But once you know that N atoms of Si are 1 Kg, you won't ever need anymore the artifact.
Just weigh one Si atom, and multiply N times, and you are done.
I prefer to right click and drag icons, and get a set of destination options - right click gives options, draging selects the location.
Left clicking and dragging makes me nervouse - left click says "take the default action", since I don't want to always copy, move, or link, this is very counter-intuitive. Left clicking+draggin behaves much like right clicking+dragging behaves in windws, which is what I like.
I don't understand. On both Windows and KDE, to drag from A to B, you left click icon in A and drag into B. Why do you have to right click? When I drag-and-drop on Konqueror, it always says me first "copy, move, link"? And you choose. On Windows, IIRC, you just have one default action and you have to resort to ctrl-x/ctrl-v if you want to move instead of copy, for example.
The popup window to rename files that you somtimes get is annoying, I like doing that in-place with the file name under the icon.
Oh please. One thing is not understanding something. Another is not basically understanding the things that you use everyday.
Computers are exceedingly complex things, I agree. Exactly for this reason, how can someone perform a task with them without a bit of basic practical knowledge about how they work? I don't want people to know what is the HTTP protocol or what a shared library is, but at least understanding that there is a big program called Windows that allows them to use the PC at all and manages the devices; while Office is a collection of programs that runs on top of Windows, well, that's the bare minimum.
As for the elitism: yes, people in general are not only ignorant (everyone of us is, somehow), but idiots. I confirm. It's stunning to see the banality and idiocy of the average arguments made by everyday people you meet in a street, no matter what's the actual argument. They not only do not know: they do not think properly on what they do know. Yes, I'm an elitist, that's really sad but that's the facts leading me in that direction.
Excuse me, are you really saying that Konqueror is worse than Explorer? When I first installed Linux I immediately thought that Konqueror was THE killer app for file management. Just to mention two: tabs and split windows, where are them on WinExplorer? What's good in WinExplorer that you can't have on Konqueror? I find myself badly missing Konqueror on Windows (hope that with KDE 4 this changes), not the contrary.
Ehm. I guess you are trolling, because I am Italian and live in Italy since 26 years, so I guess I know how does the thing work.
Yes, texting costs from 0.10 to 0.20 each, but it involves prepaid cards. You pay a 50 Euro card/recharge from an ATM, and go away with that. If your kid ends the prepaid amount by texting, you can simply avoid to buy him/her another card.
In fact, in Italy (AFAIK one of the countries with the heaviest cell phones/SMS usage), something like that is completely unheard of, because all cell phones use prepaid cards (usually in the 20-100 Euros range).
Leaving a teen with a cell phone and a plan paid by the parents sounds completely nuts to me.
Well, seeing films at the cinema can be actually nice. It's a different experience. Of course, it all comes down to the kind of films you go to see at the cinema. Let's say I rarely go to the cinema for films that will be full of "ugly pubescent teens" or other noisy creatures. But a quiet cinema with a good film is a nice experience.
You didn't understand me. What I want to say is that the "trauma" experienced by those children is not something so big and terrible as to justify all these parents going nuts. I don't think the teachers did something good -actually, they just instilled in them the unjustified fear of terrorism being everywhere. But I also don't think it was something so terrible and permanent so to have everyone screaming THINKOFTHECHILDREN. Teachers did a nasty thing. Children were scared. No one was hurt. Children will learn it was a bad,bad joke and continue their life as usual. Nothing serious really happened, that's what I want to say.
What those kids learned that day is that you may never, ever trust anyone that you trusted. And that does way more harm than good.
Why? Trusting people blindly won't help them at all. Let them learn that even people that they should trust must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Humankind is (mostly, not all) s**t. Children have to learn that.
No, I'm not arguing that they are good, but that people can survive it without cracking. If your argument was right, most of the population of Germany, Italy and France born between the 1920s and the 1940s would be crazy, dead suicide and the like. It is not so, obviously, and as far as I can see, Europeans are much less war mongers than Americans. Probably because Europeans lived the war on their skin, while Americans (in Vietnam, for example) were accustomed to happy, protected lives, and were unable to sustain the stress of being thrown into a bitter war.
