What, exactly, is the "gay agenda" again? I keep forgetting. Wasn't it something about not being treated as second-class citizens for being gay? Yes, they have absolutely no right to insist that we treat like human beings. Or do you mean another agenda, like their plot to take over the world and force all the rest of us to be gay too?
Married het female, if you're wondering. I'm wondering how a comment about with the words gay agenda got modded up. That smacks of anti-gay paranoia.
"In addition, if this surveillence operation is true, then he may be harming national security be revealing it to the general public and alerting terrorists that they are being watched."
They already know that. Everyone on the face of the earth knows that already, in fact.
Those all sound to me like good reasons not to support Microsoft. I foolishly supported them once, the first time I bought a PC, which came with Windows Me. I later switched to 2k -- I know my friend didn't need his copy after his PC broke down and he bought a iBook (I frankly don't give a crap whether the EULA forbids that or not) -- and they've not gotten a penny from me since. Frankly, I have no intention of ever supporting a company that treats it customers like this; with the continual barrage of piracy checks on your legal instalaltions and MS pumping more resources into DRM, I think there is no company in the world besides AT&T that is more clearly against their own customers. Supporting Microsoft seems a lot to me like supporting your local meth dealer (dangerous people giving you a drug made from rat poison and Drano).
"Microsoft has never really tried to cut off illegal users in all these years, although it could've done so at any point."
Huh? Deactivating Windows doesn't count? ou can use a deactivated copy only for so long a time, right? Am I missing something here? (Win 2k/Debian-user.)
This is similar to what I've heard, on and offline. Many teens simply have no time for games. A great deal of the reason is home work and studying -- if you're my age (35) and thought you had a lot of homeowrk in school, you might be surpirsed to learn that kids today get even more. Often a lot more. My neighbor's 14-year-old daughter is assigned homework every day in school, and there's frequently enough for Friday that it takes two nights to finish. And she's not taking extra classes, she's simply involved in track. I hear pretty much the same on IRC, where sometimes a couple of teens drop into my favorite channel while taking homework breaks during the evening. I think if more areas still let kids off in summer like they used to instead of the new off & on schedule you'd see an increase in gaming. But when you're only off for a week occasionally, there's little point in getting involved in an immersive game and most games today are meant to be immersive. As it is, the total of four teens I know only play short games like Tetris when they actually have the time to be bored.
"They're not paying now and wouldn't pay if Apple released a legal version, just like they pirate Windows today."
That's an awfully broad-sweeping statement. What do you base it on? I don't know how many people I've heard say they want OS X but not Apple's hardware. What makes you so certain that these people would never be willing to pay for it if Apple made a PC version? Many of these people aren't pirating Windows or OS X -- Apple may say it's illegal to install OS X on a PC, but a lot of these people paid for OS X and I'm not so sure that part of Apple's EULA would hold up in court if they tried to sue one of these hackers. What makes you think they're pirating Windows in the first place? Where did you come up with that?
No, I'm not one of them, but that statement is just BS, crying piracy with no evidence whatsoever. You sound like an MS representative.
"They do not prevent you from eskewing their Click-n-Run server for apt-get, which works perfectly fine by all accounts."
Yes they do. When I was new to Linux I downloaded and installed Lindows. I read a tutorial on how to use apt (it was quite accurate, I know that now) and Lindows immediately broke. It locked up so that I had to reboot and then went into a kernel panic. What was I trying to install? The Gimp. I've read numberous posts from people who had the same experience at Distrowatch, LinuxQuestions.org, various other forums and on IRC.
"Whatever happened to good old fashioned "knowing what the hell you're talking about or shutting the hell up"? "
I do know what I'm talking about. Sorry, but you're clearly the one who doesn't know what he's talking about on that particular score. People who live in glass houses.... get embarassed a lot.
"If you have never had a pain in the ass installing software on Linux let alone finding a specific app then I want what your smokin."
