It's really stupid to deny the reality that people want to use it because of politics which is what it boils down to.
In the long run, yes. But since they are obviously not denying the "reality", I guess it isn't stupid afterall?
I recall that one of Mozilla's mission is to promote an open Web, in which case it would be stupid to adopt h264. Well, they tried, but at this point, it would be more stupid not to adopt it.
To sum it up, h264 adoption, or lack thereof, is just "stupid".
If you can't restart X without bringing down your GUI apps, I don't see the point for the target audience.
For some people, "only having to restart X" will only save a bit of time over rebooting the whole laptop, reconfiguring bios etc.
Not all laptops have a BIOS configuration that allows you to choose the GPU (ASUS UL series for instance). On mine, I had to change the SATA operation mode to have the second GPU work, but this in turn meant a severe performance degradation on my SSD. Without that (deficient) improvisation, I would not have been able to use the second GPU at all!
Besides, logging out of your desktop and then logging in again is surely better than what you suggest?
Yes, let's trivialize reality the other way around and shift the blame onto the people instead, who obviously elected the wrong representatives... No need to burden the mind with complicated problems like the electoral process, lobbying activities, campaign contributions, concentration of media ownership, etc etc.
The Pledge is predominantly sworn by children in public schools in response to state laws requiring the Pledge to be offered.
That is, teaching loyalty to the state at an early age is not just typical of totalitarian states, for better or for worse. Not to belittle your criticism of the Sandinista regime, of course.
And before any of you jump in to point out that the DMCA is just a U.S. thing, you had better keep in mind that the DMCA is just the U.S. implementation of the WIPO COpyright Treaty [wikipedia.org], so these types of court cases are probably in the pipeline for your country soon too!
Yes, but it is a lousy implementation of the WIPO Copyright Treaty. There were other competing legislation, and considering that U.S. law already complied with the entire treaty with the exception of one provision, I think it is fairly safe to say the DMCA goes far beyond being a mere implementation. The DMCA law dramatically expanded the scope of copyright law, conflicting with the first sale doctrine by granting copyright owners the power to dictate audience behavior, and going ridiculously far beyond copyright protection by giving owners the power to control access to intellectual property, whether a violation exists or not. You can read more about it in Taking A Bite Out Of Circumvention: Analyzing 17 U.S.C. Â 1201 As A Criminal Law by Jason M. Schultz. There is also a nice summary taken from a paper by Pamela Samuelson, Why the Anti-Circumvention Regulations Need to be Revised.
[...] every iPhone is currently a "child's phone" until Apple gets around to adding the self-censorship [...]
Not really since huge amounts of offensive content is readily available through Safari. I believe the true rationale for Apple's censorship policy is that it is easier to justify when claimed to protect the children, rather than just eliminating the competition or whatever threatens their bottom line.
After all, the landing fuel will cost them a lot of extra weight.
But what is the difference in weight between the thruster versus parachute landing systems?
[...] it doesn't sound like a good idea.
Sure, the added complexity may not improve the odds, but ignoring the inherent risk new technology entails, how much of an impact on safety are we really talking about here? It would seem that this is the way forward considering how NASA has also been contemplating a similar approach with the Delta Clipper for quite some time.
It makes no sense to spin off OpenOffice before knowing what Oracle does to it. What I think most of us really care about is some reinvigoration in the OpenOffice project, which this change may help bring about.
Besides, the real "leveling of city blocks" you're talking about last happened in WW2, right here, where I live (I live in a post-war building). And now I am not calling even THAT "out of proportion", since at that time, this country's government had the same plans about the Jews as Hamas has today.
If someone fired 6,000 rockets at me, I would be pissed of course. But I wouldn't retaliate through collective punishment, denying food and medicine to innocent civilians, evicting them out of their home and taking their land to build "settlements" to my compatriots, especially knowing that my country was created from territory unwillingly provided by the very same people. I think "out of proportion" doesn't mean what you think it means...
The anti-circumvention provisions in the DMCA is based on the assumption that DRM works. It is much harder to defeat the DMCA if you ignore the fallacy of DRM because, then, legislators will keep believing it helps a large part of the US economy (that is, the media industry).
The DMCA states that you are not allowed to circumvent a mechanism that protects a copyrighted work even if circumvention is your only means of exercising numerous rights granted by law. Basically, it is in direct conflict with far older and established laws, and so you end up in court trying to resolve this contradiction, with one side having little money to pay for a lawyer while the other finances political campaigns to see their favorite laws enacted.
I felt the parent already made that point, but of course you are right - the better the technique, the greater the range of interpretation. Put differently, ones technique is just a means to an end, with the end being the interpretation.