What I want to say is that a bit of distress (not a war, of course!) is positive for children. It makes them stronger.
Do you wonder why kids snap and start shooting? When the adults we entrust them to don't even have the foggiest idea just what they do the the psyche of a child? This is something we hear about, because it has been so damn over the top that you can't simply keep it under cover anymore. How much psychological abuse do we never notice? How often do our kids get scarred by teachers who don't have the minuscle idea about motivating and actually encouraging the kids to learn, instead relying on scare and pressure?
Stop this THINKOFTHECHILDREN!!!!1!11!! BS, please.
The psychological problem with your children is that they live a too much protected life. They are hysterically protected and cared about. What would they learn about coping with conflicts, bad people, bad bosses, bad things of life and so on, in the world you want for them? Nothing. They would live in a carefully crafted shell of tender hydrophilic cotton, until it's too late for them to learn that the world is not that depicted by the Disney channel.
Human beings didn't evolve in a happy, Teletubbies-like world. They evolved in a cruel savana full of bloody predators. Yet we are here. Childhood is made to learn to cope with bad situations, not to stay in a happy candy world.
Let your children have emotional distress. Let your children smash their heads on the bad facts of life. They are children -they will quickly learn and know how to react and they will become stronger and stronger (if you have a family shaping those conflicts correctly, of course). What will make your children crazy, neurotic people is to let them discover how bad is the world at 20, when they won't be able to pick up any emotional instrument to cope with the world anymore.
Parental consent is ALWAYS necessary when anything out of the ordinary happens, especially when said extraordinary thing causes emotional distress.
Oh please. Stop this "emotional distress" BS.
My parents were subject to a LOT of "emotional distress" when they were children. My children father was a refugee from the Italian-Yugoslavia border during the WW II, fleeing to leave most of his relatives (except for his brother and his parents) slaughtered by the Tito army. My grandma, when a child, slept on the ruins of her bombed house. My mother, when a child, lived in Venezuela, with only my grandma caring of her while my grandpa worked 500 km apart and there were earthquakes and revolutions.
Still, my parents and grandparents are psychologically healthy, very normal people. The fact is: human beings have been created to survive a much more cruel, distressing world than our Occidental world. A little distress is more than harmless: it is actually a benefit, because they learn to cope with stress and bad feeling when still young, instead of waiting too late to discover the world is not made of happy Disney cartoons.
The only problem with that happening is that children will (wrongly) learn that OMG TERRORISTS are a common, everyday menace, while they should have to fear obesity much more for their lives, for example.
TFA appears to propose some sort of nebulous copyright replacement legislation which would enforce GPL sharing - I might be missing something obvious, but it seems likely that it would just be copyright by a different name.
Yes, but TFA acknowledges that -but also recognizes it would be very different from copyright as we know it. Imagine a law that says: "The author of a work has the right to apply conditions on the distribution of the work and to have his authorship recognized, provided these do not harm the right of other people to freely share the work for at least non-commercial purposes". In this case, you would have GPL (or something like that), and many CC, perfectly enforceable, but it wouldn't be something like "copyright" as we know it.
If someone writes kernel drivers correctly, those drivers will end in the kernel mainline. Linux supports out of the box more hardware than every other OS, no matter how obsolete and obscure. If you don't have your drivers accepted, AFAIK it's a problem with your code not being of enough good quality, nothing else.
Thanks for the link. In fact, it seems the legislation is not that bad. For example the justification of Amendment 3:
It should be made clear that the involvement of injured parties in investigations carried out by the police or public prosecutors' offices must not jeopardise the neutrality of those state investigation agencies. Maintaining objectivity and neutrality is part and parcel of the rule of law.
states basically that MPAA and RIAA cannot go berserk ignoring the neutrality of laws.
Amendment 16, instead, explicitly protects fair use: Member States shall ensure that the fair use of a protected work, including such use by reproduction in copies or audio or by any other means, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship or research, does not constitute a criminal offence.
