"But porn? Who goes over to a friend's house and watches porn? That just seems really weird to me. I wouldn't do that in a million years."
You can go over to a friend's house, have he burn a dvd-r full of freshly bittorrented porn AVIs, masked with innocent-looking filenames, and go home and start the wanking.
Razor thin margins? We're talking of a publishing industry that does not pay authors (in fact, most authors have to pay the journals to get published), does not pay peer reviewers and that prints only a handful of uberpriced copies (almost every academic journal AFAIK costs more than 15$ per copy today, and most sell individual PDF articles for as much as 50$) while doing most redistribution on cheap web servers, and have guaranteed subscriptions from universities in the order of thousands of dollars. If this is a publishing industry that has razor thin margins, I wonder how can newspapers be alive.
2) If publishers are really contributing nothing to academic publishing, and just charge high prices and force you to sign away your rights (which I think is a fair characterization), here's a crazy idea: stop publishing through them! Set up your own journals and charge nothing or a token amount for access. If scientists are so bigoted they only deign to acknowledge work published in overpriced, unnecessary, exploitative publishers' journals, the problem is on the scientists' end.
That's why people have created PLOS. As a scientist, I can tell you that building a career only with public access journals is next to impossible, today. However public access journals/approaches are growing fast, so maybe in the future what you are suggesting will be entirely possible.
To put it another way: If there is no right and no wrong, then it is meaningless to say that anyone has ever done anything wrong. If it is not meaningless to say that no one has ever done anything wrong, then there MUST exist some absolute concept of right and wrong.
There are no absolute rights or wrongs. There are rights or wrongs relative to the local ethics. So talking of "right" or "wrong" is perfectly meaningful locally. It is meaningless globally. Paradox solved.
I am a KDE guy, but I must admit that Konqueror also sucks in the same cases (don't know with KDE 4)
However, as a spare-time programmer (brrr!!) I would really like to know what can I read to avoid at least the most trivial of such pitfalls -for GUIs and for anything else.
"In 1948, behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner published an article in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, in which he describes his pigeons exhibiting what appeared to be superstitious behavior. One pigeon was making turns in its cage, another would swing its head in a pendulum motion, while others also displayed a variety of other behaviors. Because these behaviors were all done ritualistically in an attempt to receive food from a dispenser, even though the dispenser had already been programmed to release food at set time intervals regardless of the pigeons' actions, Skinner believed that the pigeons were trying to influence their feeding schedule by performing these actions. He then extended this as a proposition regarding the nature of superstitious behavior in humans."
This is pure FUD. On Windows, it takes me several hours to install decent image retouching support, a feed reader, a PDF reader, a vector graphics editor, a decent audio player (what WMP is not), a decent browser, a decent Office suite, a decent mail client etc.etc. And still you have to download codecs for a LOT of widespread formats.
On Linux you just have to look a bit for mp3 and dvd codecs, but everything else you need is there. On Windows, yeah, maybe WMP plays mp3s by default, but on a nearly unusable system.
we have enough data to show that solar systems like ours (with a Jupiter, a Mars, etc) are not going to be the norm.
Why? We have serious biases in our planet-detection techniques that make the detection of solar systems like our pretty hard, while hot Jupiters are readily and routinely easy to detect. Basically, anything that orbits more than once in a few days and has less than 1 Jupiter mass is damn hard to detect.
What we're learning is that, probably, there is no "standard" in planetary systems: each one will have a different history and different idiosyncracies. Wild wild universe indeed. But this doesn't mean that systems like our, with giant planets outside in slow orbits and rocky planets inside, are rare. They're just almost undetectable by current means.
Well, if we start by refusing currently accepted theories, we can start go 100% wild and every hypothesis is "valid".
That is not to say that one day those theories couldn't be proven wrong, but until that day let's stay within the realms of science, instead of that of random fantasy.
Added value of mailing lists: They are usually archived. In searchable text.