Precisely. Basically, technique and interpretation are not the same thing. When a score indicates a mood, it is giving an emotional direction for the given interpretation; it is not, as I understand it, detailing how to produce said interpretation. For example, a piano performance would always be unique because each performance brings an interpretation unique for that moment.
With regards to oratory skills, I couldn't agree more. A friend once read a poem he wrote which I completely fell in love with. When I tried reading it, giving my best effort, all beauty conveyed that first time was all but demolished...
You have a point, there is no comprehensive version numbering scheme that is universally accepted. I think you are also wrong as the issue is about the very well accepted beta, RC and final release scheme, not simply number sequences.
No number sequence, such as 8.10 or whatever comes to mind, is going to tell you that the release is a beta, RC or final release. However, outside developer circles, people are going to assume a final release, and that is precisely why one should label a version as beta or RC if confusion is to be avoided. Obviously, confusion was not avoided with 4.0, and again, not everyone keeps track of developer blogs and announcements.
Obviously, KDE 4.0 was barely a release candidate to end users, so one could at least have expected the RC label. Had it been "properly" named, I would find it hard to imagine distros like Kubuntu or Fedora shipping a first release candidate in the manner 4.0 was delivered. It would have been an embarrassment to them. Instead, KDE was embarrassed. Needlessly.
It would be absurd of me to expect Google's morality to be identical with mine.
You must be confused... corporations have no morality. Whatever "morality" you see is just a another component of a larger ever changing corporate strategy. I could agree that corporations exhibit a tendency towards some set of values, but the word morality ascribes to them a quality that I find to be out of context.
You reap what you sow - except when you have limited liability, in which case you can sow something entirely different. Hard to construct a code of conduct based on right and wrong in the normal sense under those circumstances...
Of course, with the ability to neutralize ICBM attacks, one could also launch first-strike attacks without fear. Consequently, this capability would make a nuclear attack initiated by the US far more likely. Somehow, that doesn't make me feel any safer.
I think the distinction here is that YOU cannot get it to work on YOUR laptop. No problem with the OS. [...]
[...] The fact is that if Ubuntu in particular and Linux in general want to make headway against Microsoft, these kinds of problems cannot exist. [...] the fact is that it works under Windows and that's what users care about. [...]
Adopting Linux is like adopting a first generation gadget - if you spend some effort reading up on caveats before adopting it, you may save yourself a lot of grief. The problem is that Linux is just crossing a threshold where it is gaining a lot of prominence, with new potential users thinking this also means it has gained total industry wide adoption already. It actually works the other way around - a growing number of adopters will eventually compel the entire market to support it, whether they like it or not.
You can't possibly expect Linux to somehow achieve the same kind of ubiquity that Windows now enjoys before it can achieve the same kind of ubiquity that Windows now enjoy. It doesn't make any sense.
A question no one seems to be asking is: when will we be able to purchase this phone without a subscription?
I have a friend that will drop by the US on a business trip in a month or so, and it would be great to have him get one while at it. But, alas, what is the point if the thing is locked? There is no T-Mobile where I live... and, btw, I detest the idea of buying locked/broken phones and then having to unlock/fix them for an additional fee.
As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't even have to be a duplex scanner, work with OCR, or automatically produce PDF's. I figure that as long as I can have something that produces the damn digital photos of pages, the most agonizing step is done, all else being a matter of arranging the proper mix of software and scripts for post-production, something that can be done in due time (the same way I trust decent devices for reading will be available for mass consumption sometime "soon"). Meanwhile, I would finally be able to throw away the tons of books without feeling bad about it.
Having said that, it has been utterly frustrating finding an affordable solution. The thing to look for are document scanners I think, price starting at around 500 USD last I checked. Those were crap, so moved up to 1000 USD, but reviews were not kind to those either. Concluded that something around 5000 USD was more to my liking - those could handle duplex, scan insanely fast etc ad nauseum, none of which was critical to me, except for reliability: handle arbitrary sheet sizes and not having the feed jam. Now I just need to wait for the price to radically drop. *sigh*
Note that when say that some feature are non-critical, I don't mean that they aren't nice to have. Duplex auto-feed scanning are obviously very nice features, but that would mean the price would be insanely inflated, and I rather save that money (I'm not a public library). If the thing can only feed sheets slowly, I don't care, as long as it does so reliably, on arbitrary sheet sizes. Post production stuff, as I said earlier, can be dealt with later.
Slashdot Mirror
h264 is ubquitous.
And so was Gif, and we know how that went...
It's really stupid to deny the reality that people want to use it because of politics which is what it boils down to.
In the long run, yes. But since they are obviously not denying the "reality", I guess it isn't stupid afterall?
I recall that one of Mozilla's mission is to promote an open Web, in which case it would be stupid to adopt h264. Well, they tried, but at this point, it would be more stupid not to adopt it.