Moreover I see nothing taking sides about P2P software and websites.
I'm all for legalizing free, noncommercial share of copyrighted information (that is, what it's called "end user piracy" today). As far as TFA says, it seems Europe now explicitely protects the end user right to share copyrighted information: something that previous Italian legislation, for example, explicitely *criminalized*, instead.
It seems to me that the law bans commercial, money-making piracy (that's OK for me). As for the "banning p2p software", I've not found clear references. Can someone explain me better?
I will only try to address a few of your points because you raise a lot of good ones but this isn't the perfect place to discuss them.
True, but I can't find your email:)
you seem to imply that this is because of the police keeping thugs at bay. Bad news: thugs are free to do whatever they like, the police only care about the easy targets - like me - and laws most certainly do not stop criminals.
The whole fact that "thugs" and non-thugs exist depends on the existence of a police. Without that, me -usually not a thug by any definition- could easily poison my next-desktop collegue that I hate and get away with that. I don't do that because I know I'd be jailed and my life would be ruined. In your world, well, what bad could happen to me? His private police can put me in private jails? So, IIUC, we have a privately paid paramilitary organization, without any control, that can put me in jail for any reason (because if I can pay police to jail people killing me, why don't I end up paying it to jail people I don't like)? Would you like that? And how can't you see that such paramilitary organizations wouldn't end up to get control of anyone and build a state that -in the best of opinions- is as bad as this one?
Besides, why do you keep implying that private security would cost more? Everything the public sector does costs more than private by definition, so why would the police specifically be more expensive?
I don't think it's "by definition". A private corporation must *profit*, while a public service can happily stay at 0$ balance. Multiplying private corporations means multiplying CEO's, commercials and the like, that all end up in costs for the final buyer. These are intrinsic problems, while the problems of public sector are just mismanagement. The problem is that usually public mismanagement is so bad that private can become actually cheaper, but it's not at all "by definition".
why on earth should all industries start using poisoned fish? Look around and you'll see a Mercedes, a BMW and some crappy car out there. Why is that so, even though *nobody* forces the automobile industry to differentiate its offer?
You didn't get the fish example. Crappy food and luxury food are already offered and would be. On the other hand, you wouldn't get a taste difference between mercury-poisoned fish and not poisoned one. Problem is, a lot of fish is naturally accumulating mercury and heavy metals, and this mercury (unless in large amounts) becomes toxic by accumulation, on the scale of *years*. Fishing corporations would have no true incentive to avoid fishing on mercury contaminated seas (that are a common problem, so common that almost *all* fish sold today contains a little mercury nonetheless), without a law explicitely prohibiting them.
Coming back to your car analogy and still using heavy metals:) : I don't know in the USA, but in Europe there is a lot of legislation against the use of lead-based car fuels. (Let alone the issue that lead-free fuels can be even worse):), but: how do you enforce that if there is no law prohibiting companies to sell cheaper lead-based fuel? The problem is not crappy or good, the problem is that sometimes action that go against market tendencies must be made for the good of the public.
As for free markets not working, well, you buy most things in reasonably free markets and they seem to work quite well.
Most of times, yes. But that's also because the public keeps it under eye. A recent example: in Italy ALL cell phone companies had the habit of charging 5 Euros of "recharge costs" for a recharge. That is, for a 25 or 50 Euro phone recharge, you paid 30 or 55 Euro. It was a definite oligopoly, and no company, even newer players, offered to avoid them: it was convenient to no one to "play hard" this way. The state had to intervene and prohibit this.
Finally: how can you agree on *that*, and not on the rest?
Slashdot Mirror
But once you know that N atoms of Si are 1 Kg, you won't ever need anymore the artifact. Just weigh one Si atom, and multiply N times, and you are done.
I prefer to right click and drag icons, and get a set of destination options - right click gives options, draging selects the location.
Left clicking and dragging makes me nervouse - left click says "take the default action", since I don't want to always copy, move, or link, this is very counter-intuitive. Left clicking+draggin behaves much like right clicking+dragging behaves in windws, which is what I like.
