>Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't there going to be some sort of legislature dictating that cell phone makers use a universal charging standard by this point?
You're wrong and not only you are wrong, I have to question what colour the sky is in your world.
The Copyright Kleptocracy has more money, better liquor, better caviar, better boats, better golf clubs, and better organization than you. They also rely on "crisis fatigue" where people like you and me have more pressing things just trying to get through life.
We will see another version of ACTA under a different name byJune 2013, and if that fails, another one after that, and another, etc. And should they get one actually passed, they will push the envelope, probably not even stopping at an actual death penalty (they already participate in financial death penalties).
Kyle Reese: Listen, and understand. The Copyright Kleptocracy is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.
It's just that the Kubuntu team has had a wide reputation (fairly earned, imo) for not being the sharpest knives in the drawer. I'm not quite sure who to blame, be it Shuttleworth giving KDE short shrift and not supervising the Kubuntu team when it needed it, or the Kubuntu team under Shuttleworth ignoring his directives without enough planning.
The adoption of KDE 4.0 with no fallback to 3.5.10, when it came out was the harbinger of things to come. The KDE devs clearly told everyone who mattered that 4.0 wasn't ready for prime-time, but the Kubuntu team forced the issue anyway. I actually also lost mail because of it, since new 4.x blank kmail folders overwrote earlier ones. I mean, come on, guys. (I have since migrated to IMAP folders so this isn't even an issue anymore)
Things cleared up somewhat later, but even this past year Kubuntu-Desktop had enough flakiness for me to nuke and pave a new KDE desktop without Kubuntu shenanigans after giving it a try again.
And then I look at Pardus and wish that the Pardus team was the Kubuntu team. Honestly, they do an excellent job. Pardus is underrated, and if they went to a Debian style as opposed to their home-rolled diff-based package management, I'd switch in a New York second.
"They address this in Trek, I forget in which movie but I'm pretty sure it was on a movie. Someone complains that they're making copies of people and killing the original""
Read "Way Station" by Clifford Simak.
Much better than Star Trek and covers this exact subject.
>But, this is really going to help protect children:)
This is the most moronic thing I've read in a long time, especially since the vast majority of *real life* sex abusers are family members. It's stuff like this that trivializes and distracts from the real issues.
Here's another one: Sometimes when you remove something you don't want that should not depend on anything whatsoever (like a KDE game), it causes a cascade of derpage when you type "sudo apt-get autoremove" basically removing the entire desktop all the way back to nothing necessitting setting a bunch of things as "manually installed." Because some idiot set a hard dependency between the game and one of the basic libraries on removal.
You can take your accusation of FUD and cram it. I'm tired of watching the Kubuntu team fuck things up. I was enlightened one day years ago by installing Pardus which had 4.2.x, and every little thing worked. There is no excuse, absolutely none, for a bad KDE setup if a small band of Turkish IT dweebs *in their unpaid spare time* could set up KDE back when KDE had an awful reputation because the Kubuntu group couldn't find their arses with both hands.
Yes, I'm mad. It almost seemed that the Kubuntu team was deliberately sabotaging KDE.
It's not as bad now as it was, but my patience is worn out. No more slack is given. I install KDE without touching kubuntu-desktop and things just work.
>Can I ask what is so wrong about the kubuntu-desktop package/settings?
There are too many things to list.
The only thing I can say is to do it yourself. Install kde-full by itself, and then do a separate install of kubuntu and compare. It is less drastic today than it used to be, but I've been burned far too many times to give kubuntu-desktop any more chances.
>but based on your comments it looks like I'm missing something here...
"Makerbot has deleted a collection of blueprints for gun components from Thingiverse, "
This is known as "shoveling shit against the tide" as my Dad says.
Guns are hundreds of years old and can be fashioned with hand tools and improvised materials and you have to be really dumb not to be able to type into a search engine "zip gun."
I grew up with a TI-99/4a (world's slowest BASIC interpreter) so my experience is similar to yours I guess, though I didn't get as far as implementing a 6800 simulator in a '48 (I actually learned how to program one by burning UVEPROMs later).
