"I'd watch out if I were you. Those "elitist jerks" are the people who actually wrote the OS."
Those elitist jerks are why I don't use Linux. Yeah, they did a wonderful job, but I simply find Windows (yes, Windows!) more convinient to use. I think Linux is in trouble because I am a CS grad student and >50% of my fellow grad students feel the same way. I'd rather not waste my time setting up video drivers and other crap like that - I could be doing something useful.
And just so you know, plenty of Linux's developers aren't elitist jerks. Unforuntely, a large number are. Believe it or not, you can program an OS without being one.
"Did you ever buy Lego cars that were pre-built and glued together?"
I don't like your lego analogy because most people use computers as tools, not as toys (except for gaming, but good luck playing games on Linux!).
Linux will never make the mainstream as long as its users are elitist jerks. There are plenty of people out there who put a lot of effort into making Linux convinient to use.
I'll leave it there as more than one concept may overload your processor.
For a good comparison of what c is capable of compared to java, compare the speed and memory footprint of azureus with utorrent. They have very similar functinality and interface, but utorrent uses about 1/5 the memory!
I think you and most of the other people who replied to my comment misunderstood what I was saying. What you are saying is obvious to most people (including me), but the problem is just intuitevly saying something is "wrong" makes for bad laws. Warez laws are grounded in thousands of years of laws against stealing that we know make sense. Laws against heavily using resources can be overbearing on people who don't mean any harm. Should we jail people for driving too much? It's more dangerous for others on the road and can be wasteful...
Just to be clear, I agree with what you say about spam being wrong, but I disagree with the statement: "There's simply no comparison here" about warez VS spam. There is a comparison, and keeping the reasons why in mind is important to ensure our government is not creating unfair laws.
The thing is laws against spam are a bit contrived, whereas laws against warez have a backing in thousands of years of laws against stealing. Is sending junk mail to someone's address illegal? No, so why should sending junk e-mails to someone's e-mail address? I'm not saying I disagree with spam laws, I'm just saying it's not as obvious as you put it.
"there has to be at least a handful of trolls and idiots who have to come up with the usual, "What a waste of money! Use this on water, food and medicine" reaction."
And for every one of those trolls there is another that thinks he understand the complicated situation better than the original troll and just has to reply. I am not saying i disagree with you - i am saying that the problem is so complicated no one knows what is best. What i do know is there are millions of poor farmers in the world that could turn 100 dollars into a permenant investment into sustainable agriculture technology that will feed starving people (eg. irrigation). When it comes down to it, 100 dollars is a lot of money for most of the people in the world, and laptops will only last so long before they run into problems of simply break. I think that the laptops are a great idea and will benefit the world, and countries can obviously spend the money as they see fit, but most *very poor* countries will have no use for these laptops.
Many people in the world live off less than 100 dollars a year - these are not the people who should be getting 100 dollar laptops (nor do I think they are the ones who live under a government that would buy them). I know this is a controversial viewpoint, but people who are starving or diseased would get a lot more out of 20 dollars worth of environmentally sustainable farming technology than a 100 dollar laptop. A laptop won't mean squat if the child's parents make him work to help sustain the family.
I understand your point, but I think it is important to realize that this technology is not targeted towards nor will it help the very poor.
"Lack of education is the most serious problem afflicting poor people. It's more serious than starvation and disease"
That's a really strong statement for an "insightful" comment. I am guessing that you have never spent a considerable amount of time in extreme poverty (neither have i), so perhaps you should try it before saying something like that. I'll go with my intuition on this one and guess that disease and starvation, which *kill people,* is more serious than a lack of education. I agree that a lack of education may cause starvation and disease, but I don't think laptops will somehow cure disease or starvation.
"Civilization 2, probably the single most popular one, was actually designed by Brian Reynolds"
I don't think its fair to give NO credit to sid meier - he designed civ1, which civ2 heavily borrows from. Civ2 added many features, but the same basic underlying game is the same. This is true for a lot of the other turn based strategy games since civilization...
Re:For the love of God It's not St. Patty!
on
Green Geek Beer
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I agree with you, but just so you know: "Patty is short for Patricia. Paddy is short for Patrick" is not the most intuitive statement in the world:)
I actually really like fat tire, and I never knew that it was green until now - that only makes it cooler. When I see it in a bar here in SoCal, I always order a pint.
Describing why I like it is difficult. I'm not going to turn into one of those beer snobs and describe is with words like "hints of" and "burnt chocolate" because I hate people who say that. If you don't like it, don't drink it - I don't like several beers and I don't drink them. One of the things I really enjoy about going to new bars and places is trying the new beers and deciding for myself if I like them. Trusting other people on what beers are good is just missing opportunities to try new things IMO.
