their argument seem relevant in the courts.
For me it's MPC as default, VLC as a fallback. VLC is a vital tool for many operations specially streaming and such, and it plays more formats than anything, but MPC has a better interface/button bindings/behavior (VLC messes up my netbook display when I suspend). I don't see why I can't be a fan of both.
Personally I think the most notable difference between the xbox controllers and the dual-shock is the pressure sensitive triggers instead of plain buttons.
For instance in the PSX GTA games how much you accelerate depends on how fast you tap the accelerator button, in the Xbox it depends on how hard you "push the pedal", it really does feel different, the same goes for shooters.
Now I can understand a new game console choosing a dual-shock type controller when it is obvious it is going to be used as an emulator as this console is surely going to be used the most IFF it ever takes off.
Anyway, my idea for an innovative controller would be like this, replace the stick and the buttons with touch sensitive surfaces, like a touchpad, the sensitive surfaces should be curved either concave or convex to provide tactile feedback (so the player can feel the center of the surface without using "nipples" because they could hurt during intense gameplay).
That plus a central pause button, two shoulder buttons and two shoulder triggers.
Secondly, this dude got his medium completely wrong. Critics in other mediums are important because it saves people from wasting their money and because it is the only way to let a company know about its mistakes and lacks.
Linux is free, accept bug reports and feature requests, why do you need (more) critics that we already have?
Clearly all this proves is that we really don't know that much about what's going on in the universe.
OMG! We didn't know 50 solar mass stars can supernova before they shed their hydrogen atmospheres! Quick! Let's ban gay marriage and stem cell research and start praying!
Pardon? Linux can't even load itself does it? To my understanding Linux alone is not an OS.
Now the engine is definitively the most important part of the car but the engine is not the car, GNU provides you the chassis, the steering wheel, pedals the gearbox, the gas tank and even a (very uncomfortable) seat. Now that is car, barely so.
POSIX complaint or not my point is that Linux is not the most appropiate single word name for the OS, is just the one that sticked for longer.
It makes the network not free and ideally you shouldn't use it. It would actually make more sense for them to get a jabber account which is free and uses only free protocols and has many free clients instead of you reverse engineering their closed source protocols or, failing that, use a closed source OS to run a closed source app to communicate with friends on those networks. Now of course since those networks are popular you have no hope of converting your social network over to jabber.
The point is that if people were more aware of FOSS alternatives they wouldn't be using those networks so any way to advertise FOSS usage would be a net win for the FOSS community.
While I frequently think RMS takes good philosophy and generates stupid conclusion, I actually think your example proves him right.
Happens every the time, he says something, people go WTF he's nuts, you put smash two neurons and realize he's absolutely right, but still call him crazy. Then repeat without learning your lesson.
What he is asking for now is not just not crazy, is just standardization and extending of stuff already there. Example, Greasemonkey already lets you run your own javascript in the browser but:
1) Your script runs ON TOP (and after) the site scripts, you should be able to completely override them.
2) You can't distribute your script if it makes any use of the original javascript due copyright, if the modified script identified itself as free software in an standard way Greasemonkey would be able to legally distribute the changes around.
3) With no marketing budget, free software awareness come only from vocal users, if FOSS web apps had a way to advertise their FOSSness both, the app itself and the FOSS community will get greater public awareness.
None of these are bad or hard, let alone crazy ideas.
Also keep in mind that these are not compulsory instructions. RMS may seem uncompromising because he leads by example. Few leaders are as consistent as him, anything less and he'd be seen as as hypocrite. As far as I know the FSF has never actually punished someone for using closed source software.
Apache/MySQL/Perl/PHP/Postgresql/Mozilla are just applications.
Xorg/KDE|Gnome|xfce do kind of make sense but they don't limit what you can run in your system as much as the POSIX implementation itself does, they don't qualify as OS.
So it is the POSIX Operative System GNU (You know, the one that its not UNIX) which really drives your machine. Yes the core of the OS is the Linux kernel, but it is still just the kernel, a sub part of the OS.
You may have many reasons to call your OS Linux, habit, marketing, fanboyism, hate for RMS and the FSF, you may just like the name better.
Whatever your rationalization for calling your OS Linux may be I'm going to tell you what it isn't: right.