I guess my POV is skewed because the programming tools for math in HS were more primitive and the most advanced TI calcs were versions of the 30 and my most advanced calculator is a HP48 ( the real reason I like it is because I can scroll the stack easier and algebraic calcs suck).
Someone else mentioned in the thread that he took calc classes that disallowed calculators and depended a lot less on getting numeric answers and more on the logic behind it. This is the future.
>The only thing I remember was I could program it, and my professor let me for my Calculus 1 class. I still don't know a lot about Calculus, but I know more about programming...
Actually, you know more about calculus than you think you do. In order to write a program, you must understand what the algorithm does that you're using.
That is if you wrote the program from scratch instead of simply plugging things in from a cookbook.
> Kubuntu's implementation is not without its quirks
Friends don't let friends install kubuntu-desktop.
On Ubuntu, install kde-full, or a selection of the other smaller meta-packages, or a combination of individual packages, etc. This also means not starting out with the Kubuntu distro disk, but rather going with vanilla Ubuntu and going from there. Installing kubuntu-desktop is always hit-or-miss, so it's best to just avoid it and go with your own settings imposed over the default instead of someone else's idea of "good settings." Back in the 4.2x days, this was apparent when Kubuntu's KDE was an unmitigated disaster while the Pardus distro had a spectacular setup, demonstrating that yes, someone could build KDE and not screw it up. These screwed up settings are always pulled in by the kubuntu-desktop metapackage.
I have been using the KDE PPA on Ubuntu 12.04 without installing the kubuntu-desktop metapackage and it works fine.
To clarify my last message, once a business becomes larger than a certain size (50 employees total or whatever it was that I read), yes, it's a public accomodation and certain standards *must* be met to be non-discriminatory, etc.
Just because something is online shouldn't be an excuse to ignore such laws. I will welcome the day when the ADA gets brought down hard on companies like FB, Amazon, etc, that write screen-reader hostile websites.
>when others are threatening the use of violence against them when they've caused others no direct harm
If you are talking about me, you are talking out of your ass, sir.
>Of course you do, but you don't have a right to use Facebook's services.
Facebook could be called a public accomodation. You can't be refused access to a mall (a public accomodation) because you don't call yourself by a given name. The "you can only use our services if you jump through this completely arbitrary and unnecessary loop" is legally suspect.
And I find this corporate boot-licking disgusting.
Additionally, anonymous people tend to act like jackasses online
This has nothing to do with anything. Haven't you seen at the jackassery committed by people under their real names?
Come on.
My online identity is my online identity, and as far as Facebook is concerned, I am an owl. This does not change my online behavior and it's not an impediment for me to use Facebook this way. In real life I have the right to call myself whatever I want as long as I'm not trying to defraud anyone and screw you for saying I shouldn't have that right online.
... go to court, get a quick judgment, and get the Sheriff or whoever it is that has jurisdiction to enforce you going an emptying a local branch office of whatever you can carry out.
> If anime teaches us anything, it's that cartoon asteroids are always weapons of evil aliens bent on our destruction.
No, that would be a comet.../pedant:-P
-- BMO
Ugh, what a steaming pile of crap.
on
The Web We Lost
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This isn't some standard polemic about "those stupid walled-garden networks are bad!"
Yes it is. It's a long winded whine about how core principles have been lost, which they haven't.
I know that Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and LinkedIn and the rest are great sites
But you point at them and say what huge amount of harm they've done.
But they're based on a few assumptions that aren't necessarily correct.
Oh really, let's examine them then.
The primary fallacy that underpins many of their mistakes is that user flexibility and control necessarily lead to a user experience complexity that hurts growth.
The primary fallacy of this article is that ordinary people want the complexity and extensibility, that every user wants to twiddle with RSS and build web pages from scratch. The vast majority of the internet using public don't. They want someone else to take care of the minutia. It's been that way since the days of the BBS. The BBS culture had users and sysops and wasn't pure peer to peer "read-write" because not everyone could be arsed to set up his own BBS and pay for a phone line or even bother something so simple as an ANSI menu layout screen. It's still this way. The vast majority of users just want to post their pictures, send mail, pirate media, write their blawgs and to leave the icky technical stuff to people more competent.
