If he isn't, then neither is Seven of Nine. I don't want a universe where hot cybernetics chicks in leotards don't want to assimilate me.
oh, and I guess one of the slashdot admins decided it was another good moment to cause another anti creation flame war. Good job, they're always fun.
Last time I logged in under a pseudonym and posted as a creationist (not my real opinion, but roleplay can amuse). It rocked, people were practically salivating with rage.
me too. I buy a lot of audio online, mostly books, hundreds of pounds worth every few months (no television...). If I found that adverts were appearing in purchased goods I'd cancel that service the next moment.
All we have here is an attempt by microsoft to shuffle quietly away from the failed strategy that was drm.
One teensy problem. Microsoft don't have the power to force other media file players to enact its scheme, and even if they could, no-one in their right mind is going to require that people re-encode their current collections to work with the new system. Hell mine is almost 150gb, most of that audiobooks, with individual files up to 30mb in size, I'm blowed if I'm going to redo it to use media player, which I don't use in any case, because its a bloated tool (not because its made by microsoft, just because its horrible to use). Audible and the apple store, where I shop, use their own protection systems, and both have 'rip th audio cd' in their options for anything I purchase.
This scheme is ultimately unenforceable except for new purchases, and that from people who agree with microsoft. All it will give them is a way to quietly wrap drm in a blanket and heave it off a bridge late one night.
when I first started my training, an old nurse I'd known for years told me to get the ward domestic on my side. compliments, cups of tea, and the odd cake. It worked really well. On busy days there would always be a hot drink saved for me if I was busy, and someone willing to make some toast if I was caught short on the food front.
By my second year of training all these ward domestics were gone. Within a year the hospital infection rate was appalling, but 'we were meeting financial goals'.
Oddly, the single private ward had full time cleaners, lovely carpets, spotless walls and no problems with infection.
Rumours that it was me who sent a shit filled broken commode up in the lift to the private ward as a protest were entirely unfounded.
When I trained as a nurse in the early nineties we were taught to fear the germ. They piled on so much shite about asepsis that you could end up paranoid about bacteria. I am not exaggerating...
On the wards we had anti bacterial soap, and cleaning alcohol dispensers, and there was a strict routine, wash with the soap, then the alcohol, and do so many, many times throughout the day.
The result was nurses with awful skin, and screw the patients, *we* were getting infections.
Within a year someone with a brain dumped the routine, and our soap/alcohol dispensers were replaced with non scented, ordinary liquid soap. Amazingly enough the much espoused explosion of infections because of the mighty germ failed to materialize.
Then they buggered it all up by replacing in house cleaners with minimum wage contract workers, and we got a whole new set of problems, but that's another story.
What surprises me is that this is news now. as far as I'm concerned, this was all sorted out fifteen years ago. I guess different hospitals have different standards.
so, If I get the RIAA to do this to my refrigerator, it will keep it chilled enough to mean I can turn off the power and save the environment? Sounds good.
you are mostly correct, but you seem to miss my point. You don't for instance, justify the stealing of phones or phone lines as a means to beat AT&T, Instead you advocate the ability of others to offer competing services. This is absolutelly valid, and is what I was getting at.
That I have no problem with, its justifying piracy as a means to protest a monopoly which causes me problems.
After all holywood was formed by stealing patented technology and moving to california to escape opressive laws..
Gee, I thought the whole point of a free market was to let businesses succeed/fail based on their ability to deliver a product that people are willing to pay for. There are obviously enough people still paying to see shitty movies that the industry that produces them is being sustained. When there aren't, then I guess it shows that not enough people gave enough of a fuck about that industry's products.
And your point is? Given that the guy you were replying too was talking about piracy, how does your point relate?
If people don't want to see a thing because its shit, it stands to reason it is also less likely to be pirated, because of being shit. 'failure to deliver a product that people are willing to pay for' is nonsense as a justification for piracy. If there was no way for piracy to take place, people would buy more movies. This is self evident. Piracy cannot be used as justification for piracy, that's just silly.