1. Apt-get (yast, yum, whatever your distro has) 2. I follow the instructions if it's not in the apt repositories 3. If there are no instructions I don't install it -- seems a bit dodgy
"They really should work out a system like Apple is using, where the first user account is automatically in the wheel group and can sudo, but is otherwise a normal user account, with the root account disabled entirely."
Several Linux distributions are set up that way, including Ubuntu and Mandriva (unless Mandriva has changed that in the last couple of years). But not Linspire, apparently. It would be a better idea for a distro that bases its marketing appeal on user-friendliness, wouldn't it?
That's because the fact that Lindows was using the Windows name was much clearer in the languages of those countries. They have their own words for application windows and none of them are "windows". But Windows the OS was still called Windows, and Lindows was also called Lindows. It would be like someone here starting a company and calling it "Reddish Hat".
Being Christian DOES NOT equate belief in ID. Many devout Christians don't believe in ID and even the Catholic Church in Rome discourages the teaching of ID. If there's one thing IDers need to learn it's to speak for themselves instead of proclaiming that they represent all Chrisitans -- or are you saying that Christians who don't believe in ID aren't "real" Chrisitans at all? If so you're way overstepping your bounds since, by the tenets of your own faith, only God has the right to make that judgment.
Nevertheless, his post wasn't even half as flamey as yours -- and no, before you strike, I don't believe in creationism. But back on topic, to quote you: "As a scientist, creationism isn't on my radar at all, and quite frankly, I don't give a rat's ass whether or not you believe it. What I do care about, is people such as yourself misrepresenting both science and religion as something that they are not, claiming you know things that you clearly do not. And then blaming good scientists for your own ignorance and lack of insight." Where, exactly, did he do that? And his post, more polite than yours, was modded flamebait but yours hasn't been yet. On top of that, another post to this article where all slashdotters were called "niggers" was modded up too.
I've had enough/. for a while. I just ate and all the bullshit is making me queasy.
Not understand how capitalism works? I'm sure we all do. That doesn't mean we have to like it or put up with being forced to accomodate it without a fight.
I think I might be an example of both arguements here. I was a slow learner when young but then suddenly surpassed my classmates about 5th grade or so. Before then I thought I was dumber than the rest of them. Slow development because of the cortex, or did I just try harder because I thought I was dumb? At age 35, it's hard for me to remember.
In high school my IQ test claimed I was near genius. So why can't I learn to read music? Several people have tried to teach me and I've tried to learn but I just never get it. Yet I'm quite intuitive about computers and GUIs. Neither of my parents were above average, but my mother could finish a difficult crossword puzzle in 10 minutes flat, whereas I can't finish one of average difficulty. Her mind grasped the pattern in them but apparently mine does not. I'm not good at other word games either like she was, but I'm very good at puzzles that involve shapes, colors and pieces (tetris, etc.). So there definitely are people who are better at some things than others, regardless of IQ or how developed their brains are supposed to be, which is much the same as saying there are different sorts of intelligence.
I'm repeating myself by posting musch the same response as I did to this at Digg, but here goes anyway (my apologies to those who read it there). This kind of thing happens all the time in the world of fonts -- I used to collect them. I don't know how many virtually identical fonts I've seen, all of which were copyrighted by some company or other. Not similar, truly identical. And then there's many, many fonts that are copied from another source, such as typeface you've seen from popular movies. And these are all copyrighted too; I'm pretty sure that most of those wouldn't hold up in court. (Has anyone else noticed that it's so difficult to do nothing illegal nowadays becauses of patents and copyrights that it comes down to a matter of whether it would hold up in court? But I digress.)
Not only that, but many of these fonts are DRMed to the hilt, which the true type font format is set up for. Imagine, you recognize where they got the font from and you can't even use it to write a document to print out because it's DRMed so that the only purpose it serves on your system is so you can read web pages made with that font. So that violates fair usage too. In short, they basically get away with murder when it comes to fonts because no one is going to sue them.... or at least, hasn't so far.
