You miss the point. You post certain information because you want certain people to see it (if they care to look). You don't necessarily want anyone else at all to see it. That is pretty much the point of social networking sites: to share personal information with a small group of people, and NOT anyone else.
You might be interested in the Alcubierre Bubble. Special relativity doesn't allow for FTL travel, but GR does, provided we can manipulate the cosmological constant locally. Instead of moving through space, you effectively move a bit of space (containing you) to where you want to be.
It is usually not about each individual's freedom, but every individual's freedom... One person deciding that an entire university will use exchange and nothing but (thus exercising their freedom) severely limits the freedom of the students and faculty at that university to choose email clients. Luckily my undergrad university also offered IMAP access (although they very strongly discouraged it); otherwise I'd have been stuck either using Windows and outlook or using the webmail interface (evolution connector wasn't really working yet then. Is it now?). Neither one is a good option in my opinion. However, there are a large number of options for replacing exchange (as an email system, perhaps not as a whole-hog groupware system... that's out of my realm of understanding, but anyway, nearly all that it was used for at my university was email, so...) which do not limit the freedom of the students and faculty regarding mail clients.
So, which is worth more: the freedom of the person choosing an email system, or the freedom of thousands of faculty and students? I think that, if you can calm down for a minute, you will find that most of the people you would blithely brush off as "FOSSIES" (to use the AC trolls' term) do understand that when people's freedoms conflict with one another, things are very very complex. They seem to advocate their own freedom above that of others; you seem to advocate others' freedom over theirs. Neither you nor them are advocating self-sacrifice, so we can't use that appeal to emotion to establish who is right. So, who is right? Whose freedom has to give? "Your right to swing your arm stops at the end of my nose."
Furthermore, I think you will also find, in a quiet moment, that most of the "FOSSIES" would be happy enough with people using Exchange if it didn't limit their freedom of mail clients. Many might worry that it might suddenly begin to limit their freedom in the future (hence "You can't trust MS!"), and perhaps this would be a legitimate concern. Or perhaps it would not. I don't claim to know, at almost 1am. But I do know this: Mockery is cheap. Careful thought is not. Perhaps that is why both sides of this issue portray the other side in such a radical light. Invest a bit of thought before posting again, please.
Instead of reinventing the wheel, they should have just used posix signals. A simple killall -9 robots should do the trick. Of course, who knows what sending SIGCHLD would do...:-p
Software shouldn't have ever been patentable. You mentioned that any rewrite will be unsuccessful because there will still be loopholes and ways around the rules. Well, allow me to point out that the only reason we have software patents at all is that there is an officially ignored loophole. Patents on software are actually expressly forbidden. However, patents on using a general purpose computing machine to execute a particular piece of software are not, and this end run around the rules is routinely and consistently overlooked by the patent office.
I don't think that the patent system is broken, I just think that what is enforced needs to follow the spirit of what is on the books a little bit better. This would have an extremely large scale effect, of course, invalidating huge numbers of patents, but really wouldn't change the business model of any real software houses; only patent trolls would find their business damaged.
FWIW, it makes sense to forbid software patents. Software is already covered by copyright, and does not need further protection. You can't patent a recipe, which is, after all, a set of instructions, just like software.
As I understand it, the reason for the politics in ODF/OOXML is that technical factors bring in politics. OOXML allows documents to contain chunks that look like mumble, where mumble is a binary dump of a Word 97 document. This is, of course, a technical matter, a detail of the specification. However, since Word 97 format is not itself open in the slightest (a political matter, openness), this particular technical matter drags in politics in a big way.
OTOH, this political matter, lack of openness, drags in technical problems as well. A spec which is not open must be reverse engineered (and even then there is dubious legality), so only those who have access to the closed spec will necessarily be able to implement it correctly. This tilts the playing field for the software market heavily in favor of those with access to the closed spec. Any competitors will find that either their software fails to function correctly, or they have to do a lot more work to get correctly functioning software. The result: either a monoculture/monopoly in software using this spec, or a variety of incompatible attempts at implementing the spec, resulting in inability to carry files from one computer to another and expect them to still work.
So, a technical matter in the OOXML spec results in political wrangling, which wrangling is motivated by technical reasons anyways. Dig a little bit deeper than most people are willing to, and you find that it really isn't a matter (for most people) of Anything-But-Microsoft. It may look that way, because MS offerings are so consistently rejected, but nearly always, it is actually for technical reasons (perhaps technical by way of political in the middle, but technical at both ends (motivation for objection, and object of objection)).
