It used to be perfectly legal for a private business to enforce any poilicy they like, including segregationist ones. It was viewed by the law as being no different than a 'no shoes no shirt no service" rule - if you are on the private property of the business and your presense there is not welcome, then legally you become a trespasser. Therefore a black man protesting lunch counter's whites' only policy by sitting up at the counter was in fact breaking the law. He was trespassing by being there agaisnt the proprietor's will. Same with being on a bus company's bus without following the rules they set about blacks having to be behind whites.
So yes, The civil rights movement was all about deliberately breaking laws the movement considers unfair to bring them to everyone's attention, bog down the system, and get the rules changed. There's a word for this, it's called "Civil Disobedience".
And so you can't claim it's a wrong practice today without also claiming it was a wrong practice back then.
Even on high-speed connections a cluttered image-heavy site can be slow. There are bottlenecks at locations other than the last wire to your house, and also those sites with all the banner ads can bog down when the banner ad site is slow to respond.
Yes, but those stupid people aren't the ones who failed to get the joke - it's the ones who pollute the internet with enough stupidity that they are indistinguishable from a jokester. If someone you don't know says something that's really silly and dumb, you can't assume they were joking. There exist people on the internet dumb enough to say things like that and actually mean it.
To "get" that a joke is a joke first requires that you respect the speaker enough to tell that he couldn't possibly be dumb enough to actually mean what he said. For friends you know, that works. For random strangers on the internet, where stupidity reigns supreme, it doesn't.
King worked within the system - he told his people to work within the system
False. Rosa Not giving up her seat on the bus was breaking the law. Blacks sitting at a whites-only lunch counter was breaking the law. For sanitation workers, a government-employed group, to go on strike was to break the law. He told his people to break the laws their movement didn't agree with, but to do so in nonviolent ways, and go ahead and let themselves get arrested for it and not fight the police. The tactic was to thereby clog the system and make a big issue out of it. This incorrect premise on your part renders the rest of what you said as the utter bullshit that it is.
I sincerely hope this next phrase is a misrepresented summary of the bill on C|net's part: "should have known the copyrighted work had not been commercially released."
So it's illegal to share something that you think is copyrighted and not COMMERCIALLY released? How about when you know it's copyrighted and released, but just not COMMERCIALLY? If someone releases a movie in a fashion similar to how, say, Apache releases a web server, this bill had better dman well not get in the way of sharing it.
But, I think it is more likely that the bill is just mis-phrased by the C|net article. I sincerely hope so.
Once the law reaches the stage where it's been passed, then the courts are the place to fight the law. But to fight the law in court, you start by breaking it and trying to make a precedent with your case. And if you think that's somehow ineffective or immoral, keep in mind that's exactly how Martin Luther King got started with the Rosa Parks case.
So, then what are you considering? Windows has the "only one vendor" problem to a much greater degree than redhat. Same with Apple. Are you going with one of the BSD's?
Somehow I doubt it from your tone, and that makes me think that when you claim that you don'y want the situation of having your software "only get to work on one distribution", that this isn't really the nature of your concern at all.
1 - Change to a different hash checksum algorithm after the one you were using becomes spoofed.
2 - In the case of digital media like text files, audio files, or movie files, you can change a byte or two and not affect the human usability one iota - for example, by adding a couple of extra blank linefeeds to a text file here and there you have the same file but it now has a different checksum.
Or, for a sound file, by changing several sound sample's values in ways undetectable to the human ear: (i.e. three consecutive sound samples in a CD quality audio file might have values of 8019,8020,8022. subtract 1 from each of them to get 8018,8019,8021 and no human being on the planet could hear the difference. Do that at 10 random places in the file. Now it has a different checksum number but is still the exact the same song - besides, you'd get more of a difference than that during the playback translation from digital to analog as the signal is used to move some speakers' membranes.
I'm sure something similar can be done for video - change all the white pixels' colors from 0xFFFFFF to OxFFFFFE - totally different checksum for the file, but no human could tell it's a different movie file by watching it.
When you watch TV, the social contract is that you accept that Ads will interrupt the show, in exchange for the ads paying for the show. But those ads exist ONLY within the confines of the television set. It would be overstepping their bounds if the advertisement hampered your ability to turn off the TV, or started getting in the way of your other appliances like your toaster and refrigerator. The understanding is that the Ad is limited in scope to that one television, and that one television station.
Contrast that with website ads, that steal keyboard focus, pop on top, maximize themselves without asking, and abuse useful user interface features in browsers to step outside the bounds of the context of the ad. My computer is not just a web browser, thank you. When a website insists on maximizing the window, and staying always on top, then it is overstepping it's bounds because it is now interferring with things that aren't web browsing, like my text editor, my programming environment, my e-mail, and so on. Those are outside the social contract of advertising, and the advertisers don't care.