One glaring example of both that springs to mind is a font that is a copy of Jimi's Hendrix's handwriting. And the maker of the font copyrighted and DRMed it. Imagine how Janie Hendrix might react if she got hold of that font and found out she couldn't even use it. How would you like it if someone copied your dead brother's handwriting to make a font and then DRMed it? (Yeah, yeah, I realize people familiar with my posts are probably Hendrixed out by now, but this a good example.) Or better still, if they copied the writing style from you?
"No, it was a myth of epic proportions that never affected any shipped consumer units for which Apple suffered on its portable line for years afterward. "
Uh-huh. And the first generation of Playstations didn't have heating problems despite claims to the contrary. Sony said so.
I'm not particularly criticizing Apple here, but I'm not going to dismiss a problem as a "myth" because a corporation says it's a myth. Other companies have done the same thing, denying actual problems with their products. And simply dismissing this as myth yourself shows you're more on Apple's side than their customers. If that weren't true you'd want to see the proof rather than proclaim that's a myth because you can't possibly know that.
"The consumers pick the level of quality in their products by what they purchase."
I must disagree here. Patents and copyrights are the real controlling factors. You can't make a true clone of Photoshop and open-source it, can you? The Gimp is as close as you can get to a PS clone to my knowledge and it's far from being a true PS clone, simply because they can't make one, let alone anything that's actually better.
Marketing is another important factor - where would we be now if Windows hadn't been marketed as aggressively as it is and MS hadn't employed the monopolistic, cutthroat practices they're infamous for? Other OSes that are gone now might still exist and be in development. You can say that the consumers support them in this, but that's not really true. What do the consumers have to do with the "MS tax" on new computers? Nothing, that's Microsoft's doing. What do consumers have to do with the fact that all big-name pre-made computers you can buy come with the latest version of Windows only (besides Macs, of course)? That's Microsft keeping the options as limited as possible.
Everyone I know would love a higher level of quality in Windows, but what can they actually do about it? The only option is to switch to another OS which might not support their hardware, not to mention their favorite games and applications. So what can they do make Microsoft produce a higher-quality version of Windows? Nothing, with MS it's take or leave it, and they do their best to prevent you from having other choices as it is.
Well, I'm a woman and the first thought that went through my mind was "funny how they criticize her looks but don't mention their own". In my experience, guys are quick to shoot down a woman's looks regardless of how good-looking they're not themselves. Frankly, if some pudgy, out-of-shape geek criticizes my looks I can easily fix that problem... with a fork.
But yeah, the fact that there were comments about her looks made me roll her eyes. I've read articles that had pics of the guy in question and never once made a comment on his looks. Perhaps I will in the future - why shouldn't I?
Disclaimer: I've just been to a site where 90% of the files to download weren't available because "this entry is not approved". So I'm a bit irritated anyway.
You obviously didn't wind up on the same page as I did when I went to Fark earlier today. It was all frog porn. Earlier there was a picture of a squirrle with a huge pair of nuts. Not edible nuts.
I wish. Some pastors spend their lives trying to help others. Unfortunately, most of those I've met are far more interested in attempting their interpretations of everything down your throat than actually helping anyone. They don't even think the difference between right and wrong is important. Sad. That said, I do know one whom I hold in high esteem, but he's retired now. A good, kind man.
You're forgetting something here: there's a great deal of this kind of crap out there that installs itself in Windows without the user's say-so. No download, no click "OK" or anything. You're online and boom, you've got spyware. A router helps, a firewall helps, Peer Guardian and WinPatrol help a lot, but you never know when another thing might come along that can get through them and be on your system before you know it.
It's a common misconception that malware has to be installed on a Windows system with the user's permission - but it doesn't. People keep saying that the users need to be educated enough not to install crap on their systems, but a lot of people obviously need to be educated about the fact that not all spyware is installed with the user's permission. At least half of it is not. It's this kind of "it's all the foolish users installing crap" attitude that helps malware flourish; people think their system is safe if they don't download attachments and install stuff off the net, but they're not. Not at all.
Slashdot Mirror
What, exactly, is the "gay agenda" again? I keep forgetting. Wasn't it something about not being treated as second-class citizens for being gay? Yes, they have absolutely no right to insist that we treat like human beings. Or do you mean another agenda, like their plot to take over the world and force all the rest of us to be gay too?