Check out tires.
Check out escape.
Disable alarm.
Assert the interior of the vehicle is empty.
Unlock doors.
Board in.
Lock doors.
Buckle up seat belt
Insert key.
Start engine.
Check out gas tank status.
Check out maintenance indicators/oil indicators.
Push pedal and drive.
Those are just the steps for getting in the car. There are other steps for getting out of the car, then of course there are other maintenance tasks that must be done periodically.
I agree not everyone must be an expert at everything but there is no excuse for not knowing what you must know to operate your own equipment, you deserve anything bad that happens as a consequence of being lazy.
LOL, minds work by putting together pieces in a framework in order to satisfy a criteria imposed by an externality.
Even "non-profitable" and "creative" stuff like writing free music follows this pattern.
We write music by putting together sounds and rhythms we get from our experience, to fulfill our need to find logical patterns and/or getting bragging points and/or please others, all of which help us better survive under natural selection, the externality.
And of course or this work implies a set of mechanical "laws", as well as a substrate subjected to those "laws".
No framework, experience, internal working or external motivation, no mind.
And this is what makes me laugh, you probably think the mind is indivisible or that bald is a hair color.
Since the article doesn't mention it, the people indicted were DEMOCRATS. Quite the conundrum, eh, SlashKos? On one hand, vote fraud is bad, but since it's your guys (Democrats) doing it is almost makes it ok, right?
Not exactly: Fred Thompson is definitively a Republican. William E. Stivers and Paul E. Bishop are far more obscure, but the only source I found reports them as Democrat and Republican respectively.
For the last time, God is a complex powerful sophisticated intelligent mind.
Minds are implemented in some substrate but God is supposed to pre-date any stuff. Minds are machines and require preset laws but God is supposed to pre-date any natural laws.
Unlike physics, that doesn't really have any known preconditions or shaping factors, minds are full of variability and personality traits, the amount of patience, paranoia, kindness, speed and capacity of memory, attention span and so on, all of this is a result of evolutive pressures and life experiences.
But because he is the first thing to exist, there is no environment shaping God's mind, which coincidentally is shaped in a remarkably human way.
With no shaping conditions this God cannot exist except by random chance, God is competing against "everything that could possibly be" a domain characterized by line noise and small things, like cosmic dust and the rules of physics.
You can insult me and call me closed minded but the truth is that your belief in God is wishful thinking.
Nobody has ever observed codes or other information arising solely from the interaction of matter and energy.
As a matter of fact we do, lots of organic compounds, (information) are formed spontaneously under energetic conditions (lookup Miller-Urey) and heavy elements (also information) can be forged inside stars through nuclear fusion and supernovae.
DNA can be the result of nucleotide evolution once replication is achieved and nucleotides can, and are formed by randomly shaking stuff and energy. The probability of the right nucleotides smashing together by chance, given enough room and time is, however small it seems to you, infinitely larger than the probability of God, who must be still fighting up there with Zeus and Spiderman in the "everything that could possibly be" arena.
There is no reason why a pure mind cannot exist outside of and totally independent of the physical reality we are presently limited to.
It doesn't matter what it is made of, a mind is a process of information processing, your God is thinking before there is any information to process or any processing rule to follow! You just can't see how preposterous that is do you?
In the cosmic lottery of "everything that could possibly be just because" most of the candidates are line noise, but noise can evolve into something interesting given enough time and energy. I'm betting on the 99.999999...% of candidates out there, you are voting on the 0.000000...999...% candidates (because to be fair you are voting on a range of possible Gods)
If you are using the fact that both are fractional probabilities to suggest that they are the same or that I just live on faith, well that's just cute and fucktardumb, but its still self deceiving.
Unacceptable to anyone whose main motivation to find an explanation for the universe is the complexity and/or orderness of it.
On the other hand if you main motivation to claim God's existence goes along the lines of "because my parents told me so", "because it would be really cool" or "because I feel it in my heart" then of course it's acceptable, but it is not objective.
They most certainly do because the enforcement is built into the law itself.
No, natural laws are so because there are no reason for them to be different. A carrot seed does not grow into a cat because some magical being is preventing it from doing so.