So, yes social contract is breeched. But by the advertisers.
If I could trust that all ads would stay nicely inside their own windows where they belong, and not do anything more than use up space on the web page they are sponsoring, then I wouldn't block them. I actually like seeing ads. They just need to stay inside the borders I assigned to them, though.
That's why I don't block ads per se, but I do tell firefox to disallow popups I didn't cause with a click, and to disable Flash by default until I click on it to start it. If the advertizers would play nice, I wouldn't have to do that to retain control over my OWN computer.
It depends on the scale. Try it on a national level and communism is guaranteed to imply a totalitarian government. Pockets of communism inside a larger non-communist government are not guaranteed to do that (Like pockets of Amish communities (which are very communist when you think about it) inside the US, or in the past, the old Amana colony.)
That leads to some really silly warning labels, like:
Warning: this product contains such-and-such, which has only been shown to be hazardous in Californina.
I think the package was labeled that way as a deliberate "see how stupid you are" satirical joke to california.
Keyboards are Havens for Super Bugs Of course. I guarantee that every bug I've ever written came into being because of my keyboard. Take away my keyboard and I'd stop producing bugs.
True, but we must not fall into the trap of believing everything that anyone lists as a fault automatically is one. Case in point - Because some people assumed that having six possible boolean combinations of keyboard focus and window raising policy was too confusing, the modern window managers have all drasticly reduced these options, and now I no longer have access to the preference I once preferred (and would still prefer if I could have it). That preference was: click border to focus and raise, click interior to just focus, focus does not follow mouse. That used to be an option on fvwm and olwm, and it used to be an option in the earliest gnome and kde window managers. Not so anymore. All because people wanted to remove a fault that was not a fault.
You claim you never mention IE, but your examples are still implicit comparasins of Firefox to the "default" experience you assume the user is having - which of course is the experience with IE. You're still saying Firefox is better than IE (or IE is worse than Firefox), you're just sugar-coating it. Thus I still stand by what I said. The only difference is purely subjective, emotional, and therefore bullshit.
So when someone points out a flaw, and the Linux enthusist just tries to spin it as being nothing, or even a good thing
They are often telling the truth. Just because you consider something to be a bad thing doesn't mean I will. Linux has a very complete list of CLI apps and a rather incomplete list of GUI ones. For what I want to do this is far better than the Windows situation where it's the inverse of that. Therefore the feature "too much stuff done through the CLI" is not a flaw. Not to me. Obviously it's better to have both a GUI and a CLI, but if I can only have one because the developer is strapped for time, I'd rather have the CLI.
It's not just spin. It's a difference of preferences.
So it's not a matter of never mentioning the other side
According to the person I was responding to, that's exactly what he claimed happened. I have my strong doubts.
(complete with immature names like M$ and Winblows)
Well, not to sound immature, but Microsoft started it - by picking product names that tried to supplant previously existing non-trademarked vocabulary. "windows" was the generic term for rectangles in your gui that stuff is displayed in. "SQL server" was a term that meant some kind of database that you can talk to with SQL. In my case (and I can't speak for everyone else) my strong dislike of the MS terminology is because they tried to hijack previously existing terminology and turn it into a trademark, and so it grates on my nerves to have to speak of their products using the hijacked term.
The problem is that you can't have a discussion on "why is X better than Y" without mentioning that there's stuff Y cannot do. I don't understand how you can have a conversation with someone on why to switch from IE to Firefox, for example, without mentioning that there's things firefox does that IE does not.
If one person says "X is better than Y" and someone else says "Y is bad compared to X" they are both saying the exact same thing, but they seem different on a purely emotional (read: bullshit) level. I don't subscribe to the notion that sugar-coating what you say like that actually changes anything signifigant about your message.
So Peir1 posts an advertisment saying "Hi, we host spammers", then does it? Oh, wait, no they don't. So how does the customer know that's what they're supporting? They just think they're getting e-mail connectivity.
However, it's not them that's being blocked in the first place. It's Pier1's network. Pier1's network is what is being blocked.
"We're not discriminating agaisnt YOU, sir, just everyone who lives on the same block as you..."
name lookups can tell you domains. And we're talking about MAPS, that is known to block too-large chunks of addresses. Yes, this is horribly inaccurate. MAPS doesn't care.
Slashdot Mirror
It used to be perfectly legal for a private business to enforce any poilicy they like, including segregationist ones. It was viewed by the law as being no different than a 'no shoes no shirt no service" rule - if you are on the private property of the business and your presense there is not welcome, then legally you become a trespasser. Therefore a black man protesting lunch counter's whites' only policy by sitting up at the counter was in fact breaking the law. He was trespassing by being there agaisnt the proprietor's will. Same with being on a bus company's bus without following the rules they set about blacks having to be behind whites.
