With 30 candidates for just one of the offices, and over 50 things to vote on in total--well, you simply can't do that with a simple two-checkbox ballot
Ok, then make it a 30-checkboxes ballot. Check one and that's it. Why should having to vote on 50 things make the interpretation of who you voted for more confusing?
So we will never know who more people INTENDED to vote for
I never quite understood how elections work in the US, but it seems excessignly complicated. Why would you even have to find out who people INTENDED to vote for?
Why can't you just have a ballot with 2 squares "Check here if you want Bush for president" and "Check here if you want Kerry for president"? I dare you to misinterpret that.
Can we just let it go already? Can we "Move On"?
Considering the fact that there is an upcoming election; considering the fact that Voting machines are unreliable; considering the fact that Bush could just as well steal another election in a couple of months, then no, we cannot move on quite yet.
And ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking it.
That is true, but in that case, there is no way to learn about the law. We can't even be sure that one exists. Although your argument is totally valid 99% of the time, we're currently in the 1% where it's as ridiculous as the following argument :
- Do you know that law? - Of course I do... don't you? - No you don't! - Yes I do! - If you do, then what is it? - What, you mean you don't know? - Yes, I know, I just want to know if you know. - I tell you I know. - Then tell me. - If you know, there's no need for me to tell you. -... -... -...
There should be a law against making laws inaccessible to the public... but don't let people know about it...
Videophiles will adopt it, but it'll never really catch on with the average consumer.
True, but that won't prevent the following situation :
Average consumer goes to Best Buy and talks to a seller. He asks "Yeah, I'd like to get a DVD player"
Seller says "Ok, we have that DVD player here, but it's lower quality and doesn't support that new format that is going to take over the whole market tomorrow. Old DVD's are sooooo 1999, and they are gonna die soon because it's an old format. I really recommend that new blue-ray DVD player, which is of much higher quality and can still read your old DVD's you already have."
There will be some (maybe even a lot of) average consumers that will end up buying high-priced Blue Rays just because they're told to, and it's the new trend. Don't laugh, you know it's gonna happen. The same thing happens everyday when average users buy an uber-powerful computer when they asked for a machine that can do emails and surf the net a little. Sellers in the electronics (and most other fields too) are sharks, and they love the smell of pigeons.
There are 2 types of people who will buy the Blue Ray, the videophiles who know how to actually enjoy the improved quality, and the clueless who don't even know the difference between analog and digital, but will get digital because they heard it's better.
Those who won't buy it are people who just can't afford it, and people who know better (and god knows there are not a lot of them, quite unfortunately).
I'm not quite convinced I'd fell the need to play random strangers.
Although you might not, maybe lots of people might. After all, when you play a PC game online, or on Xbox live, you'll likely be playing with a bunch of random strangers. What's so different between that and playing on the bus (other than if you drop the connection when you're about to lose the game, the other guy can actually stand up and go punch you in the face...)?
You nintendo fanboys are just flaming people at random
Are you saying that Sony fanboys and Microsoft fanboys aren't flaming at random either? If I had a dime for every time I heard someone throw a flame at Nintendo without ever having played a GBA or a GameCube game, I'd be quite rich today.
Just because games like Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh exist doesn't mean other good games don't exist. Pokémon is aimed at kids. You're not a kid? then don't play it, but don't say it's shit just because YOU don't like it. Adults (most of them) don't play with Tonka trucks and dolls and micro-machines, but that doesn't mean it's crap.
One day this thing will support watching porn
AFAIK, your PC supports that, does that make your PC evil? I think your TV does that too. Heck, even your neighbour's bedroom window supports that. Your porn argument totally missed the point.
I think a phone is cheaper, unless it's long distance.
hmmm... ever tried to play a quality video game on a cell phone? Those games aren't worthy of even being compared to what Nintendo makes with portable games.
VoIP is just an additional cool feature to an already cool device.
What's funny though is that he contradicts himself at the same time :
When you go to your department store and you buy 10 Cognac glasses and two weeks later you break two of them, the store doesn't give you two backup copies. Where did this backup copy thing come from? A digital thing lasts forever
(emphasis mine)
Exactly our point. What we bought is not the plastic disc, it's the digital thing. If the plastic disc breaks, we shouldn't need to buy a new digital thing, just a plastic disc. Just like if the cognac glass breaks, we don't need to buy new cognac, just a new glass.