To sum it up, h264 adoption, or lack thereof, is just "stupid".
Military drones, armed and dangerous, operating software resulting from IP theft?
Heh... I'd love to see the Business Software Alliance go after these guys... :-)
the processor on my computer runs on a single Atom already. I'm not impressed.
If you can't restart X without bringing down your GUI apps, I don't see the point for the target audience.
For some people, "only having to restart X" will only save a bit of time over rebooting the whole laptop, reconfiguring bios etc.
Not all laptops have a BIOS configuration that allows you to choose the GPU (ASUS UL series for instance). On mine, I had to change the SATA operation mode to have the second GPU work, but this in turn meant a severe performance degradation on my SSD. Without that (deficient) improvisation, I would not have been able to use the second GPU at all!
Besides, logging out of your desktop and then logging in again is surely better than what you suggest?
Yes, let's trivialize reality the other way around and shift the blame onto the people instead, who obviously elected the wrong representatives... No need to burden the mind with complicated problems like the electoral process, lobbying activities, campaign contributions, concentration of media ownership, etc etc.
Just wanted to point out this little tibit regarding the Pledge of Allegiance:
The Pledge is predominantly sworn by children in public schools in response to state laws requiring the Pledge to be offered.
That is, teaching loyalty to the state at an early age is not just typical of totalitarian states, for better or for worse. Not to belittle your criticism of the Sandinista regime, of course.
I think it is an alternative to string theory.
From http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=313565 :
Compared to string theory - much simpler and works in 3+1 dimensions
Compared to LQG - the classical limit is not a problem
And before any of you jump in to point out that the DMCA is just a U.S. thing, you had better keep in mind that the DMCA is just the U.S. implementation of the WIPO COpyright Treaty [wikipedia.org], so these types of court cases are probably in the pipeline for your country soon too!
Yes, but it is a lousy implementation of the WIPO Copyright Treaty. There were other competing legislation, and considering that U.S. law already complied with the entire treaty with the exception of one provision, I think it is fairly safe to say the DMCA goes far beyond being a mere implementation. The DMCA law dramatically expanded the scope of copyright law, conflicting with the first sale doctrine by granting copyright owners the power to dictate audience behavior, and going ridiculously far beyond copyright protection by giving owners the power to control access to intellectual property, whether a violation exists or not. You can read more about it in Taking A Bite Out Of Circumvention: Analyzing 17 U.S.C. Â 1201 As A Criminal Law by Jason M. Schultz. There is also a nice summary taken from a paper by Pamela Samuelson, Why the Anti-Circumvention Regulations Need to be Revised.
[...] every iPhone is currently a "child's phone" until Apple gets around to adding the self-censorship [...]
Not really since huge amounts of offensive content is readily available through Safari. I believe the true rationale for Apple's censorship policy is that it is easier to justify when claimed to protect the children, rather than just eliminating the competition or whatever threatens their bottom line.
Problem: classified information leaks to general public.
Solution: regulate the general public.
So if you loose track of your private information, just start a couple of those botnets to monitor the internets... never fails...
After all, the landing fuel will cost them a lot of extra weight.
But what is the difference in weight between the thruster versus parachute landing systems?
[...] it doesn't sound like a good idea.
Sure, the added complexity may not improve the odds, but ignoring the inherent risk new technology entails, how much of an impact on safety are we really talking about here? It would seem that this is the way forward considering how NASA has also been contemplating a similar approach with the Delta Clipper for quite some time.
It makes no sense to spin off OpenOffice before knowing what Oracle does to it. What I think most of us really care about is some reinvigoration in the OpenOffice project, which this change may help bring about.
Besides, the real "leveling of city blocks" you're talking about last happened in WW2, right here, where I live (I live in a post-war building). And now I am not calling even THAT "out of proportion", since at that time, this country's government had the same plans about the Jews as Hamas has today.
If someone fired 6,000 rockets at me, I would be pissed of course. But I wouldn't retaliate through collective punishment, denying food and medicine to innocent civilians, evicting them out of their home and taking their land to build "settlements" to my compatriots, especially knowing that my country was created from territory unwillingly provided by the very same people. I think "out of proportion" doesn't mean what you think it means...
you agreed to it and just clicked the mouse button in a convoluted way.
Then convolute further and use a mouse instead of a cat...
The anti-circumvention provisions in the DMCA is based on the assumption that DRM works. It is much harder to defeat the DMCA if you ignore the fallacy of DRM because, then, legislators will keep believing it helps a large part of the US economy (that is, the media industry).
The DMCA states that you are not allowed to circumvent a mechanism that protects a copyrighted work even if circumvention is your only means of exercising numerous rights granted by law. Basically, it is in direct conflict with far older and established laws, and so you end up in court trying to resolve this contradiction, with one side having little money to pay for a lawyer while the other finances political campaigns to see their favorite laws enacted.