So yes, The civil rights movement was all about deliberately breaking laws the movement considers unfair to bring them to everyone's attention, bog down the system, and get the rules changed. There's a word for this, it's called "Civil Disobedience".
And so you can't claim it's a wrong practice today without also claiming it was a wrong practice back then.
Even on high-speed connections a cluttered image-heavy site can be slow. There are bottlenecks at locations other than the last wire to your house, and also those sites with all the banner ads can bog down when the banner ad site is slow to respond.
Yes, but those stupid people aren't the ones who failed to get the joke - it's the ones who pollute the internet with enough stupidity that they are indistinguishable from a jokester. If someone you don't know says something that's really silly and dumb, you can't assume they were joking. There exist people on the internet dumb enough to say things like that and actually mean it.
To "get" that a joke is a joke first requires that you respect the speaker enough to tell that he couldn't possibly be dumb enough to actually mean what he said. For friends you know, that works. For random strangers on the internet, where stupidity reigns supreme, it doesn't.
King worked within the system - he told his people to work within the system
False. Rosa Not giving up her seat on the bus was breaking the law. Blacks sitting at a whites-only lunch counter was breaking the law. For sanitation workers, a government-employed group, to go on strike was to break the law. He told his people to break the laws their movement didn't agree with, but to do so in nonviolent ways, and go ahead and let themselves get arrested for it and not fight the police. The tactic was to thereby clog the system and make a big issue out of it. This incorrect premise on your part renders the rest of what you said as the utter bullshit that it is.
Nice try.
I sincerely hope this next phrase is a misrepresented summary of the bill on C|net's part: "should have known the copyrighted work had not been commercially released."
So it's illegal to share something that you think is copyrighted and not COMMERCIALLY released? How about when you know it's copyrighted and released, but just not COMMERCIALLY? If someone releases a movie in a fashion similar to how, say, Apache releases a web server, this bill had better dman well not get in the way of sharing it.
But, I think it is more likely that the bill is just mis-phrased by the C|net article. I sincerely hope so.
Once the law reaches the stage where it's been passed, then the courts are the place to fight the law. But to fight the law in court, you start by breaking it and trying to make a precedent with your case. And if you think that's somehow ineffective or immoral, keep in mind that's exactly how Martin Luther King got started with the Rosa Parks case.
So, then what are you considering? Windows has the "only one vendor" problem to a much greater degree than redhat. Same with Apple. Are you going with one of the BSD's?
Somehow I doubt it from your tone, and that makes me think that when you claim that you don'y want the situation of having your software "only get to work on one distribution", that this isn't really the nature of your concern at all.
easy fixes:
1 - Change to a different hash checksum algorithm after the one you were using becomes spoofed.
2 - In the case of digital media like text files, audio files, or movie files, you can change a byte or two and not affect the human usability one iota - for example, by adding a couple of extra blank linefeeds to a text file here and there you have the same file but it now has a different checksum.
Or, for a sound file, by changing several sound sample's values in ways undetectable to the human ear: (i.e. three consecutive sound samples in a CD quality audio file might have values of 8019,8020,8022. subtract 1 from each of them to get 8018,8019,8021 and no human being on the planet could hear the difference. Do that at 10 random places in the file. Now it has a different checksum number but is still the exact the same song - besides, you'd get more of a difference than that during the playback translation from digital to analog as the signal is used to move some speakers' membranes.
I'm sure something similar can be done for video - change all the white pixels' colors from 0xFFFFFF to OxFFFFFE - totally different checksum for the file, but no human could tell it's a different movie file by watching it.
When you watch TV, the social contract is that you accept that Ads will interrupt the show, in exchange for the ads paying for the show. But those ads exist ONLY within the confines of the television set. It would be overstepping their bounds if the advertisement hampered your ability to turn off the TV, or started getting in the way of your other appliances like your toaster and refrigerator. The understanding is that the Ad is limited in scope to that one television, and that one television station.
Contrast that with website ads, that steal keyboard focus, pop on top, maximize themselves without asking, and abuse useful user interface features in browsers to step outside the bounds of the context of the ad. My computer is not just a web browser, thank you. When a website insists on maximizing the window, and staying always on top, then it is overstepping it's bounds because it is now interferring with things that aren't web browsing, like my text editor, my programming environment, my e-mail, and so on. Those are outside the social contract of advertising, and the advertisers don't care.
So, yes social contract is breeched. But by the advertisers.
If I could trust that all ads would stay nicely inside their own windows where they belong, and not do anything more than use up space on the web page they are sponsoring, then I wouldn't block them. I actually like seeing ads. They just need to stay inside the borders I assigned to them, though.
That's why I don't block ads per se, but I do tell firefox to disallow popups I didn't cause with a click, and to disable Flash by default until I click on it to start it. If the advertizers would play nice, I wouldn't have to do that to retain control over my OWN computer.