You can either take a copyright or release it into the public domain. It's a mutually exclusive state.
Whatever you release in the public domain can be copyrighted (or copylefted if you wanna play on words...). Straight from the GPL, here's how they recommend to state the licence :
--- BEGIN QUOTE ---
Copyright (C) yyyy name of author
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
--- END QUOTE ---
Copyright and public domain are not mutually exclusive.
It is somewhat amazing when common sense breaks out isn't it? Almost scary.
What is actually scary is that we are all surprised that common sense broke in... Common sense should be the rule, not the exception... but then, IANAL, so I don't know much about all those laws thingies and all...
Nah, your real problem is with the movie studios. Basically, they stopped making plots in, what, '86 or so? With the rare exception of a "Memento" here or a "Requiem For A Dream" there, you can limit your watching to only movies made prior to the late '80s without missing a single thing
The real problem isn't only with the movie studios, it's with the whole Hollywood way of doing things. Most Hollywood movies just plain suck and have no storyline whatsoever. It's just a big show of special effects saying "Look at what we can do!", but with no creativity in storytelling at all.
However, if you look away from Hollywood, you'll see there's a whole other world of movies out there. French movies, German movies, French Canadian movies. Since most of those non-Hollywood studios can't afford the thousands of special effects, they actually work on having a good story. You should try it sometime.
I don't know what their order of upgrade is, but I really doubt it is older-first... I've had my account since 1996 and am still on 2Mb. Or if they really do it older-first, then at that pace, it's gonna take decades before someone who just signed up get theirs...
The winner will be the system that developers create the most popular games for
If Nintendo pulls off another Pokémon-like stunt for the DS (at least in Japan), then they already won the battle... Ya just can't beat a game that has a bunch of japanese schoolgirls interrested...
Re:'Flaws' Not that big of a deal
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Why should a thinking man think that descrambler has a name like cmd??
Because cmd stands for Common Machine-code Descrambler
Mozilla still has a reputation of being a part time hobby for coders
One thing I wonder though... From the point of view of corporate management, now that we have Internet Explorer 6 and Netscape 7.2, does the version number of Mozilla 1.7 make it look like it is "inferior"?
I know my boss knows better (after I had a nice talk with him, and he's a tech-type), but anyone has insights from the "average" non-technical-type boss?
And since processors are supposed to double their speed every 18 months
If I'm not mistaken, that is what is known as "Moore's law" (and it deals with the number of transistors on a CPU rather than the frequency, but we can suppose doubling the number of transistors doubles the speed). However, after having been obeyed during roughly 30 years (from 1972 to 2002), Moore's law has failed lately, when about 30 months have passed from the introduction of the 2.0GHz CPU and the 3.4GHz, which is not quite the double now.
We seem to have reached a certain limit in making things smaller and smaller, and silicon CPUs won't grow much faster in the near future. We'll need some new technology (quantum processors, photon processors) to drastically increase frequency now.
but ou are not allowed to USE their GPLed software in non-GPL-licensed software. Unless, of course, you buy their commercial license, which they will try to sell you at any cost.
It's not only mySQL, you simply can't build any non-GPL software on top of GPL stuff, that's the whole point of the GPL. If you make your commercial product open-source, then you don't have to buy a licence. The page you pointed at clearly states 4 situations when you need to buy a commercial licence:
--- BEGIN QUOTE ---
You need a commercial license under these conditions:
* When you link a program with any GPL code from the MySQL software and don't want the resulting product to be licensed under GPL, perhaps because you want to build a commercial product or keep the added non-GPL code closed source for other reasons. When purchasing commercial licenses, you are not using the MySQL software under GPL even though it's the same code.
* When you distribute a non-GPL application that works only with the MySQL software and ship it with the MySQL software. This type of solution is considered to be linking even if it's done over a network.
* When you distribute copies of the MySQL software without providing the source code as required under the GPL license.
* When you want to support the further development of the MySQL database even if you don't formally need a commercial license. Purchasing support directly from MySQL AB is another good way of contributing to the development of the MySQL software, with immediate advantages for you. See section 1.4.1 Support Offered by MySQL AB.
--- END QUOTE ---
These conditions are anything but abusive. 1 & 2) You make a derivative work and don't want to licence it under the GPL, you shouldn't use GPL code in the first place. 3) You simply don't respect the GPL yourself. 4) Support and donations, every GPL project needs that.