Married het female, if you're wondering. I'm wondering how a comment about with the words gay agenda got modded up. That smacks of anti-gay paranoia.
"In addition, if this surveillence operation is true, then he may be harming national security be revealing it to the general public and alerting terrorists that they are being watched."
They already know that. Everyone on the face of the earth knows that already, in fact.
Those all sound to me like good reasons not to support Microsoft. I foolishly supported them once, the first time I bought a PC, which came with Windows Me. I later switched to 2k -- I know my friend didn't need his copy after his PC broke down and he bought a iBook (I frankly don't give a crap whether the EULA forbids that or not) -- and they've not gotten a penny from me since. Frankly, I have no intention of ever supporting a company that treats it customers like this; with the continual barrage of piracy checks on your legal instalaltions and MS pumping more resources into DRM, I think there is no company in the world besides AT&T that is more clearly against their own customers. Supporting Microsoft seems a lot to me like supporting your local meth dealer (dangerous people giving you a drug made from rat poison and Drano).
"Microsoft has never really tried to cut off illegal users in all these years, although it could've done so at any point."
Huh? Deactivating Windows doesn't count? ou can use a deactivated copy only for so long a time, right? Am I missing something here? (Win 2k/Debian-user.)
This is similar to what I've heard, on and offline. Many teens simply have no time for games. A great deal of the reason is home work and studying -- if you're my age (35) and thought you had a lot of homeowrk in school, you might be surpirsed to learn that kids today get even more. Often a lot more. My neighbor's 14-year-old daughter is assigned homework every day in school, and there's frequently enough for Friday that it takes two nights to finish. And she's not taking extra classes, she's simply involved in track. I hear pretty much the same on IRC, where sometimes a couple of teens drop into my favorite channel while taking homework breaks during the evening. I think if more areas still let kids off in summer like they used to instead of the new off & on schedule you'd see an increase in gaming. But when you're only off for a week occasionally, there's little point in getting involved in an immersive game and most games today are meant to be immersive. As it is, the total of four teens I know only play short games like Tetris when they actually have the time to be bored.
"They're not paying now and wouldn't pay if Apple released a legal version, just like they pirate Windows today."
That's an awfully broad-sweeping statement. What do you base it on? I don't know how many people I've heard say they want OS X but not Apple's hardware. What makes you so certain that these people would never be willing to pay for it if Apple made a PC version? Many of these people aren't pirating Windows or OS X -- Apple may say it's illegal to install OS X on a PC, but a lot of these people paid for OS X and I'm not so sure that part of Apple's EULA would hold up in court if they tried to sue one of these hackers. What makes you think they're pirating Windows in the first place? Where did you come up with that?
No, I'm not one of them, but that statement is just BS, crying piracy with no evidence whatsoever. You sound like an MS representative.
"They do not prevent you from eskewing their Click-n-Run server for apt-get, which works perfectly fine by all accounts."
Yes they do. When I was new to Linux I downloaded and installed Lindows. I read a tutorial on how to use apt (it was quite accurate, I know that now) and Lindows immediately broke. It locked up so that I had to reboot and then went into a kernel panic. What was I trying to install? The Gimp. I've read numberous posts from people who had the same experience at Distrowatch, LinuxQuestions.org, various other forums and on IRC.
"Whatever happened to good old fashioned "knowing what the hell you're talking about or shutting the hell up"? "
I do know what I'm talking about. Sorry, but you're clearly the one who doesn't know what he's talking about on that particular score. People who live in glass houses.... get embarassed a lot.
"If you have never had a pain in the ass installing software on Linux let alone finding a specific app then I want what your smokin."
1. Apt-get (yast, yum, whatever your distro has)
2. I follow the instructions if it's not in the apt repositories
3. If there are no instructions I don't install it -- seems a bit dodgy
"They really should work out a system like Apple is using, where the first user account is automatically in the wheel group and can sudo, but is otherwise a normal user account, with the root account disabled entirely."