"What concerns me is your sheep-like blind faith in your corrupt and evil government... You and countless ill-informed dimwits like yourself"
Please excuse my bluntness, but STFU. I am not an idiot, I have a decent background in government, I actively educate myself about politics and civil rights, and I don't like the way you pigeon-hole me as a Bush-voting brainless moron. Comments like yours are somewhat hurtful and indicate to me that you aren't really at the level to have a civil argument with me. But I'll bite...
I agree that Bush is leading the country into a terrible state. But I don't agree that spying on citizens is a new thing or even a bad thing by definition. Yes, it can easily be abused, in which case it is a bad thing. But it is also, arguably, neccesary. Consider that the infrastucture to spy on citizens was built before Bush. I come from the area that the NSA is in, and I know some people who work there. I have known since the late 1990's, before Bush had any federal power, that the NSA had the technology to simulatenously spy on *every phone call in the US* with advanced computer technology. I do not know how long they have had these powers, but it's not a new development.
How many people's lives have been saved by doing this? I would say even a few would make it worth it, given no harm was done. I think it is a lot easier to save someone's life by having a computer search for the word "bomb" than harming people by doing so.
"Yes, it sucks to be one of the 3500 people killed in NY, but please consider that Many, many more people are killed every year in the US by gun-wielding Americans"
This is a good point, but it fails to take into account the economic effect. Sepetember 11th cost, by most estimates, 100s of billions of dollars. The actual physical damage was far less, but the fear it instilled in the citizens, the hit on tourism, etc, was far worse. It sounds to me like you are not from the US, so you may not understand how it felt to live here on september 11th. The real damage from 9/11 was not the people who died. It was the massive effect it had on 300 million people. Even a small bomb in a new york subway killing 10 people would have the same crippling effect on the nation.
I am not going to spend much more time on your reply, because IMO it should have been labeled as flame-bait. Of course this is slashdot, where unpopular opinions are modded down and popular ones are modded up. So whatever - I'd like to have a rational, intelligent discussion about this, but if you reply in such an insulting manner again consider yourself ignored.
Eh, I knew this would happen. The opinions of most people on slashdot are unfortunetly homogeneous, and the result is a modded up comment that I don't think is very insightul (no offense, seriously - I think you make an important argument).
My point, which I think was ignored in your reply, is that the government is essentially useless without some power. People don't drive dangerously on the road because police have the power to pull those drivers over. People can't safely stash stolen money in their house because if the government suspects they stole it they will search for it. People don't cheat on their taxes because the IRS will make them wish they were never born. Terrorists don't have free reign because the government actually makes it fairly hard to do anything.
This last point is something that the average citizen does not know, which makes arguing my point a little more difficult. Want to build a bomb? Most people think it would be easy. Go on the internet, download instructions, go out to the store, and buy some materials/100 pounds of fertilizer. What you may not know is that federal agents would be at your doorstep within a few hours because they are not stupid, and sort of organized about things like this. I don't see what's wrong with this. They are protecting me from getting blown up to bits. In the case of taxes, they are strict because if they weren't *everyone* would stop paying and the government would fall apart.
As I said before, I am a (sort of) liberterian, so I perfectly understand your arguments. The problem is your arguments are ideals, not the way an actual government that wants to survive more than a year would be run. When you say:
"Sure, maybe this time they're trying to protect you (though it seems it's actually more of a tax dispute). The possibility of abuse is huge and scary."
I wonder what "they" even means. Seriously, who wants to abuse me by reading my e-mail? Worrying like that can actually hinder a government by limiting its power. I know this sounds like crazy authoritarian rants, but I think they make sense in a rational real-world setting.
IMO, It's our job as citizens to watch the government and stop it from becoming 1984, not to remove its powers entirely into a impotent nation that could be invaded by Canada.
"DejaNews already started to get worse before Google acquired them"
Very true, but after google aquired them, they shut it down for weeks (this is back when I used it all the time and didn't know how else to use newsgroups), and then as a final insult brought it back with stripped-down functionality and a harder-to-use interface. I may be somewhat innacurate though, this was almost 5 years ago
Part of living in the USA is dealing with things like this. What it comes down to it, if you are suspected by the government of being a terrorist, you have no rights. This has been true in the US long before GW Bush.
I think invasions of privacy like this are terrible, but I won't scold the US because I understand that they are doing it to protect me and everyone else in my country. I know that it opens up abuse, but *maybe* reading someone's email will save another person's life (or a lot of people). If so, I don't think any rational person would think it was wrong (not in a moral sense, but a practical one) that the government read the e-mails. As a semi-liberterian I know these views are really odd, but I think that it is too easy to get caught up in ideals and forget that one of our government's few essential jobs is to protect us, and that is practically impossible without a few right-killing powers. Plus I like to play the devil's advocate.