There is a whole body of law that deals with what is called "intellectual property"
Which is a completely human construction, and only exists in the fact that we discuss them and enforce them. God also exists in the fact that we can worship him, fly ourselves into buildings for him and we can bash minorities in His Holy Authority. Gods can even exists in the artwork and writings of the civilizations that dreamed them.
But as soon as the believers are dead and the writings are lost, they vanish for they only exists in our imagination.
DNA is an excellent example of information that can only exists when it is embodied unlike your disembodied God.
Where the first DNA arose? Well there are several rival theories, I subscribe myself to the thermal vent theory, but the comet one sounds very promising too. It boils down to physics, and if you ask me where do physics come from, they I have to ask you what's so different from physics to God?
Why does physics require a maker and God doesn't?
Why does physics can't "just be" but God does?
I'll tell you one thing that is different from God to physics. Physics are simple, tiny, basic, primordial, axiomatic, the building blocks for something bigger. God is a huge, complex, animalistic, intelligent being much more sophisticated that anything else in the universe.
In the end though it comes down to the fact that a person believes what he or she chooses to believe. There is no way to prove or disprove the existence of God.
Not really, the only thing preventing the probability of God being exactly zero is that we aren't omniscient (and if we were, we still wouldn't have a way to be sure we were).
This is the same loophole that prevents the possibility of the existence of Bugs Bunny, The Flying Spaghetti Monster and Bloody Mary from being 0.0 too, but you wouldn't dare suggesting they could be real do you?
I just hope you are a little kid looking for answers like I once was and not just some troll.
Slashdot Mirror
All it means is that the RIAA sent another exec to supervise so the number of RIAA approved consumers doubled immediately.
Seriously I don't buy for a second that the litigation caused any significant number of people to subscribe to a RIAA approved service in Sweden. This is just a hoax to make their argument seem relevant in the courts.
Well, I *already* hate these companies exactly for these kinds of dirty tricks so its business as usual.
I'm afraid (literally) that apelike mentality is a permanent feature of the population at large.
If /. became self aware I just know what it is going to say...
FIRST THOUGHT!
I know, I really couldn't see the point, I didn't notice it until someone pointed that out for me.
For me it's MPC as default, VLC as a fallback. VLC is a vital tool for many operations specially streaming and such, and it plays more formats than anything, but MPC has a better interface/button bindings/behavior (VLC messes up my netbook display when I suspend). I don't see why I can't be a fan of both.
Personally I think the most notable difference between the xbox controllers and the dual-shock is the pressure sensitive triggers instead of plain buttons.
For instance in the PSX GTA games how much you accelerate depends on how fast you tap the accelerator button, in the Xbox it depends on how hard you "push the pedal", it really does feel different, the same goes for shooters.
Now I can understand a new game console choosing a dual-shock type controller when it is obvious it is going to be used as an emulator as this console is surely going to be used the most IFF it ever takes off.
Anyway, my idea for an innovative controller would be like this, replace the stick and the buttons with touch sensitive surfaces, like a touchpad, the sensitive surfaces should be curved either concave or convex to provide tactile feedback (so the player can feel the center of the surface without using "nipples" because they could hurt during intense gameplay).
That plus a central pause button, two shoulder buttons and two shoulder triggers.
Firstly, he's wrong, there are plenty of critics.
Secondly, this dude got his medium completely wrong. Critics in other mediums are important because it saves people from wasting their money and because it is the only way to let a company know about its mistakes and lacks.
Linux is free, accept bug reports and feature requests, why do you need (more) critics that we already have?
Your privacy and anonymity is defined by the aggregate social stupidity of your friends.
Xix.
That has quite a Zen ring to it!
Seems to me that a laptop is a) less painful, b) less maintenance, and c) creates less shit.
It depends, is it running Vista?
The computer scientist does
>>> 2 + 2
4
>>>
Al Gore isn't a climatologist but has worked with many climatologists. He is more like their sponsor and mouthpiece.
We need heretics but do we still need another Global Warming denialist? Are you gonna suggest we start arguing for a flat Earth too again?
I wonder what effect Touhou Project would have on your contrast sensibility...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHmzO2RI1fs
OMG! We didn't know 50 solar mass stars can supernova before they shed their hydrogen atmospheres! Quick! Let's ban gay marriage and stem cell research and start praying!