I just an incredibly genius idea. What if all executable files, whatever the common or arcane extension, were underlined or colored (like hyperlinks in HTML). Scanning a directly listing, the bright red executable files would stand right out from the rest of the black text. Just like people have been taught than underlined text on HTML pages can be clicked, they will learn than bright red files can be executed, and will take the appropriate caution.
Interesting. However it won't ever appear in windows, and Linux/most other operating systems have no need for such a system, being already safer by design.
1: You are an idiot with computers. 2: The default 'do not show file extensions for known file types' is on for explorer.
Whoever thought that last was a good plan should have been shot. Without file extensions visible, people can simply not realise that they are about to run an executable. Plus some wouldn't know all the many executable file extensions for windows anyway.
I do not write like shit. I write like someone, who having had a very stressful day, has availed himself of half a bottle of metaxa, and who realises that his post was not all it should have been.
Politics and science are, so it seems, bumping considerably of late.
I'm speaking here as a scientist of several years experience (most of which I should state has been in the 'oh fuck I am never going to prove my hypothesis' catagory).
Scientists and politicians caan never see eye to eye. The simple reason for this, which I will explain over a couple of sentances, is that science requires evidence with is proveable by the current state of the art, in the full and contented knowledge that the state of the art can be disproved/advanced at any point. Politians do not live in the same world. Their opinions can and must change to reflect the mean (or is it modal?) view of that sector of the population which is most likely to votw for them.
This may sound as if I think they are not as good as scientists, but this is an erronious view. The role of the politician has evolved for over 2000 yeras, starting when the citizens of Athens firs decided that a singler point of faliure what a bit shit, and moving forward to the most mobile of all democracies, that of the United States. In all that time (in my opinion) the scientist has been following a different path to that of the scientist.
A scientist, with what may perhaps be superior knowledge in his domain may cry foul regarding some aspect of current policy. In response, the politician, who lacks the domain knowledge, but has superior knowledge of the political climate, and, one assumes in the general case, is subject to an external optimisation system (voting) that removes the candidates which differ by too much from the required state, either agrees or seeks to discredit the findings of the scientist.
This does, on the face of it, seem to be an insane system, but it has advantages.
Could scientists run the world? Fuck no, I know many, am one myself, and frankly I would run screaming from any mob that claimed this.
Fancy a ruler that would happily spend years persuing a single aspect of a problem? Cos I don't
The principle point is that the world can only work if the extremists, be they political, religious or scientific are not allowed to be in charge. I'm biased, I think that scientific extremism (which is more or less the default state, since specialisation is required), is not that bad, but my own logic requirs that I exclude myself from the set of people allowed to rule.
I wonder what imaginary land the US military and political leaders live in that makes them think they could tool up in space and land defense systems and have no-one else respond...
If China had started first, the US would be responding, and it would be 'Right' and 'Good' that they do so.
China is doing exactly the same thing, and it's bad? Hello? Reality calling, this is not a surprise....
Politicians have picked up on widespread concern amongst the public - believe it or not, that is their function in a democratic society.
Nice point, shame it's wrong. Polititians do not pick up on points of concern to the public, they pick up on the concerns about which there is the most shouting or potential publicity/funding from pressure groups.
The public are not concerned about this issue. Most wouldn't even know about it unless someone plastered it across a newspaper. The lobbyists with money are concerned. If the 'public' were concerned about this they wouldn't be buying the games in the first place.
Plus, unless you legislate to allow search and seizure in peoples houses, there is no chance this law could have any effect *whatsoever*, since people can just go buy the games for their kids themselves
Because y'know, there never was any violence before video games turned up.
What we have here is a handy emotive issue that can be used to make politicians sound like they are 'in touch' with the needs of the community. The fact that its a loads of nonsense obviously has no relevence.
This is my thinking. Sometimes you just want to look at a web page, and you want it to arrive fast.
I use barely any of the features of firefox, tabbed browsing, some addons, rss feed bookmarks is about all. It is very good indeed, and Safari isn't as good yet, but it all depends what you want.
The option in Safari to have none of your history/actions/passwords in a given session saved may make it very appealing for some. The rendering of some web pages is actually nicer looking on my screen in safari as well, which is interesting.
I likely won't use Safari, but nor will I bash it because it isn't exactly like some other product. So what? how boring the world would be if everything was the same.
