People get insane amounts of life sentences because many places still define life as 20-25 years, which with good time and parole can get pretty low. With multiple life sentences the judge insures that the convict stays in prison for life.
Only a lawyer would use a phrase like "life sentence" and have it mean anything other than "incarcerated for the rest of their life".
I agree with you completely, but the problem is exactly what you say in the last statement, and that is my biggest concern, and this has been happening with an excess of technologies, policies, etc.
I think the real reason is a bunch of politicians doing a completely shitty jobs in general by being willing to violate their own ethics has translated to businesses doing a shitty job and violating their own ethics, and so forth down the road. I have a feeling every generation has dealt with this, we are not the last, and certainly not the first if history has anything to say about it.
I don't know what the cure is for that, since there is clearly enough nepotism for people to stretch their political career beyond retirement and beyond death, into their own children etc. I think this has been covered far more than enough already.
However, on the flip side in favor of being too careful is just as bad as not being careful in that both result in undesired change/errors/mistakes/people thrown to the wayside as innocent victims. There just isn't a balance at all, and this is evident in many cultures worldwide. It's just becoming more apparent because of the internet, or maybe it's just as apparent as it's always been. I don't know.
We the public are generally far too docile and naive. I recognize that almost all of our problems follow from this. I think it's because we have largely abandoned principle in favor of immediate convenience and gratification and that this has made us weak and timid. What immediate convenience would see as a gross overreaction to something small is what principle would see as stopping a problem in its early stages before it can grow and develop into a crisis.
We ignore the acorns that are planted and years later we wonder how the hell that giant mighty oak tree got there and we curse at how hard it's going to be to chop it down and at how much damage it's going to do when it falls. We act like it's so hard to know with certainty when we are on a wrong path and we think we need to go down each wrong path before we can see that clearly. Anyone who tries to tell us these things ahead of time is ignored, ridiculed, or is given some cop-out like "you're arrogant" or "who are you to judge?" The difference between true arrogance and speaking the truth with authority because you can see it with your own eyes is seldom appreciated.
I think that the answer to almost everything you have mentioned boils down to this flawed and unstated assumption in our society that people don't need to understand themselves and don't need to come up with their own understanding of the world. Most people have beliefs and worldviews, including strong ones, that are not the product of a careful evaluation of all available options. This amounts to programming. Regardless of age, I do not believe that a person is properly an adult until they have evaluated every last thing they think they believe with a willingness to reject anything and everything that does not help them grow as a human being. If this dynamic process of personal growth were the norm in our culture, if the average citizens were not a bunch of overgrown children, then the ethical violations of politicians and corporations would never be accepted for a moment. We have become weak and vacuous and they are moving in to fill this vacuum but they themselves are effects, not causes.
So, here's an interesting question then. What if ISPs were not allowed to target downloaders, but only providers?
We are generally talking about torrents here. The only problem with your suggestion is that the very nature of a torrent is that each downloader is also uploading. I strongly doubt that ISPs are going to draw a distinction between "uploading as part of downloading" and "being the original seeder." They certainly won't have incentive to do so. So we're back again to the original problem, which is whether ISPs have any business acting as enforcement agents for copyright interests. My position is that they don't.
It's a hard position for me to be in, because usually that is misinterpreted as the "I have nothing to hide" mentality.
The "I have nothing to hide [so search me]" mentality was never a valid position. Its very basis is the idea that privacy is not legitimate, that the only purpose of privacy is to cover up wrongdoing. If you hear anyone honestly say "I have nothing to hide", I wonder how they'd react if you told them to disrobe, in public. I don't recommend actually doing that, of course, but it illustrates the point. You'd quickly find that even people who think they believe in that BS do in fact have things they don't wish to open up to the scrutiny of strangers.
Privacy certainly is legitimate. I'll tell you what is not legitimate: people who don't respect yours.
Which we have seen back in December (when NewYorkCountryLawyer was defending an innocent 19-year-old transplant patient against the RIAA) that tangible evidence doesn't really matter as much as it used to.
That's the scary thing and I don't think most people appreciate it.
It would be better for us to have every last copyright interest and major media corporation go completely out of business and leave us with little or no music and movies, than it would be to compromise sound standards of evidence in an attempt to "help" those industries. Once you go down that path, you open up a whole world of shit that most people don't believe could ever happen here in the USA. That path leads to nothing less than modern, legally-sanctioned witch-hunts where pissing off the wrong monied interest is all it takes to ruin your life even if you have broken no laws. McCarthyism is a pretty close illustration of what can happen, except this one would be for the general public. We're not far from that point right now when you consider how much money and time it would take for you to have any hope of defending yourself against the army of lawyers that a large media corporation could send after you and the number of years that they could tie you up in court.
I sure wish people in general would wake up and realize that we can know with 100% certainty where this path leads without ever having to set foot on it. There are things that simply should not ever be compromised for any reason. Whatever we think we're trying to accomplish is not worth what this will cost.
who cares? what's the difference of the sources until it's proven in court.
This throws that whole "is it legal" argument out the window in favor of screwing anyone the industry doesn't like.
You just illustrated the futility of what they are trying so hard to do.
They aren't actually trying to screw anyone whom the industry doesn't like. That people are also getting screwed is more of a side-effect. They're trying to eliminate a technology that the industry doesn't like. The thing about that, is that the cat is already out of the bag and isn't going back in. That's why this will fail.
Only one open question remains: how many people are going to suffer in one way or another before it is generally understood that this can't possibly work?
Yeah I know what he said is true. But he had a "troll" mod for a short time. I wasn't saying "who modded this troll [poster]" I was saying "who modded this [as a] troll".
Kinda confusing now that I read my post again.
Glad to see that others have noticed some of the low-quality moderation that goes on and are willing to say something about it. I know that this can't be true, but for a while there I felt like the only one.
I've never seen a good reason for why the old metamoderation system was abolished.
Isn't this already common practice? I know my ISP (COX) warned me that 3 complaints would lead to account termination.
I think it's new and maybe it's becoming common, but right now it's still unusual.
The one thing that bothers me is that it sounds like mere allegations are enough to count towards the "three strikes". I'm hearing about account terminations etc. and I am not hearing much about the burden of proof.
The summary had one thing right though:
The company told Canada's telecom regulator that net neutrality rules are not needed since content blocking has social benefits, including the potential for a three-strikes-and-you're-out policy."
I agree that this will have societal benefits. For one, if this becomes a widespread practice we're going to see encrypted or obfuscated torrent protocols in a hurry. This will start an arms race that the ISPs have no hope of winning, which is appropriate because copyright is a legal issue, not a technical issue or a customer service issue that an ISP should be concerned about. That's the best way I know of to start an arms race -- apply the wrong solution and when it fails, try harder and harder instead of recognizing a failed idea and looking for a different solution.
The other societal benefit is that more people are going to start questioning whether draconian copyright enforcement measures are in anyone's best interests. It's like places that have arbitrarily low speed limits; the model depends on the idea that most people get away with it most of the time. If there were a way to perfectly catch and fine 100% of people who exceed the speed limit by even one mile per hour, the result would be a severe public backlash that would cause the speed limit to be raised. Once the public gets tired of the copyright interests' insatiable appetite for increasingly punitive measures, those copyright interests are going to wish like hell that they had quit while they are ahead. They and their products are a mere luxury; we do not need them and as soon as we realize that, it will help to restore the balance of power that is sorely missing.
The general public is exceedingly stupid when it comes to seeing ahead of time that something is headed down the wrong path and is going to be a problem, but once they do, there's not a whole lot that can stop them. This has all the makings of a severe public backlash because what drives the awareness is the Internet and open discussion so the usual mass-media's one-sided approach to everything won't hold this one back.
I should say I'm not exactly known for brevity, but I had a lot to say about this. I also felt that someone with your appreciation of truth is a worthy audience.
Cookies are always nice unless they're the browser kind or have something in them that you're allergic to. Many problems could be solved with them =]
As for my patronizing manner, having been the editor of an OSS mag, I've seen my fair share of zealot email, comments, etc on both sides of the debate. It burns you out after a while - especially when you're a pragmatic person who sees benefits to both open and closed source solutions in various situations.