It depends on the scale. Try it on a national level and communism is guaranteed to imply a totalitarian government. Pockets of communism inside a larger non-communist government are not guaranteed to do that (Like pockets of Amish communities (which are very communist when you think about it) inside the US, or in the past, the old Amana colony.)
That leads to some really silly warning labels, like:
Warning: this product contains such-and-such, which has only been shown to be hazardous in Californina.
I think the package was labeled that way as a deliberate "see how stupid you are" satirical joke to california.
Keyboards are Havens for Super Bugs
Of course. I guarantee that every bug I've ever written came into being because of my keyboard. Take away my keyboard and I'd stop producing bugs.
People often make arguments by saving their strongest point for last.
The fact that it was listed third does not mean the author thought it was the least important. It could be just the opposite.
I don't like the tie-in to only one hardware vendor. MacOSX is great. Port it to an open hardware archetecture and I'll be more interested.
True, but we must not fall into the trap of believing everything that anyone lists as a fault automatically is one. Case in point - Because some people assumed that having six possible boolean combinations of keyboard focus and window raising policy was too confusing, the modern window managers have all drasticly reduced these options, and now I no longer have access to the preference I once preferred (and would still prefer if I could have it). That preference was: click border to focus and raise, click interior to just focus, focus does not follow mouse. That used to be an option on fvwm and olwm, and it used to be an option in the earliest gnome and kde window managers. Not so anymore. All because people wanted to remove a fault that was not a fault.
You claim you never mention IE, but your examples are still implicit comparasins of Firefox to the "default" experience you assume the user is having - which of course is the experience with IE. You're still saying Firefox is better than IE (or IE is worse than Firefox), you're just sugar-coating it. Thus I still stand by what I said. The only difference is purely subjective, emotional, and therefore bullshit.
Funny, I always associate lame wannabe mispelling "leet speek" with kids using Windows.
How do you back up "far better" with numbers? You can't.
So when someone points out a flaw, and the Linux enthusist just tries to spin it as being nothing, or even a good thing
They are often telling the truth. Just because you consider something to be a bad thing doesn't mean I will. Linux has a very complete list of CLI apps and a rather incomplete list of GUI ones. For what I want to do this is far better than the Windows situation where it's the inverse of that. Therefore the feature "too much stuff done through the CLI" is not a flaw. Not to me. Obviously it's better to have both a GUI and a CLI, but if I can only have one because the developer is strapped for time, I'd rather have the CLI.
It's not just spin. It's a difference of preferences.
So it's not a matter of never mentioning the other side
According to the person I was responding to, that's exactly what he claimed happened. I have my strong doubts.
(complete with immature names like M$ and Winblows)
Well, not to sound immature, but Microsoft started it - by picking product names that tried to supplant previously existing non-trademarked vocabulary. "windows" was the generic term for rectangles in your gui that stuff is displayed in. "SQL server" was a term that meant some kind of database that you can talk to with SQL. In my case (and I can't speak for everyone else) my strong dislike of the MS terminology is because they tried to hijack previously existing terminology and turn it into a trademark, and so it grates on my nerves to have to speak of their products using the hijacked term.
The problem is that you can't have a discussion on "why is X better than Y" without mentioning that there's stuff Y cannot do. I don't understand how you can have a conversation with someone on why to switch from IE to Firefox, for example, without mentioning that there's things firefox does that IE does not.
If one person says "X is better than Y" and someone else says "Y is bad compared to X" they are both saying the exact same thing, but they seem different on a purely emotional (read: bullshit) level. I don't subscribe to the notion that sugar-coating what you say like that actually changes anything signifigant about your message.
So Peir1 posts an advertisment saying "Hi, we host spammers", then does it? Oh, wait, no they don't. So how does the customer know that's what they're supporting? They just think they're getting e-mail connectivity.
However, it's not them that's being blocked in the first place. It's Pier1's network. Pier1's network is what is being blocked.
"We're not discriminating agaisnt YOU, sir, just everyone who lives on the same block as you..."
That at least tells you this it's a class B or a
Exactly. The fact that it is innacurate and hits too large of a group is only of concern to people in that netblock, not to people oustide of it.
This article was about a quite-correct block on Pier1. Pier1 is a hosting company that spams, and should be blocked.
On this I disagree. Not all of their customers are spammers, so blocking the whole company is overkill.
name lookups can tell you domains. And we're talking about MAPS, that is known to block too-large chunks of addresses. Yes, this is horribly inaccurate. MAPS doesn't care.
Your opening line says "No". Your closing line says you don't know. I'm confused as to your meaning.
At first I thought that "ass accurate as possible" was a typo. Then I realized you're talking about a list of spammers and thought maybe you meant it.