And the second, more grave fallacy, is the thinking that exerting extreme control over users is the best way to maximize the profitability and sustainability of their networks.'
And users can vote with their feet and migrate elsewhere. This article is written like the users have nowhere to go and the big services are some sort of social prison that nobody can escape. People are perfectly free to set up their own servers and whatnot. We've seen an explosion of cheap hosting like never before. But most people don't want to do that. The number of people I know, personally, that can write a simple HTML 1.0 web page from scratch, even with commercial tools, I can count on one hand. This is not the fault of the likes of Facebook or whoever. This is the because of the fact that even 20 years after the invention of the www, it's still complex with concepts that are nearly impossible for most people to wrap their heads around. And thus we wind up with services that are more than willing to do it for them.
The author is bemoaning the loss of the peer-to-peer read-write-web which never existed in the first place.
There are the technorati and there is everyone else, and the technorati run things. This is entirely by consent. There was no wresting control from users who wanted to do their own things. If there was any freedom lost (there hasn't been) it's because it was given up, not taken.
Slashdot Mirror
I have you foed for some reason, and it just occurred to me that I no longer remember why I have a whole bunch of people foed, including you.
Time to clean.
--
BMO
Yeah, I only thought of the "hookers and blow" after I posted.
You are absolutely right.
--
BMO
>Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't there going to be some sort of legislature dictating that cell phone makers use a universal charging standard by this point?
You're wrong and not only you are wrong, I have to question what colour the sky is in your world.
--
BMO
The Copyright Kleptocracy has more money, better liquor, better caviar, better boats, better golf clubs, and better organization than you. They also rely on "crisis fatigue" where people like you and me have more pressing things just trying to get through life.
We will see another version of ACTA under a different name byJune 2013, and if that fails, another one after that, and another, etc. And should they get one actually passed, they will push the envelope, probably not even stopping at an actual death penalty (they already participate in financial death penalties).
Kyle Reese: Listen, and understand. The Copyright Kleptocracy is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.
--
BMO
Then I take back being offended.
It's just that the Kubuntu team has had a wide reputation (fairly earned, imo) for not being the sharpest knives in the drawer. I'm not quite sure who to blame, be it Shuttleworth giving KDE short shrift and not supervising the Kubuntu team when it needed it, or the Kubuntu team under Shuttleworth ignoring his directives without enough planning.
The adoption of KDE 4.0 with no fallback to 3.5.10, when it came out was the harbinger of things to come. The KDE devs clearly told everyone who mattered that 4.0 wasn't ready for prime-time, but the Kubuntu team forced the issue anyway. I actually also lost mail because of it, since new 4.x blank kmail folders overwrote earlier ones. I mean, come on, guys. (I have since migrated to IMAP folders so this isn't even an issue anymore)
Things cleared up somewhat later, but even this past year Kubuntu-Desktop had enough flakiness for me to nuke and pave a new KDE desktop without Kubuntu shenanigans after giving it a try again.
And then I look at Pardus and wish that the Pardus team was the Kubuntu team. Honestly, they do an excellent job. Pardus is underrated, and if they went to a Debian style as opposed to their home-rolled diff-based package management, I'd switch in a New York second.
--
BMO
"They address this in Trek, I forget in which movie but I'm pretty sure it was on a movie. Someone complains that they're making copies of people and killing the original""
Read "Way Station" by Clifford Simak.
Much better than Star Trek and covers this exact subject.
--
BMO
>But, this is really going to help protect children :)
This is the most moronic thing I've read in a long time, especially since the vast majority of *real life* sex abusers are family members. It's stuff like this that trivializes and distracts from the real issues.
--
BMO
Ok, I'll just mention a couple.
"Recomends:" abuse. Rampant, idiotic Recommends.
Here's another one: Sometimes when you remove something you don't want that should not depend on anything whatsoever (like a KDE game), it causes a cascade of derpage when you type "sudo apt-get autoremove" basically removing the entire desktop all the way back to nothing necessitting setting a bunch of things as "manually installed." Because some idiot set a hard dependency between the game and one of the basic libraries on removal.