I'd imagine you need a thick skin to be effective in a position like that. I'll be honest though, I don't think it burns you out. I think reacting to it burns you out (even if only in your mind), which is something else entirely and comes with an element of choice. It's just one of those things where even not making a choice IS making a choice. Our general culture doesn't grasp those things very well. It just isn't on our collective list of priorities, so we get the victim idea that because someone says A you absolutely must experience emotion B. Most people only know how to re-act.
You've never had fun until you've been at a conference and had someone come up to you and basically start yelling at you because your banner has a technology listed on it (it was on one of the covers) that "cost them business" because people moved to it from what they were doing.
At the risk of sounding like a braggart, I pity the fool who tries that with me. Someone who does that has already shown that they are emotional and reactive and petty. Well, that was knowable before they opened their mouth if you observe people; they have merely removed all doubt. When calm, collected strategy is placed against emotional reactive pettiness, calmness wins every time. I refer to the strong indomitable kind of calmness, not the fake people-pleasing kind that's based on wanting to react and suppressing it. That is emphatically not because I am so clever or skilled or whatever. It's because of the extreme weakness of the position of anyone who acts this way. I need do little more than refuse to validate that position and its absurdity will be apparent. The person to whom it will be most apparent is the fool who acts that way.
A position of weakness needs to be propped up. To the person with the weakness, it feels like need and doubt and insecurity. They want you to get upset and they want you to take them seriously because that's how they get their power, how they feel significant and worthwhile. I don't need to defeat such a mentality; that's not really my place. All I need to do is endure it patiently and stop propping it up by taking it seriously and it generally backfires and defeats itself. People like that (i.e. most people) run on stress or anger or tension or conflict as surely as the engine in my car runs on gasoline. Just think of how stressed out and pressed for time most people are; that's because it's how they feel alive and important. When you get upset you are not only validating what would fall apart without your validation, you are also playing their game and giving to them the energy that they run on. That's why they do what they do instead of finding a more graceful way to handle criticism or a difference of opinion.
The trap is that when you see these things and understand them, it's easy to feel tempted to judge and condemn the person. Doing so will utterly cripple your ability to patiently endure; it will make you more like the person you judge and condemn. My answer to that is to see how ignorant they are and to genuinely want something better than that for them; I combine that with the effectiveness of leading by example to show that something better does exist. Whether they understand it or not is their choice and I respect their decision. They really are ignorant. It's a
With open source libraries, you generally have to find the wheel before you can reuse it.
Often people end up reinventing the wheel because they (a.) couldn't find one someone else made, (b.) found one, but it wasn't under licensing terms that they could use with their project, or (c.) found one, but the project lost its way and ended up incomplete with a lead developer who may well have been hit by a bus.
Not saying closed source libraries are more helpful, plentiful, or accessible, but open source is not the panacea that zealots on Slashdot would like it to be.
Eh, I'm not a zealot and I didn't say anything was a panacea.
It was a tongue-in-cheek type of post, intended to be subtle sarcasm making fun of the exact kind of zealotry you point out. That's alright, bladejester thought it needed a serious explanation too, with lots of emphatic quote marks and patronization and everything. He also mentioned giving me a cookie and assured me that the sky won't fall down. A cookie does sound nice.
Yes,.NET is complex, or rather it has a hell of a lot of libraries. That, however, is not necessarily a bad thing. It saves you from having to reinvent the wheel every time you write something.
For many here on/. it is apparently an unpleasant notion that nowadays a computer is an appliance, much as any other.
It's not unpleasant. It's just not true. When users pretend that it is true and treat it like any appliance, and predictably have problems like security compromises, THAT is the unpleasant part. The rest of your paragraph just goes on to contrast the situation with computers with the situation with bonafide appliances.
Further, appliances are never or almost never general-purpose machines. They tend to do one or two things and do them very well. I consider "appliance" and "general-purpose machine" to be antithetical. I doubt that a computer can be made into a true appliance that Joe Sixpack could successfully treat as such without removing the "general-purpose" property.
If computers as a whole, including software that runs them, were finally regarded just as most other products, in terms of liability of the makers, there would be a huge incentive to ensure that self-propagating malware would be eliminated. If MS or the manufacturer had to pay for the disinfecting of every Windows computer for at least a year after purchase, malware would soon be reduced to a trickle.
As a user, I have two choices. I can wait for an indefinite period of time for the laws to change so that MS must assume liability for Windows security problems and continue to suffer from those problems in the meantime. Or, I can take responsibility for my own experience and take whatever measures are necessary to secure my own computer (the one I bought and decided to put online). Without a genie in a lamp or a magic wand, those are the choices. Security compromises are simply unacceptable to me so the first choice is not an option for me.
Acknowledging this reality, I read and I study and I learn everything I can. In the process, I have become more skilled and more productive with Windows (though I still don't like Windows...), Linux, and computing in general. I've become non-helpless and I need not passively wait for anyone else to solve these problems for me. I've come to appreciate and enjoy the technologies involved and have generally had a far richer experience than someone who refuses to acknowledge this reality. I was able to do this because I am literate and therefore able to read some of the wealth of information that anyone can find online for free. All it cost me was a little effort, not even very much in the scheme of things. Hell it's not really even effort; it's an investment that has already paid off many times over. I look at many other users who are also literate and can also use Google and I see excuse after excuse for why they haven't done the same. I then see those same users complain about their experience, which tells me they are unhappy with the choice that they have made. What am I supposed to think?
Logically, there are two explanations for what makes me different from those users. Either I am inherently more capable than they are, or, they are at least as capable as I am and are choosing to limit themselves. I do not believe that I am inherently any better or more capable than they are. In my life I have seen people realize that they were their own worst enemy and become stronger, more resourceful people. They did so by dropping the victim mentality; that pox on mankind that suggests that either everything is someone else's fault or everything that is faulty must be fixed by someone else so therefore we need not change ourselves or improve our situation. Maybe it IS someone else's fault and maybe someone else SHOULD fix it but that is no reason to avoid learning and growing. The problem with the victim mentality is that people see that they did not directly cause the problem and they conclude that therefore their poor decision-making doesn't need to change. The two aren't really related but under this mentality, one justfies the other and creates
AFAIK it's a Unix-like environment running on top of the Mach microkernel with a BSD-ish userland. The unix-like varnish over the microkernel is very modern, but I find the BSD userland rather primitive.
The GUI is good. Most Mac users never leave it.
I really don't know much about OSX, not as much as I'd like to.
Do you know whether it's POSIX-compliant? Is it proper to refer to it as a "Unix" or is it a "Unix clone" or "Unix-like system" like Linux? I'd also be interested in anything explaining why they went with a Mach microkernel and whether that has any non-negligible impact on performance (i.e. message-passing overhead, switching from kernel to userspace, etc). I'd appreciate anything you are able to explain since I'm honestly rather ignorant about OSX.
Because Linux is Free as in feeling that somehow your choice in a Computer Operating Systems makes you morally superior.
Or it is free as in beer so When OS X or Windows dies on you you have a quick free OS to install to get your work done.
Or it helps you become an Alpha Geek... If a girl is gonna go for a geek they at least will go for the Alpha geek.
Or the very rare case that there is an app the only runs well in Linux that they need to use.
I really do like and prefer Linux. I enjoy the system. I like its transparency, performance, stability. I like how easy it is to customize, how it does what I want it to do. I like the lack of vendorlock, the use of open standards. I enjoy both the Free Speech aspects and the Free Beer aspects. It generally does not get in my way by making assumptions. I also like the non-commercial nature; that is, companies can use it and market it, but it's not inherently a commercial product and none of those companies have a monopoly on it. I first installed Linux back in late 1996 or so, maybe early 1997. I have not looked back. Not once have I wanted to switch back to Windows.