Several Linux distributions are set up that way, including Ubuntu and Mandriva (unless Mandriva has changed that in the last couple of years). But not Linspire, apparently. It would be a better idea for a distro that bases its marketing appeal on user-friendliness, wouldn't it?
That's because the fact that Lindows was using the Windows name was much clearer in the languages of those countries. They have their own words for application windows and none of them are "windows". But Windows the OS was still called Windows, and Lindows was also called Lindows. It would be like someone here starting a company and calling it "Reddish Hat".
Mine too.... then the doctor told them I was a girl.
Would you like sound with that? Works for me, but as always, your mileage may vary.
Being Christian DOES NOT equate belief in ID. Many devout Christians don't believe in ID and even the Catholic Church in Rome discourages the teaching of ID. If there's one thing IDers need to learn it's to speak for themselves instead of proclaiming that they represent all Chrisitans -- or are you saying that Christians who don't believe in ID aren't "real" Chrisitans at all? If so you're way overstepping your bounds since, by the tenets of your own faith, only God has the right to make that judgment.
Nevertheless, his post wasn't even half as flamey as yours -- and no, before you strike, I don't believe in creationism. But back on topic, to quote you: "As a scientist, creationism isn't on my radar at all, and quite frankly, I don't give a rat's ass whether or not you believe it. What I do care about, is people such as yourself misrepresenting both science and religion as something that they are not, claiming you know things that you clearly do not. And then blaming good scientists for your own ignorance and lack of insight." Where, exactly, did he do that? And his post, more polite than yours, was modded flamebait but yours hasn't been yet. On top of that, another post to this article where all slashdotters were called "niggers" was modded up too.
I've had enough /. for a while. I just ate and all the bullshit is making me queasy.
Not understand how capitalism works? I'm sure we all do. That doesn't mean we have to like it or put up with being forced to accomodate it without a fight.
Therein lies the biggest problem of all. Most people don't give them anything. Better that than nothing.
I think I might be an example of both arguements here. I was a slow learner when young but then suddenly surpassed my classmates about 5th grade or so. Before then I thought I was dumber than the rest of them. Slow development because of the cortex, or did I just try harder because I thought I was dumb? At age 35, it's hard for me to remember.
In high school my IQ test claimed I was near genius. So why can't I learn to read music? Several people have tried to teach me and I've tried to learn but I just never get it. Yet I'm quite intuitive about computers and GUIs. Neither of my parents were above average, but my mother could finish a difficult crossword puzzle in 10 minutes flat, whereas I can't finish one of average difficulty. Her mind grasped the pattern in them but apparently mine does not. I'm not good at other word games either like she was, but I'm very good at puzzles that involve shapes, colors and pieces (tetris, etc.). So there definitely are people who are better at some things than others, regardless of IQ or how developed their brains are supposed to be, which is much the same as saying there are different sorts of intelligence.
I'm repeating myself by posting musch the same response as I did to this at Digg, but here goes anyway (my apologies to those who read it there). This kind of thing happens all the time in the world of fonts -- I used to collect them. I don't know how many virtually identical fonts I've seen, all of which were copyrighted by some company or other. Not similar, truly identical. And then there's many, many fonts that are copied from another source, such as typeface you've seen from popular movies. And these are all copyrighted too; I'm pretty sure that most of those wouldn't hold up in court. (Has anyone else noticed that it's so difficult to do nothing illegal nowadays becauses of patents and copyrights that it comes down to a matter of whether it would hold up in court? But I digress.)
Not only that, but many of these fonts are DRMed to the hilt, which the true type font format is set up for. Imagine, you recognize where they got the font from and you can't even use it to write a document to print out because it's DRMed so that the only purpose it serves on your system is so you can read web pages made with that font. So that violates fair usage too. In short, they basically get away with murder when it comes to fonts because no one is going to sue them.... or at least, hasn't so far.