I don't understand. On both Windows and KDE, to drag from A to B, you left click icon in A and drag into B. Why do you have to right click? When I drag-and-drop on Konqueror, it always says me first "copy, move, link"? And you choose. On Windows, IIRC, you just have one default action and you have to resort to ctrl-x/ctrl-v if you want to move instead of copy, for example.
The popup window to rename files that you somtimes get is annoying, I like doing that in-place with the file name under the icon.
Me too, and Konqueror does it. Just press F2.
It IS much better, because me too prefers to spend my time somehow more cleverly than resetting my stupid VCR clock everytime there is a power outage.
(Oh, ok, I shouldn't be here procrastinating on /. in this case...)
Oh please. One thing is not understanding something. Another is not basically understanding the things that you use everyday.
Computers are exceedingly complex things, I agree. Exactly for this reason, how can someone perform a task with them without a bit of basic practical knowledge about how they work? I don't want people to know what is the HTTP protocol or what a shared library is, but at least understanding that there is a big program called Windows that allows them to use the PC at all and manages the devices; while Office is a collection of programs that runs on top of Windows, well, that's the bare minimum.
As for the elitism: yes, people in general are not only ignorant (everyone of us is, somehow), but idiots. I confirm. It's stunning to see the banality and idiocy of the average arguments made by everyday people you meet in a street, no matter what's the actual argument. They not only do not know: they do not think properly on what they do know. Yes, I'm an elitist, that's really sad but that's the facts leading me in that direction.
Excuse me, are you really saying that Konqueror is worse than Explorer? When I first installed Linux I immediately thought that Konqueror was THE killer app for file management. Just to mention two: tabs and split windows, where are them on WinExplorer? What's good in WinExplorer that you can't have on Konqueror? I find myself badly missing Konqueror on Windows (hope that with KDE 4 this changes), not the contrary.
Upgrading Ubuntu.
Ehm. I guess you are trolling, because I am Italian and live in Italy since 26 years, so I guess I know how does the thing work.
Yes, texting costs from 0.10 to 0.20 each, but it involves prepaid cards. You pay a 50 Euro card/recharge from an ATM, and go away with that. If your kid ends the prepaid amount by texting, you can simply avoid to buy him/her another card.
If I text to friends who are young, female, and Asian, a reply comes back within minutes.
Cool. How can I have young female Asians as friends too?
In fact, in Italy (AFAIK one of the countries with the heaviest cell phones/SMS usage), something like that is completely unheard of, because all cell phones use prepaid cards (usually in the 20-100 Euros range).
Leaving a teen with a cell phone and a plan paid by the parents sounds completely nuts to me.
You're kidding, isn't it?
Well, seeing films at the cinema can be actually nice. It's a different experience. Of course, it all comes down to the kind of films you go to see at the cinema. Let's say I rarely go to the cinema for films that will be full of "ugly pubescent teens" or other noisy creatures. But a quiet cinema with a good film is a nice experience.
I would not call submerged cities (do you know Venice?) just "bad weather".
You didn't understand me. What I want to say is that the "trauma" experienced by those children is not something so big and terrible as to justify all these parents going nuts. I don't think the teachers did something good -actually, they just instilled in them the unjustified fear of terrorism being everywhere. But I also don't think it was something so terrible and permanent so to have everyone screaming THINKOFTHECHILDREN. Teachers did a nasty thing. Children were scared. No one was hurt. Children will learn it was a bad,bad joke and continue their life as usual. Nothing serious really happened, that's what I want to say.
And no, I'm not a troll :)
What those kids learned that day is that you may never, ever trust anyone that you trusted. And that does way more harm than good.
Why? Trusting people blindly won't help them at all. Let them learn that even people that they should trust must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Humankind is (mostly, not all) s**t. Children have to learn that.