Does that mean I found the One Superior OS? The Be-All and End-All? No. It means I found something I really like that works well for me. Ideally, everyone else will do that on their own just like I did. There's a lot I could say (and have said) about Linux etc. but ultimately people have to make their own choices. There are lots of people I know to whom I would not recommend it because I know that those folks aren't interested in learning it. I respect their wishes. If they should change their minds and become more interested in computing, enough to want to put some effort into it, I'll be there to help them. Until they come to me about that, I support them when I can with computing issues, be it with Windows or Mac or Linux or whatever. I have some strong Libertarian type beliefs, in that as much as possible I believe people should make their own choices and do their own thing. To the degree that this is reasonable, I try to help the people I know with whatever decision they made even if I tell them why I would not have made that decision myself. Windows versus Linux is no different.
I'll be honest, you seem rather bitter. Your post up there looks like it was trying to be humor but the humor couldn't claw its way out of the bitterness. Such is often the way of cynicism. Linux really is an excellent OS. There are lots of people who cannot enjoy an excellent thing without looking down on others who won't or can't. You don't just see this in computing; unfortunately this behavior is found everywhere. You could focus on this maladaptive behavior until you drive yourself nuts, if you want, but I hope you don't. There are lots of us who do what we do even when no one is looking.
I understand what you're saying and I'm not meaning to speak against it per se. I do disagree with some of it though.
If something is funny enough to deserve an actual Karmic boost, then people use Informative, Insightful, etc. because +1 Funny doesn't give any karma bonus to the recipient.
Whenever I moderate, I've never felt like someone's karma and whether it is in good standing was my responsibility. If they made a really great post that truly expressed something worthy, doing so should have been its own reward. I certainly feel this way whenever I post something (however well or however badly) that truly represents what I believe. It just isn't difficult to maintain "Excellent" karma.
It's a hack around slashdots apparently humorless moral system. I personally think the ugliness of the hack (and it is ugly) is outweighed by the utility of it. It could be rendered moot if not for a fear that funny trolls will get mod points.
I'll give you my honest opinion, and opinion is all that it is. I find that most of the things that get modded to +5 Funny really aren't very funny, or aren't funny anymore now that I've seen someone post it for the last six months. It's rare that I see any sort of truly unique or clever or witty humor on this site, and most of the best examples of that are incidental and not the main purpose of the post that contains them.
You're right that it is a hack but I think it's worth appreciating that the "hack" is not to get around a bug but to circumvent a deliberate design. I certainly do have grounds to criticize Slashdot (the old metamod system needs to be brought back yesterday) but I think that the moderation system is one thing they got right. Of course humor is generally welcome here; if you read what I'm about to say and conclude that I am anti-humor or anti-laughter, well you'd be quite wrong. But Slashdot is not really a "humor" site and if you want to laugh, there are certainly better places to go. I also often see meaningful discussion hijacked and drowned out because one person posts a Russian reversal and the next 20 replies are variations on the joke and don't really contribute anything. There are occasionally good original jokes but in terms of signal-to-noise, the jokes on here are mostly noise.
So, I think the decision to not allow Funny mods to contribute to karma was a sound one and fits well with the overall purpose of this site. Maybe this is going to sound a little too much like "get off my lawn" but I feel that when there are so many millions of Web sites, it makes more sense to find one that provides what you wanted to see at that moment than it does to come up with "hacks" that circumvent deliberate design decisions in an attempt to make the current site conform to your wishes.
No of course not. Lots of systems are designed for technicians/engineers only, but the OP that I replied to (and many other posters) said "YEAR OF THE LNUX DESKTOP" which implies a desktop usable by everybody, same as Windows or Mac OS, and directly replacing those. That was the assumption.
The tongue-in-cheek post that currently sits at +5 Funny? Your post seemed to use that joke to begin a serious discussion of usability so it was really your motivation for doing that to which I was responding. That is, your serious reply to a joke made me feel like this subject was important to you.
One thing I'll add is that there were a lot of trollish responses to your question. I think it was an honest question and I generally do assume that unless I have some solid reasons not to. There were no reasons to thnk that yours was anything but an honest post. Some people don't appreciate benefit of doubt; I hope you don't allow that to discourage you.
Unfortunately that line does not exist.
It may not. Some information is critical and must appear in the config file; much of it will be auto-detected when X starts if it is not specified. That key combination I mentioned will still work.
I assume you mean Konsole. It tells me I have a 1.7 GHz Pentium M with 502 MB of total mem, and 36G of hard drive.
Konsole is one way to open a shell, yes. That figure of "502 MB" is either incorrect or you have integrated video hardware that is using a portion of system RAM in place of video memory.
Did the output of "df -h" show only a single partition 36G in size? Or did you have multiple entries in the output that command? DF will show information per partition, not per hard drive. You may also wish to run "dmesg" from a shell (this is especially useful if it hasn't been long since you rebooted) so you can see the output of the kernel drivers, such as the IDE/SCSI drivers that detect your hard drives. If it's been a while since your last reboot then this information may no longer be present; if that is the case, you may have the same information in the text file/var/log/dmesg. This will have not just hard drive information but everything the kernel detects, including CPU and RAM.
The "free" command's output reminds me of Amiga's version of that command, albeit Amigaspace was divided into CHIP and FAST RAM. (sigh) I miss my Amiga; it's a shame the company went bankrupt.
Unfortunately the Amiga was a bit before my time. I was around then, but I was not interested in computing at the time. It seems like folks who had one really loved it, in which case yes that is a shame.
Dood, in Soviet Russia, lame repetitive meme uses YOU, covered in hot grits from a statue of Natalie Portman...
Sitting at +5, Informative. Now, I'm going to step out on a limb here and suggest that there is nothing "insightful" about it. Funny maybe (debatable), but not insightful. If the mods haven't proven the AC's point then I'm not sure what could.
- I changed my laptop from 1280x1024 resolution to 640x480 resolution. Then I decided to go back, but the desktop properties windows has the "OK" button off the screen. With Windows such a problem would not happen because pressing the Enter key automatically selects okay. On Ubuntu Linux it does not. Now I'm stuck with 640x480.:-|
Now, I'm not sure exactly what you used to adjust the resolution but this should be an easy solution that doesn't depend on exactly what method you used. If you look in your/etc/X11/xorg.conf file, you should see a line like this (in Section Screen):
Those are the resolutions available (yours is likely to be different). There is no need to edit that line; you can switch among those modes during a running X session by using key combinations. You can use CTRL-ALT-KeypadMinus and CTRL-ALT-KeypadPlus (must be the minus and plus keys on the right-hand keypad) to change back and forth. This is an X11 feature and is independent from the window manager or desktop environment (i.e. KDE or Gnome) you're using. Once you can see that "OK" button you can select the desired mode and click OK and it'll set it ot whatever option you chose.
I still can't get my Ubuntu machine to connect to my Netscape Dialup ISP. The Netscape software crashes, and even after a connection is established, all I see is a lot of garbage.
Unfortunately I know nothing about Netscape Dialup and can't really help you there. If the software you mention is proprietary and provided by Netscape, they should help you with that. If you are using standard programs (which are unlikely to crash so I doubt this is the case) then you would need to know which PPP settings Netscape is using, particularly with regard to password authentication. If it really is a proprietary system, this is where I would say that just because proprietary systems have such a strong preference for accommodating Windows does not mean that they are a good idea.
I have no idea what speed the CPU is, or how much RAM, because I can't find a "My Computer" or equivalent properties icon. The size of the hard drive is also a mystery; Ubuntu keeps telling me it's 20 gig, even though I'm fairly certain it's 300 based upon the specs at compaq.com. Weird.
For the CPU information, open a shell (a regular user should be able to do this, no need for root) and type this command: cat/proc/cpuinfo. If you have a multi-core CPU, it will have an entry for each core.
For memory, try the "free" command or maybe "free -m" for units in megabytes. For this to make sense you'll need to know a bit about how Linux uses memory. The memory listed as "free", that is, completely unused, will probably be quite low almost all the time. Linux uses a lot of memory that would otherwise be empty (and thus wasted) as disk and file cache; any memory used this way is instantly available anytime a program you are using needs it. Generally, "buffers" + "shared" + "free" memory is what's actually available to use.