One glaring example of both that springs to mind is a font that is a copy of Jimi's Hendrix's handwriting. And the maker of the font copyrighted and DRMed it. Imagine how Janie Hendrix might react if she got hold of that font and found out she couldn't even use it. How would you like it if someone copied your dead brother's handwriting to make a font and then DRMed it? (Yeah, yeah, I realize people familiar with my posts are probably Hendrixed out by now, but this a good example.) Or better still, if they copied the writing style from you?
Thank you for the link. :) This is funny stuff and with a lot less racism and fat chick jokes than bash.org.
"No, it was a myth of epic proportions that never affected any shipped consumer units for which Apple suffered on its portable line for years afterward. "
Uh-huh. And the first generation of Playstations didn't have heating problems despite claims to the contrary. Sony said so.
I'm not particularly criticizing Apple here, but I'm not going to dismiss a problem as a "myth" because a corporation says it's a myth. Other companies have done the same thing, denying actual problems with their products. And simply dismissing this as myth yourself shows you're more on Apple's side than their customers. If that weren't true you'd want to see the proof rather than proclaim that's a myth because you can't possibly know that.
"The consumers pick the level of quality in their products by what they purchase."
I must disagree here. Patents and copyrights are the real controlling factors. You can't make a true clone of Photoshop and open-source it, can you? The Gimp is as close as you can get to a PS clone to my knowledge and it's far from being a true PS clone, simply because they can't make one, let alone anything that's actually better.
Marketing is another important factor - where would we be now if Windows hadn't been marketed as aggressively as it is and MS hadn't employed the monopolistic, cutthroat practices they're infamous for? Other OSes that are gone now might still exist and be in development. You can say that the consumers support them in this, but that's not really true. What do the consumers have to do with the "MS tax" on new computers? Nothing, that's Microsoft's doing. What do consumers have to do with the fact that all big-name pre-made computers you can buy come with the latest version of Windows only (besides Macs, of course)? That's Microsft keeping the options as limited as possible.
Everyone I know would love a higher level of quality in Windows, but what can they actually do about it? The only option is to switch to another OS which might not support their hardware, not to mention their favorite games and applications. So what can they do make Microsoft produce a higher-quality version of Windows? Nothing, with MS it's take or leave it, and they do their best to prevent you from having other choices as it is.
Well, I'm a woman and the first thought that went through my mind was "funny how they criticize her looks but don't mention their own". In my experience, guys are quick to shoot down a woman's looks regardless of how good-looking they're not themselves. Frankly, if some pudgy, out-of-shape geek criticizes my looks I can easily fix that problem... with a fork.
But yeah, the fact that there were comments about her looks made me roll her eyes. I've read articles that had pics of the guy in question and never once made a comment on his looks. Perhaps I will in the future - why shouldn't I?
Disclaimer: I've just been to a site where 90% of the files to download weren't available because "this entry is not approved". So I'm a bit irritated anyway.
You obviously didn't wind up on the same page as I did when I went to Fark earlier today. It was all frog porn. Earlier there was a picture of a squirrle with a huge pair of nuts. Not edible nuts.
I wish. Some pastors spend their lives trying to help others. Unfortunately, most of those I've met are far more interested in attempting their interpretations of everything down your throat than actually helping anyone. They don't even think the difference between right and wrong is important. Sad. That said, I do know one whom I hold in high esteem, but he's retired now. A good, kind man.
You're forgetting something here: there's a great deal of this kind of crap out there that installs itself in Windows without the user's say-so. No download, no click "OK" or anything. You're online and boom, you've got spyware. A router helps, a firewall helps, Peer Guardian and WinPatrol help a lot, but you never know when another thing might come along that can get through them and be on your system before you know it.
It's a common misconception that malware has to be installed on a Windows system with the user's permission - but it doesn't. People keep saying that the users need to be educated enough not to install crap on their systems, but a lot of people obviously need to be educated about the fact that not all spyware is installed with the user's permission. At least half of it is not. It's this kind of "it's all the foolish users installing crap" attitude that helps malware flourish; people think their system is safe if they don't download attachments and install stuff off the net, but they're not. Not at all.