A diebold one I guess...
Valve is on the phone, they want their gravity gun back.
Pardon? Linux can't even load itself does it? To my understanding Linux alone is not an OS.
Now the engine is definitively the most important part of the car but the engine is not the car, GNU provides you the chassis, the steering wheel, pedals the gearbox, the gas tank and even a (very uncomfortable) seat. Now that is car, barely so.
POSIX complaint or not my point is that Linux is not the most appropiate single word name for the OS, is just the one that sticked for longer.
It makes the network not free and ideally you shouldn't use it. It would actually make more sense for them to get a jabber account which is free and uses only free protocols and has many free clients instead of you reverse engineering their closed source protocols or, failing that, use a closed source OS to run a closed source app to communicate with friends on those networks. Now of course since those networks are popular you have no hope of converting your social network over to jabber.
The point is that if people were more aware of FOSS alternatives they wouldn't be using those networks so any way to advertise FOSS usage would be a net win for the FOSS community.
While I frequently think RMS takes good philosophy and generates stupid conclusion, I actually think your example proves him right.
Happens every the time, he says something, people go WTF he's nuts, you put smash two neurons and realize he's absolutely right, but still call him crazy. Then repeat without learning your lesson.
What he is asking for now is not just not crazy, is just standardization and extending of stuff already there. Example, Greasemonkey already lets you run your own javascript in the browser but:
1) Your script runs ON TOP (and after) the site scripts, you should be able to completely override them.
2) You can't distribute your script if it makes any use of the original javascript due copyright, if the modified script identified itself as free software in an standard way Greasemonkey would be able to legally distribute the changes around.
3) With no marketing budget, free software awareness come only from vocal users, if FOSS web apps had a way to advertise their FOSSness both, the app itself and the FOSS community will get greater public awareness.
None of these are bad or hard, let alone crazy ideas.
Also keep in mind that these are not compulsory instructions. RMS may seem uncompromising because he leads by example. Few leaders are as consistent as him, anything less and he'd be seen as as hypocrite. As far as I know the FSF has never actually punished someone for using closed source software.
Actually it would be just GNU.
Apache/MySQL/Perl/PHP/Postgresql/Mozilla are just applications.
Xorg/KDE|Gnome|xfce do kind of make sense but they don't limit what you can run in your system as much as the POSIX implementation itself does, they don't qualify as OS.
So it is the POSIX Operative System GNU (You know, the one that its not UNIX) which really drives your machine. Yes the core of the OS is the Linux kernel, but it is still just the kernel, a sub part of the OS.
You may have many reasons to call your OS Linux, habit, marketing, fanboyism, hate for RMS and the FSF, you may just like the name better.
Whatever your rationalization for calling your OS Linux may be I'm going to tell you what it isn't: right.
Check out tires.
Check out escape.
Disable alarm.
Assert the interior of the vehicle is empty.
Unlock doors.
Board in.
Lock doors.
Buckle up seat belt
Insert key.
Start engine.
Check out gas tank status.
Check out maintenance indicators/oil indicators.
Push pedal and drive.
Those are just the steps for getting in the car. There are other steps for getting out of the car, then of course there are other maintenance tasks that must be done periodically.
I agree not everyone must be an expert at everything but there is no excuse for not knowing what you must know to operate your own equipment, you deserve anything bad that happens as a consequence of being lazy.
LOL, minds work by putting together pieces in a framework in order to satisfy a criteria imposed by an externality.
Even "non-profitable" and "creative" stuff like writing free music follows this pattern.
We write music by putting together sounds and rhythms we get from our experience, to fulfill our need to find logical patterns and/or getting bragging points and/or please others, all of which help us better survive under natural selection, the externality.
And of course or this work implies a set of mechanical "laws", as well as a substrate subjected to those "laws".
No framework, experience, internal working or external motivation, no mind.
And this is what makes me laugh, you probably think the mind is indivisible or that bald is a hair color.
Since the article doesn't mention it, the people indicted were DEMOCRATS. Quite the conundrum, eh, SlashKos? On one hand, vote fraud is bad, but since it's your guys (Democrats) doing it is almost makes it ok, right?