Now, the OP who said "we should reject this just because it is from MS" might be a true Anything-But-Microsoft person. That would certainly explain the remark. OTOH, caution, a look at history, and an understanding of the technical matters involved in said history would also explain the remark quite easily. The reference to MS' "track record" suggests to me that perhaps the latter explanation is the right one. But then again, I'm an eternal optimist, always seeking to think the best of people until I actually have a real reason to think otherwise.
So, to rephrase what you've said, OOo is not a subpar replacement for MSOffice, it is merely not the status quo. Say what you mean the first time around, and we won't have this sort of confusion in the future.
in the "right of way" areas. What is that? Sounds like eminent domain... Ummmm... no. The GP specifically mentioned that they (the telcos, AKA corporations in the private sector) leased the right to use the land from the railroad companies (again, corporations in the private sector). That is, the railroads bought the land (or in some cases, yes, were given it by the government, which had seized it by means of eminent domain), and they they turned around and leased it out to whomever they pleased. If I owned a piece of land, and a telco wanted to put a line across it, I could lease them the right to do so if I wanted to. Eminent domain enters into it nowhere.
That's like paying for a four bedroom apartment, where one of the rooms is pre-filled with sewage, when you actually only need a 2 bedroom place to begin with.
Crack the code of socalizing, get that one done and you will become upper management.
But... very many people don't want to be upper management. You can't get anything real done in management, except for take credit for other people's work. I don't really care that much about getting credit, whether I've done the work or not. I want to work on interesting problems and find good solutions for them. Upper management can go screw itself.
You've clearly lost the argument already. Your last comment sealed the deal nice and tight. Take your medicine with some grace and politeness. Rediscover the lost art of contrition.
You know, you are allowed to use something other than your birthday, your pet's name, and your favorite Transformer as passwords... Some of us use random sequences of characters. If you can't remember such a thing, use a pronounceable string of letters (make it plenty long), such as generated by pwgen. It is much easier to remember a string of sounds that is perhaps 4 syllables long than a string of characters which is 12 characters long.
It is interesting that Apple products' aesthetics seem to be a much better deterrent to tinkering inside the case than "YOUR WARRANTY AND LIFE ARE VOID IF YOU REMOVE THIS STICKER"...
It is worth pointing out that (according to my linguistics-grad-student fiancee) most of Chomsky's ideas have either been rejected or modified past the point of recognizability over the course of the last few decades.
The way that quantum entanglement gets around these paradoxes is thus: You can't tell that a change propagated faster than light until you compare the measurements at both ends. That is, the outcome of measurements at either end is not something you can predict, except to say that there will be some correlation between the two. Thus these effects are useless for transmitting information faster than light, but very useful for encryption.
I realize you were making a joke, but your (feigned) reaction is all too common. "If you don't agree with me, then you must be being paid to say that!" is barely one step removed from "If you don't agree with me, then you must be stupid!". While it may very well be the case that the person who disagrees with you is stupid or even paid, this is still an unpleasant (and I might venture to say unhealthy) attitude. But I see it all the time, on a very broad spectrum of topics.
Oh no. General Failure was verrry good at reading disks of all kinds. The older and crappier the hardware, the better he was at reading them. I sucked at it, of course, and I tried to get him to read them to me, but he never would.
There's still a difference between a difficult and challenging puzzle and a puzzle that practically requires a strategy guide to solve. I'll make an analogy, in physics:
I can solve a lot problems in quantum mechanics. Many of them are exceedingly difficult, and might take me days, weeks, even years. They are challenging, many of them are fun, and some of them do really require creative leaps to finish.
OTOH you have things like the discovery of quantum mechanics. Some completely off the wall, nonsensical notion had to be tried (like Planck's quantization of energy in the oscillators in his model) before QM could even begin to enter people's minds. Things like this make no sense at all given what was previously known, and require a tremendous amount of trial and error (mostly error), or a ridiculously lucky guess, to get right. Blackbody radiation was a very serious problem before Planck tried out a model that even he thought was so silly as to be nearly worthless.
Problems in the first class can be as difficult, challenging, and fun as you like, and yet they don't require a strategy guide. Problems in the second class would require a strategy guide (if only there were one for the universe). Many problems in physics were known problems since the time of the Greeks, but weren't solved until the last few hundred years, largely due to various finally lucky guesses. A problem that might well take millenia of trial and error is not fun. Finally getting the right answer is pretty cool, but it doesn't really say much about your intelligence, just your dedication, luck, and the elimination of a lot of wrong answers by your forebears.
A video game which presents you with several hundred choices, of which you must pick a single unique sequence of five, in the correct order, is more in the second class of problems. It is not actually hard to do, just mindless, boring, frustrating, and unenlightening until you hit upon the right guess. It really requires a strategy guide, and is not fun.