For partition sizes, you can use this shell command: df -h. That will list all of them. The "-h" option is for human-readable; that is, it shows a figure like 30G for 30 gigabytes instead of 31443696 blocks. I'm guessing that the smaller partition you are seeing is your boot partition, but the layout of your hard drive(s) is entirely optional and your particular setup might be different.
Those are the more basic command-line functions. You can also use a GUI utility like KInfoCenter (a KDE app) or the Gnome System Monitor or gkrellm etc. for a nice readable display of this kind of information.
I've used a wide range of OSes from Commodore GEOS to Amiga Workbench to Mac to Windows 3.1 to modern Windows, so I'm used to dealing with the learning cu
The problem is the newpapers need to make money, and making money from a web site is something they may fail at.
And if they do, then the whole news media goes belly up.
You say that like the loss of the world's most powerful propaganda machine would be a bad thing. Public opinion controls government; media currently controls public opinion, mostly by deciding which issues are important and which viewpoints on those issues will be widely heard. Ever notice the absence of a minimal-government libertarian perspective (not at all the same thing as what is now called "conservative") from virtually every major news outlet? That's not an accident or a coincidence; it is built into the design.
The conservative vs. liberal perspective, which is also known as left-wing vs. right-wing, is the product of the media's "gatekeeper" function. On the one side you have those who prefer economic freedoms over personal freedoms, while on the other side you have those who prefer personal freedoms over economic freedoms. This forms a continuum with degrees in the middle that are compromises between the two extremes. This continuum is represented by two points that make a line because it is literally one-dimensional thinking. What does not occur at any point along that continuum is the preference of both economic freedom AND personal freedom; that is, freedom for its own sake. That is why the pro-freedom or minimal-government perspective is marginalized and so rarely heard from any mainstream source. We are paying a price for our commitment to this one-dimensional thinking. It is just one approach among many possible approaches and no one with any sort of media presence seems willing to discuss what the current model is costing us. I submit that the old question "Qui bono?" ("Who benefits [from this arrangement]?") applies here if it applies anywhere.
The vast majority of blog style news gets their articles from web versions of newspaper articles.
That can change. If it should ever become necessary, I'm confident that it can also change quickly.
We're talking about restaurant reviews here. Don't jump into full Wikipedia-defense DefCon 5.
So asking people to see for themselves that such a site cares about its advertisers a hell of a lot more than it cares about its users (much like network TV) is unreasonable? That's what you call "DefCon 5"? You sound like you've never seen real effort before if you think that's something special and I hope that isn't really true. Or was it that I suggested some methods that can deal with the bad information that results? Is that what bothers you so?
Personally, I don't care to be deceived by anyone for any reason. I don't care to be majorly deceived and I don't care to be mildly deceived. I especially dislike the idea of someone earning a profit by feeding me bad information. The tactics of deception are quite similar whether it's a major national political campaign or a dinky little restaurant review site. There are things that can be done to render those tactics ineffective and I named some of them. Relax. The techniques I mentioned aren't really "work" at all, they come quite easily with even a small amount of practice.
No cross-referencing of information is required, just a quick visit to the cafe, bistro, or bar in question and you'll know whether Yelp is honest or not.
To really put that to the test, I would need to spend money at the establishment in question. I can't say I want to do that if I have any reason to believe that they are manipulating reviews, with Yelp's alleged assistance or otherwise. I'd prefer to see businesses lose customers when they engage in this sort of behavior. So, I'll keep cross-referencing and I'll keep refusing to believe anything I see, hear, or read without first checking it out, thank you. If you really think this is about restaurant reviews just because that was the example, then you have missed my point entirely.
didn't think it was a 'well guarded secret' or anything. Squelching negative reviews of your business and dampening the highly positive reviews of your competitors has been the dominant practice ever since the dawn of two businesses selling similar products.
Well, two developments had to take place for this to be a dominant practice. You identified one of them, which was two businesses selling similar products. The other is a general public which is far too eager to believe what they hear, read, or see on TV. You could think of that as the great enabler of most of the rest of our problems, including this one.
There's this idea that sites like this one or news agencies and others (this is a very general principle) exist to confirm sources and vet stories and information for you. That is, the idea that because they are established, they must therefore be better or higher-quality or more truthful. There is some truth to that, although it's more of a half-truth. Then there's this accompanying idea that therefore, you should not test and confirm information on your own. If you don't like being deceived or used as an unwitting tool in this type of alleged extortion, nothing could be farther from the truth.
I think the real issue is that most people have no idea how to perform critical thinking or how to cross-reference information or how to judge the authenticity of a source of information. They also don't seem skilled at recognizing propaganda techniques (such as bandwagon appeal, "Big Lie", appeals to emotion, etc.) when they are found in advertising and the media in general. Remedy that one shortcoming and all of these myriad instances and iterations will take care of themselves.
If you look at this from the point of view of NY State, however, the real question is more likely to be "why are the sales of these downloads not taxed like the sales of everything else?" or "why are we forgoing this revenue stream that is entirely consistent with our philosophy of taxation simply because our outdated tax codes do not account for new media?"
I think point of view may be the crux of the matter. My answer is a rather simple one.
The state of New York is an artificial construct. It is not human and it has no feelings or will of its own. The people who live within its borders are human and do have feelings and wills of their own. I submit that therefore when a question of politics comes up, "what is good for NY?" is absolutely irrelevant any time the answer to that question is different, however slightly, from the answer to the question of "what is good for the residents of NY?" That they do not feel this way and are inclined to place artificial constructs above human beings is my main problem with politicians in general.
Now it may turn out that an increase in tax revenue really is good for the residents of NY. I'm not claiming that this is impossible, only that I am quite skeptical of such claims especially when they are made by politicians. I am merely saying that it has not been rigorously demonstrated that this is the best course of action. Assuming that a thorough and complete investigation into the issue conclusively reveals that yes, an increase in tax revenue is clearly the best option, it still remains to be shown that a new source of revenue, however justifiable, is the best way to do that and that merely increasing the tax rate of existing sources is an inferior option. If high-quality research shows that increasing tax revenue in this fashion is good for the residents of NY, even then it still remains to be proven that a reduction of spending is not a better option for them. I don't see any of this sort of due diligence and concern from the politicians involved. Compared to what I am advocating, this really smacks of a "because we can" type of mentality. I mean, think about it. I get the idea that the average American puts more research into buying a car for personal use than these guys have put into a decision that will affect millions of people. That's probably an exaggeration, but I believe my point stands.
As far as the philosophy of taxation is concerned, I have doubts that this applies. When you purchase a song from iTunes or in any way obtain a legitimate, legal copy of a copyrighted work, you have not purchased a good or a product. You have purchased a license allowing you to use a copy and that license is basically a contract. Between the two, this more strongly resembles a service, not the tangible goods for which a sales tax is designed. If intellectual property is going to be taxed just like tangible property, then I want the right to do whatever I want with it the same way I can do with tangible property. I have the funny feeling that copyright-related interest groups wouldn't like that very much.
So true. It's one thing to rip off businesses and corporations. But it's another thing entirely to rip off the government. Revenue agents take a very dim view of such things.
The biggest difference is that unlike corporations, the government will spend a million dollars to get its ten cents back. Few things say "don't fuck with us" quite like that does.
Most people I know don't know because they don't want to know. You are right, it's not that hard to read up on the basics, then implement a few easy peasy downloads and installs of antivirals and the like.
Indeed, and there are some who think that you're a bad guy if you suggest that decisions have consequences and that the decision to not want to know is no exception. It's acceptable to suggest that someone is a helpless victim who's simply SOL. It's somehow terrible to point out that there are reasonable measures that they can take to prevent these kinds of problems so their situation is not hopeless at all. I don't think many people appreciate how perverse and maladaptive this really is.
When you're a victim and everything is somebody else's fault, that means you have no reason to change and improve yourself; you can assign blame instead. Therefore, the victim mentality is for people who are not interested in growing and learning. Only an absolutely perfect person has a legitimate reason for not wanting to grow and learn. I don't know about you, but I've never met an absolutely perfect person. I don't know how else to explain the true arrogance of this mentality.