Avoid Sourceforge, go to Google Code Project Hosting.
Not only is it easier (I moved my project there from sourceforge, and I love it), it's not stuffed to the gills with projects yet, so yours could stand out a bit more.
On the working alone thing. People tend to assume that open source always means co-operative coding. Not so. For example my project, while some people have offered advice from time to time, has been a solo effort from the start. There has never been anyone else I would describe as a second developer on the team.
So I also have to write all my own code. It's not easy, wouldn't I just love some help, but not many people are interested in gravitational system modelling, so I soldier on alone. I am not the only open source developer to be in this situation. We can't all be Apache or kernel devs.
At least we have our own products, and own the rights to our code. How many closed source developers can say that?
aside from the fact that all your questions can be answered by doing a little research that you *should* be doing yourself, I see one problem.
Your code will be closed source? Fine, I don't have much of a care about such, dig out, I plan to do a game, and that will be closed source at first. But your planned software will run on linux, and that gives rise to the problem.
Just say your project proves popular. Well in that case the chances are very high that you will find yourself in competition with an open source equivalent, either existing or created specifically because your software revealed a new need.
You need to look closely at the closed source rationale. It can work, but not everywhere. You could be beaten to a pulp by a small group of co-operating people out to do better then you. There have been some successes with closed software on embedded systems, but those have been heavily invested in, with lots of developers.
I'm guessing you haven't read much early American pulp SF. The ideal human (white, attractive, fanatically obedient to the state) was very much the order of the day in the fiction of that era.
My point is that only people like that would accept the kind of controls being placed on the American population without a fight.
deposed may not be the right word, but hell, since elections appear to be just as easily won in the courtroom as in the counting room, I wonder how wrong I am.
Not too long after they stop accepting IDs from those states that refuse to take part in Real ID I can see something of a Civil rights thing happening.
Just how long have we got to wait until the Neo conservative ruling class get deposed?
I'm something of a fan of Pulp SF, particularly the early stuff, your EE 'Doc' Smith and the like. His worlds were full of the kind of people who would love this stuff. Fanatically loyal, good clean white folk, ready to believe, and die for, anything a government told them. They were also undeniably Aryan in nature. When it comes to fiction, especially fiction of such historical importance to the world of SF I am willing to dismiss such concepts as products of a different age and enjoy traversing the early history of SF. However, to see people trying to change America in such a way that only the fictional American Aryans of the 1930's would accept it as is, is a frightening thing indeed.
Slashdot Mirror
If he isn't, then neither is Seven of Nine. I don't want a universe where hot cybernetics chicks in leotards don't want to assimilate me.
oh, and I guess one of the slashdot admins decided it was another good moment to cause another anti creation flame war. Good job, they're always fun.
Last time I logged in under a pseudonym and posted as a creationist (not my real opinion, but roleplay can amuse). It rocked, people were practically salivating with rage.
me too. I buy a lot of audio online, mostly books, hundreds of pounds worth every few months (no television...). If I found that adverts were appearing in purchased goods I'd cancel that service the next moment.
All we have here is an attempt by microsoft to shuffle quietly away from the failed strategy that was drm.
One teensy problem. Microsoft don't have the power to force other media file players to enact its scheme, and even if they could, no-one in their right mind is going to require that people re-encode their current collections to work with the new system. Hell mine is almost 150gb, most of that audiobooks, with individual files up to 30mb in size, I'm blowed if I'm going to redo it to use media player, which I don't use in any case, because its a bloated tool (not because its made by microsoft, just because its horrible to use). Audible and the apple store, where I shop, use their own protection systems, and both have 'rip th audio cd' in their options for anything I purchase.
This scheme is ultimately unenforceable except for new purchases, and that from people who agree with microsoft. All it will give them is a way to quietly wrap drm in a blanket and heave it off a bridge late one night.
when I first started my training, an old nurse I'd known for years told me to get the ward domestic on my side. compliments, cups of tea, and the odd cake. It worked really well. On busy days there would always be a hot drink saved for me if I was busy, and someone willing to make some toast if I was caught short on the food front.
By my second year of training all these ward domestics were gone. Within a year the hospital infection rate was appalling, but 'we were meeting financial goals'.