No, I'm not arguing that they are good, but that people can survive it without cracking. If your argument was right, most of the population of Germany, Italy and France born between the 1920s and the 1940s would be crazy, dead suicide and the like. It is not so, obviously, and as far as I can see, Europeans are much less war mongers than Americans. Probably because Europeans lived the war on their skin, while Americans (in Vietnam, for example) were accustomed to happy, protected lives, and were unable to sustain the stress of being thrown into a bitter war.
What I want to say is that a bit of distress (not a war, of course!) is positive for children. It makes them stronger.
Do you wonder why kids snap and start shooting? When the adults we entrust them to don't even have the foggiest idea just what they do the the psyche of a child? This is something we hear about, because it has been so damn over the top that you can't simply keep it under cover anymore. How much psychological abuse do we never notice? How often do our kids get scarred by teachers who don't have the minuscle idea about motivating and actually encouraging the kids to learn, instead relying on scare and pressure?
Stop this THINKOFTHECHILDREN!!!!1!11!! BS, please.
The psychological problem with your children is that they live a too much protected life. They are hysterically protected and cared about. What would they learn about coping with conflicts, bad people, bad bosses, bad things of life and so on, in the world you want for them? Nothing. They would live in a carefully crafted shell of tender hydrophilic cotton, until it's too late for them to learn that the world is not that depicted by the Disney channel.
Human beings didn't evolve in a happy, Teletubbies-like world. They evolved in a cruel savana full of bloody predators. Yet we are here. Childhood is made to learn to cope with bad situations, not to stay in a happy candy world.
Let your children have emotional distress. Let your children smash their heads on the bad facts of life. They are children -they will quickly learn and know how to react and they will become stronger and stronger (if you have a family shaping those conflicts correctly, of course). What will make your children crazy, neurotic people is to let them discover how bad is the world at 20, when they won't be able to pick up any emotional instrument to cope with the world anymore.
Parental consent is ALWAYS necessary when anything out of the ordinary happens, especially when said extraordinary thing causes emotional distress.
Oh please. Stop this "emotional distress" BS.
My parents were subject to a LOT of "emotional distress" when they were children. My children father was a refugee from the Italian-Yugoslavia border during the WW II, fleeing to leave most of his relatives (except for his brother and his parents) slaughtered by the Tito army. My grandma, when a child, slept on the ruins of her bombed house. My mother, when a child, lived in Venezuela, with only my grandma caring of her while my grandpa worked 500 km apart and there were earthquakes and revolutions.
Still, my parents and grandparents are psychologically healthy, very normal people. The fact is: human beings have been created to survive a much more cruel, distressing world than our Occidental world. A little distress is more than harmless: it is actually a benefit, because they learn to cope with stress and bad feeling when still young, instead of waiting too late to discover the world is not made of happy Disney cartoons.
The only problem with that happening is that children will (wrongly) learn that OMG TERRORISTS are a common, everyday menace, while they should have to fear obesity much more for their lives, for example.
Oh, if so, ok, we agree. It's a mere labeling question.
TFA appears to propose some sort of nebulous copyright replacement legislation which would enforce GPL sharing - I might be missing something obvious, but it seems likely that it would just be copyright by a different name.
Yes, but TFA acknowledges that -but also recognizes it would be very different from copyright as we know it. Imagine a law that says: "The author of a work has the right to apply conditions on the distribution of the work and to have his authorship recognized, provided these do not harm the right of other people to freely share the work for at least non-commercial purposes". In this case, you would have GPL (or something like that), and many CC, perfectly enforceable, but it wouldn't be something like "copyright" as we know it.
Last time I checked, FLStudio didn't run under Wine.
If someone writes kernel drivers correctly, those drivers will end in the kernel mainline. Linux supports out of the box more hardware than every other OS, no matter how obsolete and obscure. If you don't have your drivers accepted, AFAIK it's a problem with your code not being of enough good quality, nothing else.
So, IIUC, we are in some kind of grey area.
I guess we have to wait actual implementation in member states.