We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo
As far as our problems are concerned, it's incredibly rare that this is not the case.
A little known fact is that the 'sales tax' is more a 'use tax'.
The origin of that isn't difficult to deduce. I bet the conversation went something like this: "Hey, the law doesn't allow us to enforce a sales tax in this circumstance and there are some solid, principled reasons why that is the case. However, if we call it something different, we can do the same thing anyway! Genius!"
If you've ever heard anyone who was cautioned against splitting hairs or needlessly making fine distinctions, it's because this is what it leads to.
I don't understand how your "question" does anything other than restate exactly what I said. Digital downloads of movies and music are NOT taxable in the state of NY. So, if a NY company with servers in NY sells an mp3 to a customer in NY, that customer does NOT pay taxes. So, it does not matter whether iTunes is located in NY or in CA, NY cannot collect taxes. What NY has done with Amazon is to force Amazon to collect the use tax that NY residents have not been properly reporting/paying. (Use tax is what you pay your state for buying something from another state without paying taxes on it for the purpose of using it within your state. It is generally equal to what the sales tax would have been if you had purchased the item in your state. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_tax) In the case of the iTunes example from the article, NY is trying to change the reach of the sales tax to keep up with modern media. Will they collect a use tax on interstate sales of these media if they create this sales tax? Certainly, but that doesn't mean that the issues aren't distinct.
I appreciate your clarification. I agree that they are distinct but in a way they are artificially distinct which is why I spoke of this in terms of principles. To me, the real questions are "why does NY need a new source of revenue?" and "could the problem instead be solved by a reduction of spending?" A really good, self-consistent answer to the first question and an undisputed answer of "no" to the second question are what I would need in order to feel like this is justifiable and not merely the product of mismanagement. If it is indeed the product of mismanagement, the better solution is to address the mismanagement.
I feel that whether this is a "sales tax" or a "use tax" is about as important to me as whether a useful program with good peformance is written in C++ or Python would be to the average end-user. The terminology involved might be a subject of legal interest and may be of great fascination to lawyers. However, it does not in any way address my two questions and to me, those two questions are what this issue and those like it are actually about. I'm not actually disagreeing with you per se but I am deviating from your choice of emphasis.
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People get insane amounts of life sentences because many places still define life as 20-25 years, which with good time and parole can get pretty low. With multiple life sentences the judge insures that the convict stays in prison for life.
Only a lawyer would use a phrase like "life sentence" and have it mean anything other than "incarcerated for the rest of their life".
I agree with you completely, but the problem is exactly what you say in the last statement, and that is my biggest concern, and this has been happening with an excess of technologies, policies, etc.
I think the real reason is a bunch of politicians doing a completely shitty jobs in general by being willing to violate their own ethics has translated to businesses doing a shitty job and violating their own ethics, and so forth down the road. I have a feeling every generation has dealt with this, we are not the last, and certainly not the first if history has anything to say about it.
I don't know what the cure is for that, since there is clearly enough nepotism for people to stretch their political career beyond retirement and beyond death, into their own children etc. I think this has been covered far more than enough already.
However, on the flip side in favor of being too careful is just as bad as not being careful in that both result in undesired change/errors/mistakes/people thrown to the wayside as innocent victims. There just isn't a balance at all, and this is evident in many cultures worldwide. It's just becoming more apparent because of the internet, or maybe it's just as apparent as it's always been. I don't know.
We the public are generally far too docile and naive. I recognize that almost all of our problems follow from this. I think it's because we have largely abandoned principle in favor of immediate convenience and gratification and that this has made us weak and timid. What immediate convenience would see as a gross overreaction to something small is what principle would see as stopping a problem in its early stages before it can grow and develop into a crisis.
We ignore the acorns that are planted and years later we wonder how the hell that giant mighty oak tree got there and we curse at how hard it's going to be to chop it down and at how much damage it's going to do when it falls. We act like it's so hard to know with certainty when we are on a wrong path and we think we need to go down each wrong path before we can see that clearly. Anyone who tries to tell us these things ahead of time is ignored, ridiculed, or is given some cop-out like "you're arrogant" or "who are you to judge?" The difference between true arrogance and speaking the truth with authority because you can see it with your own eyes is seldom appreciated.
I think that the answer to almost everything you have mentioned boils down to this flawed and unstated assumption in our society that people don't need to understand themselves and don't need to come up with their own understanding of the world. Most people have beliefs and worldviews, including strong ones, that are not the product of a careful evaluation of all available options. This amounts to programming. Regardless of age, I do not believe that a person is properly an adult until they have evaluated every last thing they think they believe with a willingness to reject anything and everything that does not help them grow as a human being. If this dynamic process of personal growth were the norm in our culture, if the average citizens were not a bunch of overgrown children, then the ethical violations of politicians and corporations would never be accepted for a moment. We have become weak and vacuous and they are moving in to fill this vacuum but they themselves are effects, not causes.
We are generally talking about torrents here. The only problem with your suggestion is that the very nature of a torrent is that each downloader is also uploading. I strongly doubt that ISPs are going to draw a distinction between "uploading as part of downloading" and "being the original seeder." They certainly won't have incentive to do so. So we're back again to the original problem, which is whether ISPs have any business acting as enforcement agents for copyright interests. My position is that they don't.
The "I have nothing to hide [so search me]" mentality was never a valid position. Its very basis is the idea that privacy is not legitimate, that the only purpose of privacy is to cover up wrongdoing. If you hear anyone honestly say "I have nothing to hide", I wonder how they'd react if you told them to disrobe, in public. I don't recommend actually doing that, of course, but it illustrates the point. You'd quickly find that even people who think they believe in that BS do in fact have things they don't wish to open up to the scrutiny of strangers.
Privacy certainly is legitimate. I'll tell you what is not legitimate: people who don't respect yours.
That's the scary thing and I don't think most people appreciate it.
It would be better for us to have every last copyright interest and major media corporation go completely out of business and leave us with little or no music and movies, than it would be to compromise sound standards of evidence in an attempt to "help" those industries. Once you go down that path, you open up a whole world of shit that most people don't believe could ever happen here in the USA. That path leads to nothing less than modern, legally-sanctioned witch-hunts where pissing off the wrong monied interest is all it takes to ruin your life even if you have broken no laws. McCarthyism is a pretty close illustration of what can happen, except this one would be for the general public. We're not far from that point right now when you consider how much money and time it would take for you to have any hope of defending yourself against the army of lawyers that a large media corporation could send after you and the number of years that they could tie you up in court.
I sure wish people in general would wake up and realize that we can know with 100% certainty where this path leads without ever having to set foot on it. There are things that simply should not ever be compromised for any reason. Whatever we think we're trying to accomplish is not worth what this will cost.
who cares? what's the difference of the sources until it's proven in court.
This throws that whole "is it legal" argument out the window in favor of screwing anyone the industry doesn't like.
You just illustrated the futility of what they are trying so hard to do.
They aren't actually trying to screw anyone whom the industry doesn't like. That people are also getting screwed is more of a side-effect. They're trying to eliminate a technology that the industry doesn't like. The thing about that, is that the cat is already out of the bag and isn't going back in. That's why this will fail.
Only one open question remains: how many people are going to suffer in one way or another before it is generally understood that this can't possibly work?
Yeah I know what he said is true. But he had a "troll" mod for a short time. I wasn't saying "who modded this troll [poster]" I was saying "who modded this [as a] troll".
Kinda confusing now that I read my post again.
Glad to see that others have noticed some of the low-quality moderation that goes on and are willing to say something about it. I know that this can't be true, but for a while there I felt like the only one.
I've never seen a good reason for why the old metamoderation system was abolished.
Isn't this already common practice? I know my ISP (COX) warned me that 3 complaints would lead to account termination.
I think it's new and maybe it's becoming common, but right now it's still unusual.