I felt the parent already made that point, but of course you are right - the better the technique, the greater the range of interpretation. Put differently, ones technique is just a means to an end, with the end being the interpretation.
Precisely. Basically, technique and interpretation are not the same thing. When a score indicates a mood, it is giving an emotional direction for the given interpretation; it is not, as I understand it, detailing how to produce said interpretation. For example, a piano performance would always be unique because each performance brings an interpretation unique for that moment.
With regards to oratory skills, I couldn't agree more. A friend once read a poem he wrote which I completely fell in love with. When I tried reading it, giving my best effort, all beauty conveyed that first time was all but demolished...
Do we have influence in the world? Sure...so do other countries. But it isn't like we rule other countries.
No, it is not like other countries...
You have a point, there is no comprehensive version numbering scheme that is universally accepted. I think you are also wrong as the issue is about the very well accepted beta, RC and final release scheme, not simply number sequences.
No number sequence, such as 8.10 or whatever comes to mind, is going to tell you that the release is a beta, RC or final release. However, outside developer circles, people are going to assume a final release, and that is precisely why one should label a version as beta or RC if confusion is to be avoided. Obviously, confusion was not avoided with 4.0, and again, not everyone keeps track of developer blogs and announcements.
Obviously, KDE 4.0 was barely a release candidate to end users, so one could at least have expected the RC label. Had it been "properly" named, I would find it hard to imagine distros like Kubuntu or Fedora shipping a first release candidate in the manner 4.0 was delivered. It would have been an embarrassment to them. Instead, KDE was embarrassed. Needlessly.
It would be absurd of me to expect Google's morality to be identical with mine.
You must be confused... corporations have no morality. Whatever "morality" you see is just a another component of a larger ever changing corporate strategy. I could agree that corporations exhibit a tendency towards some set of values, but the word morality ascribes to them a quality that I find to be out of context.
You reap what you sow - except when you have limited liability, in which case you can sow something entirely different. Hard to construct a code of conduct based on right and wrong in the normal sense under those circumstances...
Of course, with the ability to neutralize ICBM attacks, one could also launch first-strike attacks without fear. Consequently, this capability would make a nuclear attack initiated by the US far more likely. Somehow, that doesn't make me feel any safer.
I think the distinction here is that YOU cannot get it to work on YOUR laptop. No problem with the OS. [...]
[...] The fact is that if Ubuntu in particular and Linux in general want to make headway against Microsoft, these kinds of problems cannot exist. [...] the fact is that it works under Windows and that's what users care about. [...]
Adopting Linux is like adopting a first generation gadget - if you spend some effort reading up on caveats before adopting it, you may save yourself a lot of grief. The problem is that Linux is just crossing a threshold where it is gaining a lot of prominence, with new potential users thinking this also means it has gained total industry wide adoption already. It actually works the other way around - a growing number of adopters will eventually compel the entire market to support it, whether they like it or not.
You can't possibly expect Linux to somehow achieve the same kind of ubiquity that Windows now enjoys before it can achieve the same kind of ubiquity that Windows now enjoy. It doesn't make any sense.
A question no one seems to be asking is: when will we be able to purchase this phone without a subscription?
I have a friend that will drop by the US on a business trip in a month or so, and it would be great to have him get one while at it. But, alas, what is the point if the thing is locked? There is no T-Mobile where I live... and, btw, I detest the idea of buying locked/broken phones and then having to unlock/fix them for an additional fee.
As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't even have to be a duplex scanner, work with OCR, or automatically produce PDF's. I figure that as long as I can have something that produces the damn digital photos of pages, the most agonizing step is done, all else being a matter of arranging the proper mix of software and scripts for post-production, something that can be done in due time (the same way I trust decent devices for reading will be available for mass consumption sometime "soon"). Meanwhile, I would finally be able to throw away the tons of books without feeling bad about it.
Having said that, it has been utterly frustrating finding an affordable solution. The thing to look for are document scanners I think, price starting at around 500 USD last I checked. Those were crap, so moved up to 1000 USD, but reviews were not kind to those either. Concluded that something around 5000 USD was more to my liking - those could handle duplex, scan insanely fast etc ad nauseum, none of which was critical to me, except for reliability: handle arbitrary sheet sizes and not having the feed jam. Now I just need to wait for the price to radically drop. *sigh*
Note that when say that some feature are non-critical, I don't mean that they aren't nice to have. Duplex auto-feed scanning are obviously very nice features, but that would mean the price would be insanely inflated, and I rather save that money (I'm not a public library). If the thing can only feed sheets slowly, I don't care, as long as it does so reliably, on arbitrary sheet sizes. Post production stuff, as I said earlier, can be dealt with later.