Thanks for the link. In fact, it seems the legislation is not that bad. For example the justification of Amendment 3:
It should be made clear that the involvement of injured parties in investigations carried out by the police or public prosecutors' offices must not jeopardise the neutrality of those state investigation agencies. Maintaining objectivity and neutrality is part and parcel of the rule of law.
states basically that MPAA and RIAA cannot go berserk ignoring the neutrality of laws.
Amendment 16, instead, explicitly protects fair use: Member States shall ensure that the fair use of a protected work, including such use by reproduction in copies or audio or by any other means, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship or research, does not constitute a criminal offence.
Moreover I see nothing taking sides about P2P software and websites.
I'm all for legalizing free, noncommercial share of copyrighted information (that is, what it's called "end user piracy" today). As far as TFA says, it seems Europe now explicitely protects the end user right to share copyrighted information: something that previous Italian legislation, for example, explicitely *criminalized*, instead.
It seems to me that the law bans commercial, money-making piracy (that's OK for me). As for the "banning p2p software", I've not found clear references. Can someone explain me better?
I will only try to address a few of your points because you raise a lot of good ones but this isn't the perfect place to discuss them.
True, but I can't find your email :)
you seem to imply that this is because of the police keeping thugs at bay. Bad news: thugs are free to do whatever they like, the police only care about the easy targets - like me - and laws most certainly do not stop criminals.
The whole fact that "thugs" and non-thugs exist depends on the existence of a police. Without that, me -usually not a thug by any definition- could easily poison my next-desktop collegue that I hate and get away with that. I don't do that because I know I'd be jailed and my life would be ruined. In your world, well, what bad could happen to me? His private police can put me in private jails? So, IIUC, we have a privately paid paramilitary organization, without any control, that can put me in jail for any reason (because if I can pay police to jail people killing me, why don't I end up paying it to jail people I don't like)? Would you like that? And how can't you see that such paramilitary organizations wouldn't end up to get control of anyone and build a state that -in the best of opinions- is as bad as this one?
Besides, why do you keep implying that private security would cost more? Everything the public sector does costs more than private by definition, so why would the police specifically be more expensive?
I don't think it's "by definition". A private corporation must *profit*, while a public service can happily stay at 0$ balance. Multiplying private corporations means multiplying CEO's, commercials and the like, that all end up in costs for the final buyer. These are intrinsic problems, while the problems of public sector are just mismanagement. The problem is that usually public mismanagement is so bad that private can become actually cheaper, but it's not at all "by definition".
why on earth should all industries start using poisoned fish? Look around and you'll see a Mercedes, a BMW and some crappy car out there. Why is that so, even though *nobody* forces the automobile industry to differentiate its offer?
You didn't get the fish example. Crappy food and luxury food are already offered and would be. On the other hand, you wouldn't get a taste difference between mercury-poisoned fish and not poisoned one. Problem is, a lot of fish is naturally accumulating mercury and heavy metals, and this mercury (unless in large amounts) becomes toxic by accumulation, on the scale of *years*. Fishing corporations would have no true incentive to avoid fishing on mercury contaminated seas (that are a common problem, so common that almost *all* fish sold today contains a little mercury nonetheless), without a law explicitely prohibiting them.
Coming back to your car analogy and still using heavy metals :) : I don't know in the USA, but in Europe there is a lot of legislation against the use of lead-based car fuels. (Let alone the issue that lead-free fuels can be even worse) :), but: how do you enforce that if there is no law prohibiting companies to sell cheaper lead-based fuel? The problem is not crappy or good, the problem is that sometimes action that go against market tendencies must be made for the good of the public.
As for free markets not working, well, you buy most things in reasonably free markets and they seem to work quite well.
Most of times, yes. But that's also because the public keeps it under eye. A recent example: in Italy ALL cell phone companies had the habit of charging 5 Euros of "recharge costs" for a recharge. That is, for a 25 or 50 Euro phone recharge, you paid 30 or 55 Euro. It was a definite oligopoly, and no company, even newer players, offered to avoid them: it was convenient to no one to "play hard" this way. The state had to intervene and prohibit this.
Finally: how can you agree on *that*, and not on the rest?