A video game which presents you with several hundred choices, of which you must pick a single unique sequence of five, in the correct order, and also presents you with enough information (properly sorted from the red herrings, and properly combined with logic) to deduce the correct sequence and order, or at worst several possible sequences and orders, could be really very difficult, and a lot of fun.
Slashdot Mirror
You miss the point. You post certain information because you want certain people to see it (if they care to look). You don't necessarily want anyone else at all to see it. That is pretty much the point of social networking sites: to share personal information with a small group of people, and NOT anyone else.
You might be interested in the Alcubierre Bubble. Special relativity doesn't allow for FTL travel, but GR does, provided we can manipulate the cosmological constant locally. Instead of moving through space, you effectively move a bit of space (containing you) to where you want to be.
disclaim: Veeery speculative stuff.
I know curiosity isn't technology, but...
It is usually not about each individual's freedom, but every individual's freedom... One person deciding that an entire university will use exchange and nothing but (thus exercising their freedom) severely limits the freedom of the students and faculty at that university to choose email clients. Luckily my undergrad university also offered IMAP access (although they very strongly discouraged it); otherwise I'd have been stuck either using Windows and outlook or using the webmail interface (evolution connector wasn't really working yet then. Is it now?). Neither one is a good option in my opinion. However, there are a large number of options for replacing exchange (as an email system, perhaps not as a whole-hog groupware system... that's out of my realm of understanding, but anyway, nearly all that it was used for at my university was email, so...) which do not limit the freedom of the students and faculty regarding mail clients.
So, which is worth more: the freedom of the person choosing an email system, or the freedom of thousands of faculty and students? I think that, if you can calm down for a minute, you will find that most of the people you would blithely brush off as "FOSSIES" (to use the AC trolls' term) do understand that when people's freedoms conflict with one another, things are very very complex. They seem to advocate their own freedom above that of others; you seem to advocate others' freedom over theirs. Neither you nor them are advocating self-sacrifice, so we can't use that appeal to emotion to establish who is right. So, who is right? Whose freedom has to give? "Your right to swing your arm stops at the end of my nose."
Furthermore, I think you will also find, in a quiet moment, that most of the "FOSSIES" would be happy enough with people using Exchange if it didn't limit their freedom of mail clients. Many might worry that it might suddenly begin to limit their freedom in the future (hence "You can't trust MS!"), and perhaps this would be a legitimate concern. Or perhaps it would not. I don't claim to know, at almost 1am. But I do know this: Mockery is cheap. Careful thought is not. Perhaps that is why both sides of this issue portray the other side in such a radical light. Invest a bit of thought before posting again, please.
Instead of reinventing the wheel, they should have just used posix signals. A simple killall -9 robots should do the trick. Of course, who knows what sending SIGCHLD would do... :-p
Software shouldn't have ever been patentable. You mentioned that any rewrite will be unsuccessful because there will still be loopholes and ways around the rules. Well, allow me to point out that the only reason we have software patents at all is that there is an officially ignored loophole. Patents on software are actually expressly forbidden. However, patents on using a general purpose computing machine to execute a particular piece of software are not, and this end run around the rules is routinely and consistently overlooked by the patent office.
I don't think that the patent system is broken, I just think that what is enforced needs to follow the spirit of what is on the books a little bit better. This would have an extremely large scale effect, of course, invalidating huge numbers of patents, but really wouldn't change the business model of any real software houses; only patent trolls would find their business damaged.
FWIW, it makes sense to forbid software patents. Software is already covered by copyright, and does not need further protection. You can't patent a recipe, which is, after all, a set of instructions, just like software.
As I understand it, the reason for the politics in ODF/OOXML is that technical factors bring in politics. OOXML allows documents to contain chunks that look like mumble, where mumble is a binary dump of a Word 97 document. This is, of course, a technical matter, a detail of the specification. However, since Word 97 format is not itself open in the slightest (a political matter, openness), this particular technical matter drags in politics in a big way.
OTOH, this political matter, lack of openness, drags in technical problems as well. A spec which is not open must be reverse engineered (and even then there is dubious legality), so only those who have access to the closed spec will necessarily be able to implement it correctly. This tilts the playing field for the software market heavily in favor of those with access to the closed spec. Any competitors will find that either their software fails to function correctly, or they have to do a lot more work to get correctly functioning software. The result: either a monoculture/monopoly in software using this spec, or a variety of incompatible attempts at implementing the spec, resulting in inability to carry files from one computer to another and expect them to still work.
So, a technical matter in the OOXML spec results in political wrangling, which wrangling is motivated by technical reasons anyways. Dig a little bit deeper than most people are willing to, and you find that it really isn't a matter (for most people) of Anything-But-Microsoft. It may look that way, because MS offerings are so consistently rejected, but nearly always, it is actually for technical reasons (perhaps technical by way of political in the middle, but technical at both ends (motivation for objection, and object of objection)).