Google was wise to make Gmail select ads based only on the current message.
When spambots get a hold of your gmail address, and you start receiving porn related emails, will Google show porn related ads? Does Google even support porn related ads? (I would check by googling porn content, but I'm at work right now and I know of some people who wouldn't appreciate...)
more like a lack of time and interest in keeping up to date with the latest exploit news, the latest viruses and so on.
Keeping up-to-date for the average user really isn't all that hard.
I'm gonna play devil's advocate here, but Microsoft does patch a whole lot of security holes with Windows Updates. How many of those viruses/exploits that they talk in the news also say "It affects unpatched Windows systems" or "Users should download the latest Windows Update to stop being vulnerable".
If the average user even slightly cared about 3 things, overall security would be much much higher : Automatic Windows Update, Firewall, Anti-Virus software.
Together, those 3 things can probably stop 90% of all attacks/hacks. Refusing to try and learn that is the car equivalent of refusing to understand how the brake pedal works.
How long before you go into an Arcade and you rent a VR helmet and you plug it into the different games.
I'm not quite sure that the average human mind could handle a VR Doom3...
A couple of years ago, I had an internship in a research center in applied mathematics, and I was assigned to the VR lab. I spent most of my time developing applications for the CAVE (CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment), which is a 1000 cubic-feet cube where images are projected stereographically on 4 sides (with special glasses, it produced a very neat 3D effect).
On my spare time, I browsed a little on the system and found out that Quake2 had been ported to the CAVE... Knowing that a nice 3D first-person shooted had been ported to such a big (and costy) VR device, and that I had access to it... I just had to try it.
I never had such an adrenaline rush in all my life. Seeing those monsters coming at me, and trying to be careful and leaning over to check what was behind that wall or anything (you can physically walk on a 100 square-feet surface)... I didn't last 10 minutes, but those were the most intense 10 minutes of my life.
The current human mind isn't made to handle such realism, but it might be in the future. At the beginning of the last century, people were horribly scared to see a black&white King Kong on a big screen but today we love to see huge color monsters on even bigger screens, because we became used to it. The first real VR games will be very hard on the mind, just like King Kong was back then, but future generations will have an extra gene that will let them enjoy it.
in the US, almost all general elections for the year fall on the same day each year. Thus, in 2004 every American will face a ballot that has, at minimum, choices for both president and member of the House of Representatives. Around 2/3 of the states will also have a Senatorial race on the ballot. Almost everyone will also have to vote for state legislators, and a number of state governors will also be up, along with various mayors, city counicpersons, county executives and so on.
And what keeps you to have one ballot for president, one ballot for member of HoR, one ballot for Senator, one ballot for state legislator, etc. It may *sound* more complicated, but filling out 5 simple ballots might be much simpler than filling out a single complicated ballot (I couldn't say though, I never saw a US ballot).
Even if it seems a little more complicated, a process that could reduce the uncertainty around voting and the judicial procedures can only be good for democracy.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, then make it a 30-checkboxes ballot. Check one and that's it. Why should having to vote on 50 things make the interpretation of who you voted for more confusing?
Lindows is like Windows... oh wait... they sued them, right? What's good for one is good for the other.
How is that any different from Lindows saying "We're just like Windows, but with fewer bugs and better security"? Total Microsoft hypocrisy at work.
I never quite understood how elections work in the US, but it seems excessignly complicated. Why would you even have to find out who people INTENDED to vote for?
Why can't you just have a ballot with 2 squares "Check here if you want Bush for president" and "Check here if you want Kerry for president"? I dare you to misinterpret that.
Can we just let it go already? Can we "Move On"?
Considering the fact that there is an upcoming election; considering the fact that Voting machines are unreliable; considering the fact that Bush could just as well steal another election in a couple of months, then no, we cannot move on quite yet.
That is true, but in that case, there is no way to learn about the law. We can't even be sure that one exists. Although your argument is totally valid 99% of the time, we're currently in the 1% where it's as ridiculous as the following argument :
There should be a law against making laws inaccessible to the public... but don't let people know about it...