Oddly, the single private ward had full time cleaners, lovely carpets, spotless walls and no problems with infection.
Rumours that it was me who sent a shit filled broken commode up in the lift to the private ward as a protest were entirely unfounded.
When I trained as a nurse in the early nineties we were taught to fear the germ. They piled on so much shite about asepsis that you could end up paranoid about bacteria. I am not exaggerating...
On the wards we had anti bacterial soap, and cleaning alcohol dispensers, and there was a strict routine, wash with the soap, then the alcohol, and do so many, many times throughout the day.
The result was nurses with awful skin, and screw the patients, *we* were getting infections.
Within a year someone with a brain dumped the routine, and our soap/alcohol dispensers were replaced with non scented, ordinary liquid soap. Amazingly enough the much espoused explosion of infections because of the mighty germ failed to materialize.
Then they buggered it all up by replacing in house cleaners with minimum wage contract workers, and we got a whole new set of problems, but that's another story.
What surprises me is that this is news now. as far as I'm concerned, this was all sorted out fifteen years ago. I guess different hospitals have different standards.
Hmm, how, by tying together the rear legs of all sheep?
When do the RICO investigations begin?
Rico can't help, he's busy leading the Roughnecks, don't you know anything?
so, If I get the RIAA to do this to my refrigerator, it will keep it chilled enough to mean I can turn off the power and save the environment? Sounds good.
For (i = 0; i24;i++) {
Buy_from_anyone_but_dell();
}
Yup, that covers it
you are mostly correct, but you seem to miss my point. You don't for instance, justify the stealing of phones or phone lines as a means to beat AT&T,
Instead you advocate the ability of others to offer competing services. This is absolutelly valid, and is what I was getting at.
That I have no problem with, its justifying piracy as a means to protest a monopoly which causes me problems.
After all holywood was formed by stealing patented technology and moving to california to escape opressive laws..
Oh wait, shit, um...
Gee, I thought the whole point of a free market was to let businesses succeed/fail based on their ability to deliver a product that people are willing to pay for. There are obviously enough people still paying to see shitty movies that the industry that produces them is being sustained. When there aren't, then I guess it shows that not enough people gave enough of a fuck about that industry's products.
And your point is? Given that the guy you were replying too was talking about piracy, how does your point relate?
If people don't want to see a thing because its shit, it stands to reason it is also less likely to be pirated, because of being shit. 'failure to deliver a product that people are willing to pay for' is nonsense as a justification for piracy. If there was no way for piracy to take place, people would buy more movies. This is self evident. Piracy cannot be used as justification for piracy, that's just silly.
I just an incredibly genius idea. What if all executable files, whatever the common or arcane extension, were underlined or colored (like hyperlinks in HTML). Scanning a directly listing, the bright red executable files would stand right out from the rest of the black text. Just like people have been taught than underlined text on HTML pages can be clicked, they will learn than bright red files can be executed, and will take the appropriate caution.
Interesting. However it won't ever appear in windows, and Linux/most other operating systems have no need for such a system, being already safer by design.
No, no it isn't easy to spot.
Not if either of two conditions apply.
1: You are an idiot with computers.
2: The default 'do not show file extensions for known file types' is on for explorer.
Whoever thought that last was a good plan should have been shot. Without file extensions visible, people can simply not realise that they are about to run an executable. Plus some wouldn't know all the many executable file extensions for windows anyway.
I do not write like shit. I write like someone, who having had a very stressful day, has availed himself of half a bottle of metaxa, and who realises that his post was not all it should have been.
Politics and science are, so it seems, bumping considerably of late.
I'm speaking here as a scientist of several years experience (most of which I should state has been in the 'oh fuck I am never going to prove my hypothesis' catagory).
Scientists and politicians caan never see eye to eye. The simple reason for this, which I will explain over a couple of sentances, is that science requires evidence with is proveable by the current state of the art, in the full and contented knowledge that the state of the art can be disproved/advanced at any point. Politians do not live in the same world. Their opinions can and must change to reflect the mean (or is it modal?) view of that sector of the population which is most likely to votw for them.