Now, the OP who said "we should reject this just because it is from MS" might be a true Anything-But-Microsoft person. That would certainly explain the remark. OTOH, caution, a look at history, and an understanding of the technical matters involved in said history would also explain the remark quite easily. The reference to MS' "track record" suggests to me that perhaps the latter explanation is the right one. But then again, I'm an eternal optimist, always seeking to think the best of people until I actually have a real reason to think otherwise.
So, to rephrase what you've said, OOo is not a subpar replacement for MSOffice, it is merely not the status quo. Say what you mean the first time around, and we won't have this sort of confusion in the future.
That's like paying for a four bedroom apartment, where one of the rooms is pre-filled with sewage, when you actually only need a 2 bedroom place to begin with.
You've clearly lost the argument already. Your last comment sealed the deal nice and tight. Take your medicine with some grace and politeness. Rediscover the lost art of contrition.
You know, you are allowed to use something other than your birthday, your pet's name, and your favorite Transformer as passwords... Some of us use random sequences of characters. If you can't remember such a thing, use a pronounceable string of letters (make it plenty long), such as generated by pwgen. It is much easier to remember a string of sounds that is perhaps 4 syllables long than a string of characters which is 12 characters long.
It is interesting that Apple products' aesthetics seem to be a much better deterrent to tinkering inside the case than "YOUR WARRANTY AND LIFE ARE VOID IF YOU REMOVE THIS STICKER"...
It is worth pointing out that (according to my linguistics-grad-student fiancee) most of Chomsky's ideas have either been rejected or modified past the point of recognizability over the course of the last few decades.
Why do you assume that all Linux hackers have two eyes, huh? We're all PIRATES, you insensitive clod!
I just imagined a Beowulf cluster of these things... Now I need brain bleach.
That's what they want you to think.
/me puts on tinfoil hat.
The way that quantum entanglement gets around these paradoxes is thus: You can't tell that a change propagated faster than light until you compare the measurements at both ends. That is, the outcome of measurements at either end is not something you can predict, except to say that there will be some correlation between the two. Thus these effects are useless for transmitting information faster than light, but very useful for encryption.
Well, I can do away with one question for you. Read a little bit about the No-clone Theorem.
Why not?
I realize you were making a joke, but your (feigned) reaction is all too common. "If you don't agree with me, then you must be being paid to say that!" is barely one step removed from "If you don't agree with me, then you must be stupid!". While it may very well be the case that the person who disagrees with you is stupid or even paid, this is still an unpleasant (and I might venture to say unhealthy) attitude. But I see it all the time, on a very broad spectrum of topics.
So, in other words, it stomps and spits all over states' rights. Sounds like a really great law to me!
Oh no. General Failure was verrry good at reading disks of all kinds. The older and crappier the hardware, the better he was at reading them. I sucked at it, of course, and I tried to get him to read them to me, but he never would.
There's still a difference between a difficult and challenging puzzle and a puzzle that practically requires a strategy guide to solve. I'll make an analogy, in physics:
I can solve a lot problems in quantum mechanics. Many of them are exceedingly difficult, and might take me days, weeks, even years. They are challenging, many of them are fun, and some of them do really require creative leaps to finish.
OTOH you have things like the discovery of quantum mechanics. Some completely off the wall, nonsensical notion had to be tried (like Planck's quantization of energy in the oscillators in his model) before QM could even begin to enter people's minds. Things like this make no sense at all given what was previously known, and require a tremendous amount of trial and error (mostly error), or a ridiculously lucky guess, to get right. Blackbody radiation was a very serious problem before Planck tried out a model that even he thought was so silly as to be nearly worthless.
Problems in the first class can be as difficult, challenging, and fun as you like, and yet they don't require a strategy guide. Problems in the second class would require a strategy guide (if only there were one for the universe). Many problems in physics were known problems since the time of the Greeks, but weren't solved until the last few hundred years, largely due to various finally lucky guesses. A problem that might well take millenia of trial and error is not fun. Finally getting the right answer is pretty cool, but it doesn't really say much about your intelligence, just your dedication, luck, and the elimination of a lot of wrong answers by your forebears.
A video game which presents you with several hundred choices, of which you must pick a single unique sequence of five, in the correct order, is more in the second class of problems. It is not actually hard to do, just mindless, boring, frustrating, and unenlightening until you hit upon the right guess. It really requires a strategy guide, and is not fun.
A video game which presents you with several hundred choices, of which you must pick a single unique sequence of five, in the correct order, and also presents you with enough information (properly sorted from the red herrings, and properly combined with logic) to deduce the correct sequence and order, or at worst several possible sequences and orders, could be really very difficult, and a lot of fun.