Try to find instantaneously what someone said last Wednesday at the LUG while chewing that pizza, instead.
That may be true, but the advantage of a LUG is that your attention is focussed on that one topic - Linux, Open Source, Freedom to Tinker, News things happening, Meeting Real people... the last point being a very important factor.
Real people? Do you mean that people I talk with on the Net are all.. Bots? Droids?
Seriously, stop the "real people vs Teh Internet" FUD. The internet is made of the very real people talking on it. What we communicate doesn't change a lot if we communicate it using voice or using the TCP protocol.
You can dual license, or multi-license specific files in your project so that they are compatible with other licenses you want them to be usable with, just don't forget to remove the other licenses from any files that you include someone else's GPL code in.
For what reason should I remove the other licenses from files where I include other GPL code? If it's N-licensed, and one of these licenses is GPL, technically I'm merging GPL code with GPL code, so where's the problem (assuming it's the same GPL version, of course)?
I thought of the standard clause but it always puzzled me. Who chooses what licence is actually in use? What does "any later version" mean? What if someone breaks only one of the multiple versions of the license? Let's say, if someone TiVO-izes my "GPLv2 or any later" code, that's perfectly fine for me (that thinks GPLv2 is mostly fine), but that could be NOT fine at all for some contributor. What happens in this case?
Slashdot Mirror
What right does Tivo have to put DRM in *my* hardware in order to make it impossible to modify *my* software any way I see fit?
What right does NOT have Tivo to do it?
I often disagree with the FSF, but they don't look like powerful masters of the universe to me...
"But porn? Who goes over to a friend's house and watches porn? That just seems really weird to me. I wouldn't do that in a million years."
You can go over to a friend's house, have he burn a dvd-r full of freshly bittorrented porn AVIs, masked with innocent-looking filenames, and go home and start the wanking.
and the publishers run on razor thin margins.
Razor thin margins? We're talking of a publishing industry that does not pay authors (in fact, most authors have to pay the journals to get published), does not pay peer reviewers and that prints only a handful of uberpriced copies (almost every academic journal AFAIK costs more than 15$ per copy today, and most sell individual PDF articles for as much as 50$) while doing most redistribution on cheap web servers, and have guaranteed subscriptions from universities in the order of thousands of dollars. If this is a publishing industry that has razor thin margins, I wonder how can newspapers be alive.
2) If publishers are really contributing nothing to academic publishing, and just charge high prices and force you to sign away your rights (which I think is a fair characterization), here's a crazy idea: stop publishing through them! Set up your own journals and charge nothing or a token amount for access. If scientists are so bigoted they only deign to acknowledge work published in overpriced, unnecessary, exploitative publishers' journals, the problem is on the scientists' end.
That's why people have created PLOS. As a scientist, I can tell you that building a career only with public access journals is next to impossible, today. However public access journals/approaches are growing fast, so maybe in the future what you are suggesting will be entirely possible.
He still cannot produce any logical reason for morality
Morality is sociobiology from the inside.
To put it another way: If there is no right and no wrong, then it is meaningless to say that anyone has ever done anything wrong. If it is not meaningless to say that no one has ever done anything wrong, then there MUST exist some absolute concept of right and wrong.
There are no absolute rights or wrongs. There are rights or wrongs relative to the local ethics. So talking of "right" or "wrong" is perfectly meaningful locally. It is meaningless globally. Paradox solved.
Yes, exactly, because free speech demands they MUST get away with it.
Otherwise, you're advocating censorship, pure and simple. If that's your opinion, fine. Just admit it.
Technically is a lint.
I am a KDE guy, but I must admit that Konqueror also sucks in the same cases (don't know with KDE 4)
However, as a spare-time programmer (brrr!!) I would really like to know what can I read to avoid at least the most trivial of such pitfalls -for GUIs and for anything else.