To be somewhat on topic, I'll give my opinion: Google should probably work on deleting those e-mails faster, but perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, a saved incriminating e-mail may benefit the world.
I miss DejaNews - i used to use it all the time, but then they were aquired by google (very early on) and competely destroyed into the monstrosity that is now google groups. Google can be evil and ruin things too. I was actually amazed that they became a good search engine after that fiasco.
This reminds me so much of the internet landscape from 7-8 years ago. Add a 2.0 to the end of the internet, and people forget all the hard lessons they should have learned from before.
My main complaint, a similar complaint from the first bubble, is a huge waterfall of sites that implement only a few unique ideas. Back then it was internet stores and advertising, today it is tagging, blogs, and letting the user interact with the website.
I am using a radeon 9500 right now that is software modded to perform similar to a radeon 9700. Saved me more than 100 dollars at the time, and it works great. About 3 other people I know got in on the same deal, and only one of us has had problems with faulty pipelines. I know that this may have been a rare case, but it does happen that a large percentage of the lower-end "crippled" product is actually crippled. I doubt ATI saved 100 dollars making it a 9500 instead of a 9700.
I agree that a IP should have to be used to be protected, but companies can just "half-ass" use it to skirt the law.
And eliminating IP laws entirely would destroy innovation and capitalism as we know it. What's the point of R&D if you are just donating the time and money spent to your competitors?
The issue of IP is complicated. I am all for reform, but the problem is coming up with reform that doesn't end up harming good companies or the people.
nintendo still plans on capitalizing from their old games and system. the NES was an immensely popular system. Everybody had one, and the nostalgia factor is huge. Nintendo rereleased games for the gba, and as i understand it plan on doing so for the revolution too. from their perspective, there is no point letting people who had nothing to do with the creation of the system profit off it.
Slashdot Mirror
"I'd watch out if I were you. Those "elitist jerks" are the people who actually wrote the OS."
Those elitist jerks are why I don't use Linux. Yeah, they did a wonderful job, but I simply find Windows (yes, Windows!) more convinient to use. I think Linux is in trouble because I am a CS grad student and >50% of my fellow grad students feel the same way. I'd rather not waste my time setting up video drivers and other crap like that - I could be doing something useful.
And just so you know, plenty of Linux's developers aren't elitist jerks. Unforuntely, a large number are. Believe it or not, you can program an OS without being one.
"Did you ever buy Lego cars that were pre-built and glued together?"
I don't like your lego analogy because most people use computers as tools, not as toys (except for gaming, but good luck playing games on Linux!).
You really have no clue do you.
Linux will never make the mainstream as long as its users are elitist jerks. There are plenty of people out there who put a lot of effort into making Linux convinient to use.
I'll leave it there as more than one concept may overload your processor.
Or during the winter, savings on heating ;)
"Also memory are cheap and who cares"
;)
I do... I knew a few other people who may also
For a good comparison of what c is capable of compared to java, compare the speed and memory footprint of azureus with utorrent. They have very similar functinality and interface, but utorrent uses about 1/5 the memory!
I disagree - parties rise and fall in waves, and the democrats will rise again. The only place for the republicans to go from here is down :)
I think you and most of the other people who replied to my comment misunderstood what I was saying. What you are saying is obvious to most people (including me), but the problem is just intuitevly saying something is "wrong" makes for bad laws. Warez laws are grounded in thousands of years of laws against stealing that we know make sense. Laws against heavily using resources can be overbearing on people who don't mean any harm. Should we jail people for driving too much? It's more dangerous for others on the road and can be wasteful...
Just to be clear, I agree with what you say about spam being wrong, but I disagree with the statement: "There's simply no comparison here" about warez VS spam. There is a comparison, and keeping the reasons why in mind is important to ensure our government is not creating unfair laws.
The thing is laws against spam are a bit contrived, whereas laws against warez have a backing in thousands of years of laws against stealing. Is sending junk mail to someone's address illegal? No, so why should sending junk e-mails to someone's e-mail address? I'm not saying I disagree with spam laws, I'm just saying it's not as obvious as you put it.
is it a company full of 8th graders?
"there has to be at least a handful of trolls and idiots who have to come up with the usual, "What a waste of money! Use this on water, food and medicine" reaction."