The one thing that bothers me is that it sounds like mere allegations are enough to count towards the "three strikes". I'm hearing about account terminations etc. and I am not hearing much about the burden of proof.
The summary had one thing right though:
I agree that this will have societal benefits. For one, if this becomes a widespread practice we're going to see encrypted or obfuscated torrent protocols in a hurry. This will start an arms race that the ISPs have no hope of winning, which is appropriate because copyright is a legal issue, not a technical issue or a customer service issue that an ISP should be concerned about. That's the best way I know of to start an arms race -- apply the wrong solution and when it fails, try harder and harder instead of recognizing a failed idea and looking for a different solution.
The other societal benefit is that more people are going to start questioning whether draconian copyright enforcement measures are in anyone's best interests. It's like places that have arbitrarily low speed limits; the model depends on the idea that most people get away with it most of the time. If there were a way to perfectly catch and fine 100% of people who exceed the speed limit by even one mile per hour, the result would be a severe public backlash that would cause the speed limit to be raised. Once the public gets tired of the copyright interests' insatiable appetite for increasingly punitive measures, those copyright interests are going to wish like hell that they had quit while they are ahead. They and their products are a mere luxury; we do not need them and as soon as we realize that, it will help to restore the balance of power that is sorely missing.
The general public is exceedingly stupid when it comes to seeing ahead of time that something is headed down the wrong path and is going to be a problem, but once they do, there's not a whole lot that can stop them. This has all the makings of a severe public backlash because what drives the awareness is the Internet and open discussion so the usual mass-media's one-sided approach to everything won't hold this one back.
I'd imagine you need a thick skin to be effective in a position like that. I'll be honest though, I don't think it burns you out. I think reacting to it burns you out (even if only in your mind), which is something else entirely and comes with an element of choice. It's just one of those things where even not making a choice IS making a choice. Our general culture doesn't grasp those things very well. It just isn't on our collective list of priorities, so we get the victim idea that because someone says A you absolutely must experience emotion B. Most people only know how to re-act.
At the risk of sounding like a braggart, I pity the fool who tries that with me. Someone who does that has already shown that they are emotional and reactive and petty. Well, that was knowable before they opened their mouth if you observe people; they have merely removed all doubt. When calm, collected strategy is placed against emotional reactive pettiness, calmness wins every time. I refer to the strong indomitable kind of calmness, not the fake people-pleasing kind that's based on wanting to react and suppressing it. That is emphatically not because I am so clever or skilled or whatever. It's because of the extreme weakness of the position of anyone who acts this way. I need do little more than refuse to validate that position and its absurdity will be apparent. The person to whom it will be most apparent is the fool who acts that way.
A position of weakness needs to be propped up. To the person with the weakness, it feels like need and doubt and insecurity. They want you to get upset and they want you to take them seriously because that's how they get their power, how they feel significant and worthwhile. I don't need to defeat such a mentality; that's not really my place. All I need to do is endure it patiently and stop propping it up by taking it seriously and it generally backfires and defeats itself. People like that (i.e. most people) run on stress or anger or tension or conflict as surely as the engine in my car runs on gasoline. Just think of how stressed out and pressed for time most people are; that's because it's how they feel alive and important. When you get upset you are not only validating what would fall apart without your validation, you are also playing their game and giving to them the energy that they run on. That's why they do what they do instead of finding a more graceful way to handle criticism or a difference of opinion.
The trap is that when you see these things and understand them, it's easy to feel tempted to judge and condemn the person. Doing so will utterly cripple your ability to patiently endure; it will make you more like the person you judge and condemn. My answer to that is to see how ignorant they are and to genuinely want something better than that for them; I combine that with the effectiveness of leading by example to show that something better does exist. Whether they understand it or not is their choice and I respect their decision. They really are ignorant. It's a
With open source libraries, you generally have to find the wheel before you can reuse it.
Often people end up reinventing the wheel because they (a.) couldn't find one someone else made, (b.) found one, but it wasn't under licensing terms that they could use with their project, or (c.) found one, but the project lost its way and ended up incomplete with a lead developer who may well have been hit by a bus.
Not saying closed source libraries are more helpful, plentiful, or accessible, but open source is not the panacea that zealots on Slashdot would like it to be.
Eh, I'm not a zealot and I didn't say anything was a panacea.
It was a tongue-in-cheek type of post, intended to be subtle sarcasm making fun of the exact kind of zealotry you point out. That's alright, bladejester thought it needed a serious explanation too, with lots of emphatic quote marks and patronization and everything. He also mentioned giving me a cookie and assured me that the sky won't fall down. A cookie does sound nice.
Open Source is pretty good for that, too.
It's not unpleasant. It's just not true. When users pretend that it is true and treat it like any appliance, and predictably have problems like security compromises, THAT is the unpleasant part. The rest of your paragraph just goes on to contrast the situation with computers with the situation with bonafide appliances.
Further, appliances are never or almost never general-purpose machines. They tend to do one or two things and do them very well. I consider "appliance" and "general-purpose machine" to be antithetical. I doubt that a computer can be made into a true appliance that Joe Sixpack could successfully treat as such without removing the "general-purpose" property.
As a user, I have two choices. I can wait for an indefinite period of time for the laws to change so that MS must assume liability for Windows security problems and continue to suffer from those problems in the meantime. Or, I can take responsibility for my own experience and take whatever measures are necessary to secure my own computer (the one I bought and decided to put online). Without a genie in a lamp or a magic wand, those are the choices. Security compromises are simply unacceptable to me so the first choice is not an option for me.
Acknowledging this reality, I read and I study and I learn everything I can. In the process, I have become more skilled and more productive with Windows (though I still don't like Windows...), Linux, and computing in general. I've become non-helpless and I need not passively wait for anyone else to solve these problems for me. I've come to appreciate and enjoy the technologies involved and have generally had a far richer experience than someone who refuses to acknowledge this reality. I was able to do this because I am literate and therefore able to read some of the wealth of information that anyone can find online for free. All it cost me was a little effort, not even very much in the scheme of things. Hell it's not really even effort; it's an investment that has already paid off many times over. I look at many other users who are also literate and can also use Google and I see excuse after excuse for why they haven't done the same. I then see those same users complain about their experience, which tells me they are unhappy with the choice that they have made. What am I supposed to think?
Logically, there are two explanations for what makes me different from those users. Either I am inherently more capable than they are, or, they are at least as capable as I am and are choosing to limit themselves. I do not believe that I am inherently any better or more capable than they are. In my life I have seen people realize that they were their own worst enemy and become stronger, more resourceful people. They did so by dropping the victim mentality; that pox on mankind that suggests that either everything is someone else's fault or everything that is faulty must be fixed by someone else so therefore we need not change ourselves or improve our situation. Maybe it IS someone else's fault and maybe someone else SHOULD fix it but that is no reason to avoid learning and growing. The problem with the victim mentality is that people see that they did not directly cause the problem and they conclude that therefore their poor decision-making doesn't need to change. The two aren't really related but under this mentality, one justfies the other and creates
No, it's not.
AFAIK it's a Unix-like environment running on top of the Mach microkernel with a BSD-ish userland. The unix-like varnish over the microkernel is very modern, but I find the BSD userland rather primitive.
The GUI is good. Most Mac users never leave it.
I really don't know much about OSX, not as much as I'd like to.
Do you know whether it's POSIX-compliant? Is it proper to refer to it as a "Unix" or is it a "Unix clone" or "Unix-like system" like Linux? I'd also be interested in anything explaining why they went with a Mach microkernel and whether that has any non-negligible impact on performance (i.e. message-passing overhead, switching from kernel to userspace, etc). I'd appreciate anything you are able to explain since I'm honestly rather ignorant about OSX.
Because Linux is Free as in feeling that somehow your choice in a Computer Operating Systems makes you morally superior.
Or it is free as in beer so When OS X or Windows dies on you you have a quick free OS to install to get your work done.
Or it helps you become an Alpha Geek... If a girl is gonna go for a geek they at least will go for the Alpha geek.
Or the very rare case that there is an app the only runs well in Linux that they need to use.