Not only the human one. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstition#Supersti tion_and_psychology for example:
"In 1948, behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner published an article in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, in which he describes his pigeons exhibiting what appeared to be superstitious behavior. One pigeon was making turns in its cage, another would swing its head in a pendulum motion, while others also displayed a variety of other behaviors. Because these behaviors were all done ritualistically in an attempt to receive food from a dispenser, even though the dispenser had already been programmed to release food at set time intervals regardless of the pigeons' actions, Skinner believed that the pigeons were trying to influence their feeding schedule by performing these actions. He then extended this as a proposition regarding the nature of superstitious behavior in humans."
This is pure FUD. On Windows, it takes me several hours to install decent image retouching support, a feed reader, a PDF reader, a vector graphics editor, a decent audio player (what WMP is not), a decent browser, a decent Office suite, a decent mail client etc.etc. And still you have to download codecs for a LOT of widespread formats.
On Linux you just have to look a bit for mp3 and dvd codecs, but everything else you need is there. On Windows, yeah, maybe WMP plays mp3s by default, but on a nearly unusable system.
This is plain wonderful. Thanks for the tip, one reason more to try Solaris (I still didn't but I want...)
But our cave-living and mammuth-hunting technologies would be skyrocketing!
we have enough data to show that solar systems like ours (with a Jupiter, a Mars, etc) are not going to be the norm.
Why? We have serious biases in our planet-detection techniques that make the detection of solar systems like our pretty hard, while hot Jupiters are readily and routinely easy to detect. Basically, anything that orbits more than once in a few days and has less than 1 Jupiter mass is damn hard to detect.
What we're learning is that, probably, there is no "standard" in planetary systems: each one will have a different history and different idiosyncracies. Wild wild universe indeed. But this doesn't mean that systems like our, with giant planets outside in slow orbits and rocky planets inside, are rare. They're just almost undetectable by current means.
No. That description fits Jupiter and Saturn perfectly.
Well, if we start by refusing currently accepted theories, we can start go 100% wild and every hypothesis is "valid".
That is not to say that one day those theories couldn't be proven wrong, but until that day let's stay within the realms of science, instead of that of random fantasy.
You should have gone with the Do The Fuck You Want Public License: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL
(No, it's not a joke. AFAIK, some WindowMaker icons were released under the WTFPL)
Ok, couldn't we just have a GPLv2 app doing that?
What are the actual specs? Are they already out?
If yes, let's have a look. If not, we can just brace and wait; discussing would be meaningless (oh wait, this is /. !!)
Added value of mailing lists: They are usually archived. In searchable text.
Try to find instantaneously what someone said last Wednesday at the LUG while chewing that pizza, instead.
That may be true, but the advantage of a LUG is that your attention is focussed on that one topic - Linux, Open Source, Freedom to Tinker, News things happening, Meeting Real people... the last point being a very important factor.
Real people? Do you mean that people I talk with on the Net are all.. Bots? Droids?
Seriously, stop the "real people vs Teh Internet" FUD. The internet is made of the very real people talking on it. What we communicate doesn't change a lot if we communicate it using voice or using the TCP protocol.
* Download legally-questionable open-source codec
Legally questionable in the USA, please. In my country it's perfectly legal.
Thanks for advice. Just a thing is obscure:
You can dual license, or multi-license specific files in your project so that they are compatible with other licenses you want them to be usable with, just don't forget to remove the other licenses from any files that you include someone else's GPL code in.
For what reason should I remove the other licenses from files where I include other GPL code? If it's N-licensed, and one of these licenses is GPL, technically I'm merging GPL code with GPL code, so where's the problem (assuming it's the same GPL version, of course)?
I thought of the standard clause but it always puzzled me. Who chooses what licence is actually in use? What does "any later version" mean? What if someone breaks only one of the multiple versions of the license? Let's say, if someone TiVO-izes my "GPLv2 or any later" code, that's perfectly fine for me (that thinks GPLv2 is mostly fine), but that could be NOT fine at all for some contributor. What happens in this case?