And for every one of those trolls there is another that thinks he understand the complicated situation better than the original troll and just has to reply. I am not saying i disagree with you - i am saying that the problem is so complicated no one knows what is best. What i do know is there are millions of poor farmers in the world that could turn 100 dollars into a permenant investment into sustainable agriculture technology that will feed starving people (eg. irrigation). When it comes down to it, 100 dollars is a lot of money for most of the people in the world, and laptops will only last so long before they run into problems of simply break. I think that the laptops are a great idea and will benefit the world, and countries can obviously spend the money as they see fit, but most *very poor* countries will have no use for these laptops.
Many people in the world live off less than 100 dollars a year - these are not the people who should be getting 100 dollar laptops (nor do I think they are the ones who live under a government that would buy them). I know this is a controversial viewpoint, but people who are starving or diseased would get a lot more out of 20 dollars worth of environmentally sustainable farming technology than a 100 dollar laptop. A laptop won't mean squat if the child's parents make him work to help sustain the family.
I understand your point, but I think it is important to realize that this technology is not targeted towards nor will it help the very poor.
"Lack of education is the most serious problem afflicting poor people. It's more serious than starvation and disease"
That's a really strong statement for an "insightful" comment. I am guessing that you have never spent a considerable amount of time in extreme poverty (neither have i), so perhaps you should try it before saying something like that. I'll go with my intuition on this one and guess that disease and starvation, which *kill people,* is more serious than a lack of education. I agree that a lack of education may cause starvation and disease, but I don't think laptops will somehow cure disease or starvation.
"Civilization 2, probably the single most popular one, was actually designed by Brian Reynolds"
I don't think its fair to give NO credit to sid meier - he designed civ1, which civ2 heavily borrows from. Civ2 added many features, but the same basic underlying game is the same. This is true for a lot of the other turn based strategy games since civilization...
I agree with you, but just so you know: :)
"Patty is short for Patricia. Paddy is short for Patrick"
is not the most intuitive statement in the world
I actually really like fat tire, and I never knew that it was green until now - that only makes it cooler. When I see it in a bar here in SoCal, I always order a pint.
Describing why I like it is difficult. I'm not going to turn into one of those beer snobs and describe is with words like "hints of" and "burnt chocolate" because I hate people who say that. If you don't like it, don't drink it - I don't like several beers and I don't drink them. One of the things I really enjoy about going to new bars and places is trying the new beers and deciding for myself if I like them. Trusting other people on what beers are good is just missing opportunities to try new things IMO.
Part of life is drawing lines. If you aren't drawing a line somewhere you are an extremist :)
Politics is, at its core, the drawing of those lines.
"What concerns me is your sheep-like blind faith in your corrupt and evil government... You and countless ill-informed dimwits like yourself"
Please excuse my bluntness, but STFU. I am not an idiot, I have a decent background in government, I actively educate myself about politics and civil rights, and I don't like the way you pigeon-hole me as a Bush-voting brainless moron. Comments like yours are somewhat hurtful and indicate to me that you aren't really at the level to have a civil argument with me. But I'll bite...
I agree that Bush is leading the country into a terrible state. But I don't agree that spying on citizens is a new thing or even a bad thing by definition. Yes, it can easily be abused, in which case it is a bad thing. But it is also, arguably, neccesary. Consider that the infrastucture to spy on citizens was built before Bush. I come from the area that the NSA is in, and I know some people who work there. I have known since the late 1990's, before Bush had any federal power, that the NSA had the technology to simulatenously spy on *every phone call in the US* with advanced computer technology. I do not know how long they have had these powers, but it's not a new development.
How many people's lives have been saved by doing this? I would say even a few would make it worth it, given no harm was done. I think it is a lot easier to save someone's life by having a computer search for the word "bomb" than harming people by doing so.
"Yes, it sucks to be one of the 3500 people killed in NY, but please consider that Many, many more people are killed every year in the US by gun-wielding Americans"
This is a good point, but it fails to take into account the economic effect. Sepetember 11th cost, by most estimates, 100s of billions of dollars. The actual physical damage was far less, but the fear it instilled in the citizens, the hit on tourism, etc, was far worse. It sounds to me like you are not from the US, so you may not understand how it felt to live here on september 11th. The real damage from 9/11 was not the people who died. It was the massive effect it had on 300 million people. Even a small bomb in a new york subway killing 10 people would have the same crippling effect on the nation.
I am not going to spend much more time on your reply, because IMO it should have been labeled as flame-bait. Of course this is slashdot, where unpopular opinions are modded down and popular ones are modded up. So whatever - I'd like to have a rational, intelligent discussion about this, but if you reply in such an insulting manner again consider yourself ignored.
Eh, I knew this would happen. The opinions of most people on slashdot are unfortunetly homogeneous, and the result is a modded up comment that I don't think is very insightul (no offense, seriously - I think you make an important argument).