I really do like and prefer Linux. I enjoy the system. I like its transparency, performance, stability. I like how easy it is to customize, how it does what I want it to do. I like the lack of vendorlock, the use of open standards. I enjoy both the Free Speech aspects and the Free Beer aspects. It generally does not get in my way by making assumptions. I also like the non-commercial nature; that is, companies can use it and market it, but it's not inherently a commercial product and none of those companies have a monopoly on it. I first installed Linux back in late 1996 or so, maybe early 1997. I have not looked back. Not once have I wanted to switch back to Windows.
Does that mean I found the One Superior OS? The Be-All and End-All? No. It means I found something I really like that works well for me. Ideally, everyone else will do that on their own just like I did. There's a lot I could say (and have said) about Linux etc. but ultimately people have to make their own choices. There are lots of people I know to whom I would not recommend it because I know that those folks aren't interested in learning it. I respect their wishes. If they should change their minds and become more interested in computing, enough to want to put some effort into it, I'll be there to help them. Until they come to me about that, I support them when I can with computing issues, be it with Windows or Mac or Linux or whatever. I have some strong Libertarian type beliefs, in that as much as possible I believe people should make their own choices and do their own thing. To the degree that this is reasonable, I try to help the people I know with whatever decision they made even if I tell them why I would not have made that decision myself. Windows versus Linux is no different.
I'll be honest, you seem rather bitter. Your post up there looks like it was trying to be humor but the humor couldn't claw its way out of the bitterness. Such is often the way of cynicism. Linux really is an excellent OS. There are lots of people who cannot enjoy an excellent thing without looking down on others who won't or can't. You don't just see this in computing; unfortunately this behavior is found everywhere. You could focus on this maladaptive behavior until you drive yourself nuts, if you want, but I hope you don't. There are lots of us who do what we do even when no one is looking.
Whenever I moderate, I've never felt like someone's karma and whether it is in good standing was my responsibility. If they made a really great post that truly expressed something worthy, doing so should have been its own reward. I certainly feel this way whenever I post something (however well or however badly) that truly represents what I believe. It just isn't difficult to maintain "Excellent" karma.
I'll give you my honest opinion, and opinion is all that it is. I find that most of the things that get modded to +5 Funny really aren't very funny, or aren't funny anymore now that I've seen someone post it for the last six months. It's rare that I see any sort of truly unique or clever or witty humor on this site, and most of the best examples of that are incidental and not the main purpose of the post that contains them.
You're right that it is a hack but I think it's worth appreciating that the "hack" is not to get around a bug but to circumvent a deliberate design. I certainly do have grounds to criticize Slashdot (the old metamod system needs to be brought back yesterday) but I think that the moderation system is one thing they got right. Of course humor is generally welcome here; if you read what I'm about to say and conclude that I am anti-humor or anti-laughter, well you'd be quite wrong. But Slashdot is not really a "humor" site and if you want to laugh, there are certainly better places to go. I also often see meaningful discussion hijacked and drowned out because one person posts a Russian reversal and the next 20 replies are variations on the joke and don't really contribute anything. There are occasionally good original jokes but in terms of signal-to-noise, the jokes on here are mostly noise.
So, I think the decision to not allow Funny mods to contribute to karma was a sound one and fits well with the overall purpose of this site. Maybe this is going to sound a little too much like "get off my lawn" but I feel that when there are so many millions of Web sites, it makes more sense to find one that provides what you wanted to see at that moment than it does to come up with "hacks" that circumvent deliberate design decisions in an attempt to make the current site conform to your wishes.
The tongue-in-cheek post that currently sits at +5 Funny? Your post seemed to use that joke to begin a serious discussion of usability so it was really your motivation for doing that to which I was responding. That is, your serious reply to a joke made me feel like this subject was important to you.
One thing I'll add is that there were a lot of trollish responses to your question. I think it was an honest question and I generally do assume that unless I have some solid reasons not to. There were no reasons to thnk that yours was anything but an honest post. Some people don't appreciate benefit of doubt; I hope you don't allow that to discourage you.
It may not. Some information is critical and must appear in the config file; much of it will be auto-detected when X starts if it is not specified. That key combination I mentioned will still work.
Konsole is one way to open a shell, yes. That figure of "502 MB" is either incorrect or you have integrated video hardware that is using a portion of system RAM in place of video memory.
/var/log/dmesg. This will have not just hard drive information but everything the kernel detects, including CPU and RAM.
Did the output of "df -h" show only a single partition 36G in size? Or did you have multiple entries in the output that command? DF will show information per partition, not per hard drive. You may also wish to run "dmesg" from a shell (this is especially useful if it hasn't been long since you rebooted) so you can see the output of the kernel drivers, such as the IDE/SCSI drivers that detect your hard drives. If it's been a while since your last reboot then this information may no longer be present; if that is the case, you may have the same information in the text file
Unfortunately the Amiga was a bit before my time. I was around then, but I was not interested in computing at the time. It seems like folks who had one really loved it, in which case yes that is a shame.
By the way, nice sig.
Dood, in Soviet Russia, lame repetitive meme uses YOU, covered in hot grits from a statue of Natalie Portman...
Sitting at +5, Informative. Now, I'm going to step out on a limb here and suggest that there is nothing "insightful" about it. Funny maybe (debatable), but not insightful. If the mods haven't proven the AC's point then I'm not sure what could.
Now, I'm not sure exactly what you used to adjust the resolution but this should be an easy solution that doesn't depend on exactly what method you used. If you look in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, you should see a line like this (in Section Screen):
Modes "1280x1024" "1152x864" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
Those are the resolutions available (yours is likely to be different). There is no need to edit that line; you can switch among those modes during a running X session by using key combinations. You can use CTRL-ALT-KeypadMinus and CTRL-ALT-KeypadPlus (must be the minus and plus keys on the right-hand keypad) to change back and forth. This is an X11 feature and is independent from the window manager or desktop environment (i.e. KDE or Gnome) you're using. Once you can see that "OK" button you can select the desired mode and click OK and it'll set it ot whatever option you chose.
Unfortunately I know nothing about Netscape Dialup and can't really help you there. If the software you mention is proprietary and provided by Netscape, they should help you with that. If you are using standard programs (which are unlikely to crash so I doubt this is the case) then you would need to know which PPP settings Netscape is using, particularly with regard to password authentication. If it really is a proprietary system, this is where I would say that just because proprietary systems have such a strong preference for accommodating Windows does not mean that they are a good idea.
For the CPU information, open a shell (a regular user should be able to do this, no need for root) and type this command: cat /proc/cpuinfo. If you have a multi-core CPU, it will have an entry for each core.
For memory, try the "free" command or maybe "free -m" for units in megabytes. For this to make sense you'll need to know a bit about how Linux uses memory. The memory listed as "free", that is, completely unused, will probably be quite low almost all the time. Linux uses a lot of memory that would otherwise be empty (and thus wasted) as disk and file cache; any memory used this way is instantly available anytime a program you are using needs it. Generally, "buffers" + "shared" + "free" memory is what's actually available to use.
For partition sizes, you can use this shell command: df -h. That will list all of them. The "-h" option is for human-readable; that is, it shows a figure like 30G for 30 gigabytes instead of 31443696 blocks. I'm guessing that the smaller partition you are seeing is your boot partition, but the layout of your hard drive(s) is entirely optional and your particular setup might be different.
Those are the more basic command-line functions. You can also use a GUI utility like KInfoCenter (a KDE app) or the Gnome System Monitor or gkrellm etc. for a nice readable display of this kind of information.
You say that like the loss of the world's most powerful propaganda machine would be a bad thing. Public opinion controls government; media currently controls public opinion, mostly by deciding which issues are important and which viewpoints on those issues will be widely heard. Ever notice the absence of a minimal-government libertarian perspective (not at all the same thing as what is now called "conservative") from virtually every major news outlet? That's not an accident or a coincidence; it is built into the design.