You can take your accusation of FUD and cram it. I'm tired of watching the Kubuntu team fuck things up. I was enlightened one day years ago by installing Pardus which had 4.2.x, and every little thing worked. There is no excuse, absolutely none, for a bad KDE setup if a small band of Turkish IT dweebs *in their unpaid spare time* could set up KDE back when KDE had an awful reputation because the Kubuntu group couldn't find their arses with both hands.
Yes, I'm mad. It almost seemed that the Kubuntu team was deliberately sabotaging KDE.
It's not as bad now as it was, but my patience is worn out. No more slack is given. I install KDE without touching kubuntu-desktop and things just work.
--
BMO
If it was about removing plans for "build your own sex toys" it would absolutely be censorship.
Some day sites like this are going to have to learn the lessons that librarians have already learned.
--
BMO
>Can I ask what is so wrong about the kubuntu-desktop package/settings?
There are too many things to list.
The only thing I can say is to do it yourself. Install kde-full by itself, and then do a separate install of kubuntu and compare. It is less drastic today than it used to be, but I've been burned far too many times to give kubuntu-desktop any more chances.
>but based on your comments it looks like I'm missing something here...
You are.
--
BMO
"Makerbot has deleted a collection of blueprints for gun components from Thingiverse, "
This is known as "shoveling shit against the tide" as my Dad says.
Guns are hundreds of years old and can be fashioned with hand tools and improvised materials and you have to be really dumb not to be able to type into a search engine "zip gun."
--
BMO
I grew up with a TI-99/4a (world's slowest BASIC interpreter) so my experience is similar to yours I guess, though I didn't get as far as implementing a 6800 simulator in a '48 (I actually learned how to program one by burning UVEPROMs later).
I guess my POV is skewed because the programming tools for math in HS were more primitive and the most advanced TI calcs were versions of the 30 and my most advanced calculator is a HP48 ( the real reason I like it is because I can scroll the stack easier and algebraic calcs suck).
Someone else mentioned in the thread that he took calc classes that disallowed calculators and depended a lot less on getting numeric answers and more on the logic behind it. This is the future.
--
BMO
>The only thing I remember was I could program it, and my professor let me for my Calculus 1 class. I still don't know a lot about Calculus, but I know more about programming...
Actually, you know more about calculus than you think you do. In order to write a program, you must understand what the algorithm does that you're using.
That is if you wrote the program from scratch instead of simply plugging things in from a cookbook.
--
BMO
> Kubuntu's implementation is not without its quirks
Friends don't let friends install kubuntu-desktop.
On Ubuntu, install kde-full, or a selection of the other smaller meta-packages, or a combination of individual packages, etc. This also means not starting out with the Kubuntu distro disk, but rather going with vanilla Ubuntu and going from there. Installing kubuntu-desktop is always hit-or-miss, so it's best to just avoid it and go with your own settings imposed over the default instead of someone else's idea of "good settings." Back in the 4.2x days, this was apparent when Kubuntu's KDE was an unmitigated disaster while the Pardus distro had a spectacular setup, demonstrating that yes, someone could build KDE and not screw it up. These screwed up settings are always pulled in by the kubuntu-desktop metapackage.
I have been using the KDE PPA on Ubuntu 12.04 without installing the kubuntu-desktop metapackage and it works fine.
--
BMO
> Has it improved in any measurable way at all?
> I am inclined to think, "nothing at all!"
Oh look at the cute little troll.
--
BMO
>Is every business a public accommodation?
To clarify my last message, once a business becomes larger than a certain size (50 employees total or whatever it was that I read), yes, it's a public accomodation and certain standards *must* be met to be non-discriminatory, etc.
Just because something is online shouldn't be an excuse to ignore such laws. I will welcome the day when the ADA gets brought down hard on companies like FB, Amazon, etc, that write screen-reader hostile websites.