Not exactly:
Fred Thompson is definitively a Republican.
William E. Stivers and Paul E. Bishop are far more obscure, but the only source I found reports them as Democrat and Republican respectively.
So this fraud was 66% Republican goodness.
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Thompson#Electoral_history
http://norunnyeggs.com/2009/03/election-rigging-in-kentucky/
For the last time, God is a complex powerful sophisticated intelligent mind.
Minds are implemented in some substrate but God is supposed to pre-date any stuff. Minds are machines and require preset laws but God is supposed to pre-date any natural laws.
Unlike physics, that doesn't really have any known preconditions or shaping factors, minds are full of variability and personality traits, the amount of patience, paranoia, kindness, speed and capacity of memory, attention span and so on, all of this is a result of evolutive pressures and life experiences.
But because he is the first thing to exist, there is no environment shaping God's mind, which coincidentally is shaped in a remarkably human way.
With no shaping conditions this God cannot exist except by random chance, God is competing against "everything that could possibly be" a domain characterized by line noise and small things, like cosmic dust and the rules of physics.
You can insult me and call me closed minded but the truth is that your belief in God is wishful thinking.
As a matter of fact we do, lots of organic compounds, (information) are formed spontaneously under energetic conditions (lookup Miller-Urey) and heavy elements (also information) can be forged inside stars through nuclear fusion and supernovae.
DNA can be the result of nucleotide evolution once replication is achieved and nucleotides can, and are formed by randomly shaking stuff and energy. The probability of the right nucleotides smashing together by chance, given enough room and time is, however small it seems to you, infinitely larger than the probability of God, who must be still fighting up there with Zeus and Spiderman in the "everything that could possibly be" arena.
It doesn't matter what it is made of, a mind is a process of information processing, your God is thinking before there is any information to process or any processing rule to follow! You just can't see how preposterous that is do you?
In the cosmic lottery of "everything that could possibly be just because" most of the candidates are line noise, but noise can evolve into something interesting given enough time and energy. I'm betting on the 99.999999...% of candidates out there, you are voting on the 0.000000...999...% candidates (because to be fair you are voting on a range of possible Gods)
If you are using the fact that both are fractional probabilities to suggest that they are the same or that I just live on faith, well that's just cute and fucktardumb, but its still self deceiving.
So long, wishful thinker!
Unacceptable to anyone whose main motivation to find an explanation for the universe is the complexity and/or orderness of it.
On the other hand if you main motivation to claim God's existence goes along the lines of "because my parents told me so", "because it would be really cool" or "because I feel it in my heart" then of course it's acceptable, but it is not objective.
No, natural laws are so because there are no reason for them to be different. A carrot seed does not grow into a cat because some magical being is preventing it from doing so.
Which is a completely human construction, and only exists in the fact that we discuss them and enforce them. God also exists in the fact that we can worship him, fly ourselves into buildings for him and we can bash minorities in His Holy Authority. Gods can even exists in the artwork and writings of the civilizations that dreamed them.
But as soon as the believers are dead and the writings are lost, they vanish for they only exists in our imagination.
DNA is an excellent example of information that can only exists when it is embodied unlike your disembodied God.
Where the first DNA arose? Well there are several rival theories, I subscribe myself to the thermal vent theory, but the comet one sounds very promising too. It boils down to physics, and if you ask me where do physics come from, they I have to ask you what's so different from physics to God?
Why does physics require a maker and God doesn't?
Why does physics can't "just be" but God does?
I'll tell you one thing that is different from God to physics. Physics are simple, tiny, basic, primordial, axiomatic, the building blocks for something bigger. God is a huge, complex, animalistic, intelligent being much more sophisticated that anything else in the universe.
Not really, the only thing preventing the probability of God being exactly zero is that we aren't omniscient (and if we were, we still wouldn't have a way to be sure we were).
This is the same loophole that prevents the possibility of the existence of Bugs Bunny, The Flying Spaghetti Monster and Bloody Mary from being 0.0 too, but you wouldn't dare suggesting they could be real do you?
I just hope you are a little kid looking for answers like I once was and not just some troll.
Here is a couple of excellent videos of the leading theory of abiogenesis:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhWds7djuWo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6QYDdgP9eg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtmbcfb_rdc