The conservative vs. liberal perspective, which is also known as left-wing vs. right-wing, is the product of the media's "gatekeeper" function. On the one side you have those who prefer economic freedoms over personal freedoms, while on the other side you have those who prefer personal freedoms over economic freedoms. This forms a continuum with degrees in the middle that are compromises between the two extremes. This continuum is represented by two points that make a line because it is literally one-dimensional thinking. What does not occur at any point along that continuum is the preference of both economic freedom AND personal freedom; that is, freedom for its own sake. That is why the pro-freedom or minimal-government perspective is marginalized and so rarely heard from any mainstream source. We are paying a price for our commitment to this one-dimensional thinking. It is just one approach among many possible approaches and no one with any sort of media presence seems willing to discuss what the current model is costing us. I submit that the old question "Qui bono?" ("Who benefits [from this arrangement]?") applies here if it applies anywhere.
That can change. If it should ever become necessary, I'm confident that it can also change quickly.
So asking people to see for themselves that such a site cares about its advertisers a hell of a lot more than it cares about its users (much like network TV) is unreasonable? That's what you call "DefCon 5"? You sound like you've never seen real effort before if you think that's something special and I hope that isn't really true. Or was it that I suggested some methods that can deal with the bad information that results? Is that what bothers you so?
Personally, I don't care to be deceived by anyone for any reason. I don't care to be majorly deceived and I don't care to be mildly deceived. I especially dislike the idea of someone earning a profit by feeding me bad information. The tactics of deception are quite similar whether it's a major national political campaign or a dinky little restaurant review site. There are things that can be done to render those tactics ineffective and I named some of them. Relax. The techniques I mentioned aren't really "work" at all, they come quite easily with even a small amount of practice.
To really put that to the test, I would need to spend money at the establishment in question. I can't say I want to do that if I have any reason to believe that they are manipulating reviews, with Yelp's alleged assistance or otherwise. I'd prefer to see businesses lose customers when they engage in this sort of behavior. So, I'll keep cross-referencing and I'll keep refusing to believe anything I see, hear, or read without first checking it out, thank you. If you really think this is about restaurant reviews just because that was the example, then you have missed my point entirely.
Well, two developments had to take place for this to be a dominant practice. You identified one of them, which was two businesses selling similar products. The other is a general public which is far too eager to believe what they hear, read, or see on TV. You could think of that as the great enabler of most of the rest of our problems, including this one.
There's this idea that sites like this one or news agencies and others (this is a very general principle) exist to confirm sources and vet stories and information for you. That is, the idea that because they are established, they must therefore be better or higher-quality or more truthful. There is some truth to that, although it's more of a half-truth. Then there's this accompanying idea that therefore, you should not test and confirm information on your own. If you don't like being deceived or used as an unwitting tool in this type of alleged extortion, nothing could be farther from the truth.
I think the real issue is that most people have no idea how to perform critical thinking or how to cross-reference information or how to judge the authenticity of a source of information. They also don't seem skilled at recognizing propaganda techniques (such as bandwagon appeal, "Big Lie", appeals to emotion, etc.) when they are found in advertising and the media in general. Remedy that one shortcoming and all of these myriad instances and iterations will take care of themselves.
I think point of view may be the crux of the matter. My answer is a rather simple one.
The state of New York is an artificial construct. It is not human and it has no feelings or will of its own. The people who live within its borders are human and do have feelings and wills of their own. I submit that therefore when a question of politics comes up, "what is good for NY?" is absolutely irrelevant any time the answer to that question is different, however slightly, from the answer to the question of "what is good for the residents of NY?" That they do not feel this way and are inclined to place artificial constructs above human beings is my main problem with politicians in general.
Now it may turn out that an increase in tax revenue really is good for the residents of NY. I'm not claiming that this is impossible, only that I am quite skeptical of such claims especially when they are made by politicians. I am merely saying that it has not been rigorously demonstrated that this is the best course of action. Assuming that a thorough and complete investigation into the issue conclusively reveals that yes, an increase in tax revenue is clearly the best option, it still remains to be shown that a new source of revenue, however justifiable, is the best way to do that and that merely increasing the tax rate of existing sources is an inferior option. If high-quality research shows that increasing tax revenue in this fashion is good for the residents of NY, even then it still remains to be proven that a reduction of spending is not a better option for them. I don't see any of this sort of due diligence and concern from the politicians involved. Compared to what I am advocating, this really smacks of a "because we can" type of mentality. I mean, think about it. I get the idea that the average American puts more research into buying a car for personal use than these guys have put into a decision that will affect millions of people. That's probably an exaggeration, but I believe my point stands.
As far as the philosophy of taxation is concerned, I have doubts that this applies. When you purchase a song from iTunes or in any way obtain a legitimate, legal copy of a copyrighted work, you have not purchased a good or a product. You have purchased a license allowing you to use a copy and that license is basically a contract. Between the two, this more strongly resembles a service, not the tangible goods for which a sales tax is designed. If intellectual property is going to be taxed just like tangible property, then I want the right to do whatever I want with it the same way I can do with tangible property. I have the funny feeling that copyright-related interest groups wouldn't like that very much.
So true. It's one thing to rip off businesses and corporations. But it's another thing entirely to rip off the government. Revenue agents take a very dim view of such things.
The biggest difference is that unlike corporations, the government will spend a million dollars to get its ten cents back. Few things say "don't fuck with us" quite like that does.
Indeed, and there are some who think that you're a bad guy if you suggest that decisions have consequences and that the decision to not want to know is no exception. It's acceptable to suggest that someone is a helpless victim who's simply SOL. It's somehow terrible to point out that there are reasonable measures that they can take to prevent these kinds of problems so their situation is not hopeless at all. I don't think many people appreciate how perverse and maladaptive this really is.
When you're a victim and everything is somebody else's fault, that means you have no reason to change and improve yourself; you can assign blame instead. Therefore, the victim mentality is for people who are not interested in growing and learning. Only an absolutely perfect person has a legitimate reason for not wanting to grow and learn. I don't know about you, but I've never met an absolutely perfect person. I don't know how else to explain the true arrogance of this mentality.
As far as our problems are concerned, it's incredibly rare that this is not the case.
The origin of that isn't difficult to deduce. I bet the conversation went something like this: "Hey, the law doesn't allow us to enforce a sales tax in this circumstance and there are some solid, principled reasons why that is the case. However, if we call it something different, we can do the same thing anyway! Genius!"
If you've ever heard anyone who was cautioned against splitting hairs or needlessly making fine distinctions, it's because this is what it leads to.
I don't understand how your "question" does anything other than restate exactly what I said. Digital downloads of movies and music are NOT taxable in the state of NY. So, if a NY company with servers in NY sells an mp3 to a customer in NY, that customer does NOT pay taxes. So, it does not matter whether iTunes is located in NY or in CA, NY cannot collect taxes. What NY has done with Amazon is to force Amazon to collect the use tax that NY residents have not been properly reporting/paying. (Use tax is what you pay your state for buying something from another state without paying taxes on it for the purpose of using it within your state. It is generally equal to what the sales tax would have been if you had purchased the item in your state. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_tax) In the case of the iTunes example from the article, NY is trying to change the reach of the sales tax to keep up with modern media. Will they collect a use tax on interstate sales of these media if they create this sales tax? Certainly, but that doesn't mean that the issues aren't distinct.
I appreciate your clarification. I agree that they are distinct but in a way they are artificially distinct which is why I spoke of this in terms of principles. To me, the real questions are "why does NY need a new source of revenue?" and "could the problem instead be solved by a reduction of spending?" A really good, self-consistent answer to the first question and an undisputed answer of "no" to the second question are what I would need in order to feel like this is justifiable and not merely the product of mismanagement. If it is indeed the product of mismanagement, the better solution is to address the mismanagement.
I feel that whether this is a "sales tax" or a "use tax" is about as important to me as whether a useful program with good peformance is written in C++ or Python would be to the average end-user. The terminology involved might be a subject of legal interest and may be of great fascination to lawyers. However, it does not in any way address my two questions and to me, those two questions are what this issue and those like it are actually about. I'm not actually disagreeing with you per se but I am deviating from your choice of emphasis.