>when others are threatening the use of violence against them when they've caused others no direct harm
If you are talking about me, you are talking out of your ass, sir.
--
BMO
>Is every business a public accommodation?
According to federal law, yes.
Civil rights act, ADA, etc.
--
BMO
Chuck Jones called it Illudium.
But then again, he also called it Q-36 in his book "Chuck Amuck" instead of Pu-36 which is what wound up on the audio track.
--
BMO
>Of course you do, but you don't have a right to use Facebook's services.
Facebook could be called a public accomodation. You can't be refused access to a mall (a public accomodation) because you don't call yourself by a given name. The "you can only use our services if you jump through this completely arbitrary and unnecessary loop" is legally suspect.
And I find this corporate boot-licking disgusting.
--
BMO
Obviously the Illudium Pu-36 Explosive Space Modulator was stolen by a rabbit.
"It obstructs my view of Venus"
--
BMO
Additionally, anonymous people tend to act like jackasses online
This has nothing to do with anything. Haven't you seen at the jackassery committed by people under their real names?
Come on.
My online identity is my online identity, and as far as Facebook is concerned, I am an owl. This does not change my online behavior and it's not an impediment for me to use Facebook this way. In real life I have the right to call myself whatever I want as long as I'm not trying to defraud anyone and screw you for saying I shouldn't have that right online.
--
BMO
... go to court, get a quick judgment, and get the Sheriff or whoever it is that has jurisdiction to enforce you going an emptying a local branch office of whatever you can carry out.
Get paid.
This has actually happened in real life.
http://www.digtriad.com/news/watercooler/article/178031/176/Florida-Homeowner-Forecloses-On-Bank-Of-America
--
BMO
>Aren't standards something the FCC is supposed to protect?
Who? Why would they have anything to do with this?
The FCC covers the broadcast of radio waves and allocated spectrum at last look, not APIs.
--
BMO
> If anime teaches us anything, it's that cartoon asteroids are always weapons of evil aliens bent on our destruction.
No, that would be a comet... /pedant :-P
--
BMO
This isn't some standard polemic about "those stupid walled-garden networks are bad!"
Yes it is. It's a long winded whine about how core principles have been lost, which they haven't.
I know that Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and LinkedIn and the rest are great sites
But you point at them and say what huge amount of harm they've done.
But they're based on a few assumptions that aren't necessarily correct.
Oh really, let's examine them then.
The primary fallacy that underpins many of their mistakes is that user flexibility and control necessarily lead to a user experience complexity that hurts growth.
The primary fallacy of this article is that ordinary people want the complexity and extensibility, that every user wants to twiddle with RSS and build web pages from scratch. The vast majority of the internet using public don't. They want someone else to take care of the minutia. It's been that way since the days of the BBS. The BBS culture had users and sysops and wasn't pure peer to peer "read-write" because not everyone could be arsed to set up his own BBS and pay for a phone line or even bother something so simple as an ANSI menu layout screen. It's still this way. The vast majority of users just want to post their pictures, send mail, pirate media, write their blawgs and to leave the icky technical stuff to people more competent.
And the second, more grave fallacy, is the thinking that exerting extreme control over users is the best way to maximize the profitability and sustainability of their networks.'
And users can vote with their feet and migrate elsewhere. This article is written like the users have nowhere to go and the big services are some sort of social prison that nobody can escape. People are perfectly free to set up their own servers and whatnot. We've seen an explosion of cheap hosting like never before. But most people don't want to do that. The number of people I know, personally, that can write a simple HTML 1.0 web page from scratch, even with commercial tools, I can count on one hand. This is not the fault of the likes of Facebook or whoever. This is the because of the fact that even 20 years after the invention of the www, it's still complex with concepts that are nearly impossible for most people to wrap their heads around. And thus we wind up with services that are more than willing to do it for them.
The author is bemoaning the loss of the peer-to-peer read-write-web which never existed in the first place.
There are the technorati and there is everyone else, and the technorati run things. This is entirely by consent. There was no wresting control from users who wanted to do their own things. If there was any freedom lost (there hasn't been) it's because it was given up, not taken.
--
BMO