My point, which I think was ignored in your reply, is that the government is essentially useless without some power. People don't drive dangerously on the road because police have the power to pull those drivers over. People can't safely stash stolen money in their house because if the government suspects they stole it they will search for it. People don't cheat on their taxes because the IRS will make them wish they were never born. Terrorists don't have free reign because the government actually makes it fairly hard to do anything.
This last point is something that the average citizen does not know, which makes arguing my point a little more difficult. Want to build a bomb? Most people think it would be easy. Go on the internet, download instructions, go out to the store, and buy some materials/100 pounds of fertilizer. What you may not know is that federal agents would be at your doorstep within a few hours because they are not stupid, and sort of organized about things like this. I don't see what's wrong with this. They are protecting me from getting blown up to bits. In the case of taxes, they are strict because if they weren't *everyone* would stop paying and the government would fall apart.
As I said before, I am a (sort of) liberterian, so I perfectly understand your arguments. The problem is your arguments are ideals, not the way an actual government that wants to survive more than a year would be run. When you say:
"Sure, maybe this time they're trying to protect you (though it seems it's actually more of a tax dispute). The possibility of abuse is huge and scary."
I wonder what "they" even means. Seriously, who wants to abuse me by reading my e-mail? Worrying like that can actually hinder a government by limiting its power. I know this sounds like crazy authoritarian rants, but I think they make sense in a rational real-world setting.
IMO, It's our job as citizens to watch the government and stop it from becoming 1984, not to remove its powers entirely into a impotent nation that could be invaded by Canada.
"DejaNews already started to get worse before Google acquired them"
Very true, but after google aquired them, they shut it down for weeks (this is back when I used it all the time and didn't know how else to use newsgroups), and then as a final insult brought it back with stripped-down functionality and a harder-to-use interface. I may be somewhat innacurate though, this was almost 5 years ago
Part of living in the USA is dealing with things like this. What it comes down to it, if you are suspected by the government of being a terrorist, you have no rights. This has been true in the US long before GW Bush.
I think invasions of privacy like this are terrible, but I won't scold the US because I understand that they are doing it to protect me and everyone else in my country. I know that it opens up abuse, but *maybe* reading someone's email will save another person's life (or a lot of people). If so, I don't think any rational person would think it was wrong (not in a moral sense, but a practical one) that the government read the e-mails. As a semi-liberterian I know these views are really odd, but I think that it is too easy to get caught up in ideals and forget that one of our government's few essential jobs is to protect us, and that is practically impossible without a few right-killing powers. Plus I like to play the devil's advocate.
To be somewhat on topic, I'll give my opinion: Google should probably work on deleting those e-mails faster, but perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, a saved incriminating e-mail may benefit the world.
I miss DejaNews - i used to use it all the time, but then they were aquired by google (very early on) and competely destroyed into the monstrosity that is now google groups. Google can be evil and ruin things too. I was actually amazed that they became a good search engine after that fiasco.
This reminds me so much of the internet landscape from 7-8 years ago. Add a 2.0 to the end of the internet, and people forget all the hard lessons they should have learned from before.
My main complaint, a similar complaint from the first bubble, is a huge waterfall of sites that implement only a few unique ideas. Back then it was internet stores and advertising, today it is tagging, blogs, and letting the user interact with the website.
I am using a radeon 9500 right now that is software modded to perform similar to a radeon 9700. Saved me more than 100 dollars at the time, and it works great. About 3 other people I know got in on the same deal, and only one of us has had problems with faulty pipelines. I know that this may have been a rare case, but it does happen that a large percentage of the lower-end "crippled" product is actually crippled. I doubt ATI saved 100 dollars making it a 9500 instead of a 9700.
lets look at the average PHD student:
20000 dollars, 40-50 weeks a year, 40-50 hours a week
yep, that's 10 dollars an hour...
Does that mean all the PHD students should be kicked out of their labs and shouldn't be able to handle expensive books?
I agree that a IP should have to be used to be protected, but companies can just "half-ass" use it to skirt the law.
And eliminating IP laws entirely would destroy innovation and capitalism as we know it. What's the point of R&D if you are just donating the time and money spent to your competitors?
The issue of IP is complicated. I am all for reform, but the problem is coming up with reform that doesn't end up harming good companies or the people.
nintendo still plans on capitalizing from their old games and system. the NES was an immensely popular system. Everybody had one, and the nostalgia factor is huge. Nintendo rereleased games for the gba, and as i understand it plan on doing so for the revolution too. from their perspective, there is no point letting people who had nothing to do with the creation of the system profit off it.