True, but that won't prevent the following situation :
Average consumer goes to Best Buy and talks to a seller. He asks "Yeah, I'd like to get a DVD player" Seller says "Ok, we have that DVD player here, but it's lower quality and doesn't support that new format that is going to take over the whole market tomorrow. Old DVD's are sooooo 1999, and they are gonna die soon because it's an old format. I really recommend that new blue-ray DVD player, which is of much higher quality and can still read your old DVD's you already have."
There will be some (maybe even a lot of) average consumers that will end up buying high-priced Blue Rays just because they're told to, and it's the new trend. Don't laugh, you know it's gonna happen. The same thing happens everyday when average users buy an uber-powerful computer when they asked for a machine that can do emails and surf the net a little. Sellers in the electronics (and most other fields too) are sharks, and they love the smell of pigeons.
There are 2 types of people who will buy the Blue Ray, the videophiles who know how to actually enjoy the improved quality, and the clueless who don't even know the difference between analog and digital, but will get digital because they heard it's better.
Those who won't buy it are people who just can't afford it, and people who know better (and god knows there are not a lot of them, quite unfortunately).
Although you might not, maybe lots of people might. After all, when you play a PC game online, or on Xbox live, you'll likely be playing with a bunch of random strangers. What's so different between that and playing on the bus (other than if you drop the connection when you're about to lose the game, the other guy can actually stand up and go punch you in the face...)?
Are you saying that Sony fanboys and Microsoft fanboys aren't flaming at random either? If I had a dime for every time I heard someone throw a flame at Nintendo without ever having played a GBA or a GameCube game, I'd be quite rich today.
Just because games like Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh exist doesn't mean other good games don't exist. Pokémon is aimed at kids. You're not a kid? then don't play it, but don't say it's shit just because YOU don't like it. Adults (most of them) don't play with Tonka trucks and dolls and micro-machines, but that doesn't mean it's crap.
One day this thing will support watching porn
AFAIK, your PC supports that, does that make your PC evil? I think your TV does that too. Heck, even your neighbour's bedroom window supports that. Your porn argument totally missed the point.
hmmm... ever tried to play a quality video game on a cell phone? Those games aren't worthy of even being compared to what Nintendo makes with portable games.
VoIP is just an additional cool feature to an already cool device.
When you go to your department store and you buy 10 Cognac glasses and two weeks later you break two of them, the store doesn't give you two backup copies. Where did this backup copy thing come from? A digital thing lasts forever (emphasis mine)
Exactly our point. What we bought is not the plastic disc, it's the digital thing. If the plastic disc breaks, we shouldn't need to buy a new digital thing, just a plastic disc. Just like if the cognac glass breaks, we don't need to buy new cognac, just a new glass.
Whatever you release in the public domain can be copyrighted (or copylefted if you wanna play on words...). Straight from the GPL, here's how they recommend to state the licence :
--- BEGIN QUOTE ---
Copyright (C) yyyy name of author
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
--- END QUOTE ---
Copyright and public domain are not mutually exclusive.
What is actually scary is that we are all surprised that common sense broke in... Common sense should be the rule, not the exception... but then, IANAL, so I don't know much about all those laws thingies and all...
The real problem isn't only with the movie studios, it's with the whole Hollywood way of doing things. Most Hollywood movies just plain suck and have no storyline whatsoever. It's just a big show of special effects saying "Look at what we can do!", but with no creativity in storytelling at all.
However, if you look away from Hollywood, you'll see there's a whole other world of movies out there. French movies, German movies, French Canadian movies. Since most of those non-Hollywood studios can't afford the thousands of special effects, they actually work on having a good story. You should try it sometime.
Yes, I would.
What is a hard drive if it is not a read/write storage on a spinning disc?!?
I don't know what their order of upgrade is, but I really doubt it is older-first... I've had my account since 1996 and am still on 2Mb. Or if they really do it older-first, then at that pace, it's gonna take decades before someone who just signed up get theirs...
If Nintendo pulls off another Pokémon-like stunt for the DS (at least in Japan), then they already won the battle... Ya just can't beat a game that has a bunch of japanese schoolgirls interrested...
Because cmd stands for Common Machine-code Descrambler
One thing I wonder though... From the point of view of corporate management, now that we have Internet Explorer 6 and Netscape 7.2, does the version number of Mozilla 1.7 make it look like it is "inferior"?
I know my boss knows better (after I had a nice talk with him, and he's a tech-type), but anyone has insights from the "average" non-technical-type boss?
If I'm not mistaken, that is what is known as "Moore's law" (and it deals with the number of transistors on a CPU rather than the frequency, but we can suppose doubling the number of transistors doubles the speed). However, after having been obeyed during roughly 30 years (from 1972 to 2002), Moore's law has failed lately, when about 30 months have passed from the introduction of the 2.0GHz CPU and the 3.4GHz, which is not quite the double now.
We seem to have reached a certain limit in making things smaller and smaller, and silicon CPUs won't grow much faster in the near future. We'll need some new technology (quantum processors, photon processors) to drastically increase frequency now.
It's not only mySQL, you simply can't build any non-GPL software on top of GPL stuff, that's the whole point of the GPL. If you make your commercial product open-source, then you don't have to buy a licence. The page you pointed at clearly states 4 situations when you need to buy a commercial licence:
--- BEGIN QUOTE ---
You need a commercial license under these conditions:
* When you link a program with any GPL code from the MySQL software and don't want the resulting product to be licensed under GPL, perhaps because you want to build a commercial product or keep the added non-GPL code closed source for other reasons. When purchasing commercial licenses, you are not using the MySQL software under GPL even though it's the same code.
* When you distribute a non-GPL application that works only with the MySQL software and ship it with the MySQL software. This type of solution is considered to be linking even if it's done over a network.
* When you distribute copies of the MySQL software without providing the source code as required under the GPL license.
* When you want to support the further development of the MySQL database even if you don't formally need a commercial license. Purchasing support directly from MySQL AB is another good way of contributing to the development of the MySQL software, with immediate advantages for you. See section 1.4.1 Support Offered by MySQL AB.
--- END QUOTE ---
These conditions are anything but abusive. 1 & 2) You make a derivative work and don't want to licence it under the GPL, you shouldn't use GPL code in the first place. 3) You simply don't respect the GPL yourself. 4) Support and donations, every GPL project needs that.
When spambots get a hold of your gmail address, and you start receiving porn related emails, will Google show porn related ads? Does Google even support porn related ads? (I would check by googling porn content, but I'm at work right now and I know of some people who wouldn't appreciate...)
Keeping up-to-date for the average user really isn't all that hard.
I'm gonna play devil's advocate here, but Microsoft does patch a whole lot of security holes with Windows Updates. How many of those viruses/exploits that they talk in the news also say "It affects unpatched Windows systems" or "Users should download the latest Windows Update to stop being vulnerable".
If the average user even slightly cared about 3 things, overall security would be much much higher : Automatic Windows Update, Firewall, Anti-Virus software.
Together, those 3 things can probably stop 90% of all attacks/hacks. Refusing to try and learn that is the car equivalent of refusing to understand how the brake pedal works.
I'm not quite sure that the average human mind could handle a VR Doom3...
A couple of years ago, I had an internship in a research center in applied mathematics, and I was assigned to the VR lab. I spent most of my time developing applications for the CAVE (CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment), which is a 1000 cubic-feet cube where images are projected stereographically on 4 sides (with special glasses, it produced a very neat 3D effect).
On my spare time, I browsed a little on the system and found out that Quake2 had been ported to the CAVE... Knowing that a nice 3D first-person shooted had been ported to such a big (and costy) VR device, and that I had access to it... I just had to try it.
I never had such an adrenaline rush in all my life. Seeing those monsters coming at me, and trying to be careful and leaning over to check what was behind that wall or anything (you can physically walk on a 100 square-feet surface)... I didn't last 10 minutes, but those were the most intense 10 minutes of my life.
The current human mind isn't made to handle such realism, but it might be in the future. At the beginning of the last century, people were horribly scared to see a black&white King Kong on a big screen but today we love to see huge color monsters on even bigger screens, because we became used to it. The first real VR games will be very hard on the mind, just like King Kong was back then, but future generations will have an extra gene that will let them enjoy it.
And what keeps you to have one ballot for president, one ballot for member of HoR, one ballot for Senator, one ballot for state legislator, etc. It may *sound* more complicated, but filling out 5 simple ballots might be much simpler than filling out a single complicated ballot (I couldn't say though, I never saw a US ballot).
Even if it seems a little more complicated, a process that could reduce the uncertainty around voting and the judicial procedures can only be good for democracy.