This may sound as if I think they are not as good as scientists, but this is an erronious view. The role of the politician has evolved for over 2000 yeras, starting when the citizens of Athens firs decided that a singler point of faliure what a bit shit, and moving forward to the most mobile of all democracies, that of the United States. In all that time (in my opinion) the scientist has been following a different path to that of the scientist.
A scientist, with what may perhaps be superior knowledge in his domain may cry foul regarding some aspect of current policy. In response, the politician, who lacks the domain knowledge, but has superior knowledge of the political climate, and, one assumes in the general case, is subject to an external optimisation system (voting) that removes the candidates which differ by too much from the required state, either agrees or seeks to discredit the findings of the scientist.
This does, on the face of it, seem to be an insane system, but it has advantages.
Could scientists run the world? Fuck no, I know many, am one myself, and frankly I would run screaming from any mob that claimed this.
Fancy a ruler that would happily spend years persuing a single aspect of a problem? Cos I don't
The principle point is that the world can only work if the extremists, be they political, religious or scientific are not allowed to be in charge. I'm biased, I think that scientific extremism (which is more or less the default state, since specialisation is required), is not that bad, but my own logic requirs that I exclude myself from the set of people allowed to rule.
I wonder what imaginary land the US military and political leaders live in that makes them think they could tool up in space and land defense systems and have no-one else respond...
If China had started first, the US would be responding, and it would be 'Right' and 'Good' that they do so.
China is doing exactly the same thing, and it's bad? Hello? Reality calling, this is not a surprise....
[koff] I was trying to be subtle [koff]
Politicians have picked up on widespread concern amongst the public - believe it or not, that is their function in a democratic society.
Nice point, shame it's wrong. Polititians do not pick up on points of concern to the public, they pick up on the concerns about which there is the most shouting or potential publicity/funding from pressure groups.
The public are not concerned about this issue. Most wouldn't even know about it unless someone plastered it across a newspaper. The lobbyists with money are concerned. If the 'public' were concerned about this they wouldn't be buying the games in the first place.
Plus, unless you legislate to allow search and seizure in peoples houses, there is no chance this law could have any effect *whatsoever*, since people can just go buy the games for their kids themselves
Because y'know, there never was any violence before video games turned up.
What we have here is a handy emotive issue that can be used to make politicians sound like they are 'in touch' with the needs of the community. The fact that its a loads of nonsense obviously has no relevence.
I meant closed software on embedded 'linux' systems.
This is my thinking. Sometimes you just want to look at a web page, and you want it to arrive fast.
I use barely any of the features of firefox, tabbed browsing, some addons, rss feed bookmarks is about all. It is very good indeed, and Safari isn't as good yet, but it all depends what you want.
The option in Safari to have none of your history/actions/passwords in a given session saved may make it very appealing for some. The rendering of some web pages is actually nicer looking on my screen in safari as well, which is interesting.
I likely won't use Safari, but nor will I bash it because it isn't exactly like some other product. So what? how boring the world would be if everything was the same.
Avoid Sourceforge, go to Google Code Project Hosting.
Not only is it easier (I moved my project there from sourceforge, and I love it), it's not stuffed to the gills with projects yet, so yours could stand out a bit more.
On the working alone thing. People tend to assume that open source always means co-operative coding. Not so. For example my project, while some people have offered advice from time to time, has been a solo effort from the start. There has never been anyone else I would describe as a second developer on the team.
So I also have to write all my own code. It's not easy, wouldn't I just love some help, but not many people are interested in gravitational system modelling, so I soldier on alone. I am not the only open source developer to be in this situation. We can't all be Apache or kernel devs.
At least we have our own products, and own the rights to our code. How many closed source developers can say that?
aside from the fact that all your questions can be answered by doing a little research that you *should* be doing yourself, I see one problem.
Your code will be closed source? Fine, I don't have much of a care about such, dig out, I plan to do a game, and that will be closed source at first. But your planned software will run on linux, and that gives rise to the problem.
Just say your project proves popular. Well in that case the chances are very high that you will find yourself in competition with an open source equivalent, either existing or created specifically because your software revealed a new need.
You need to look closely at the closed source rationale. It can work, but not everywhere. You could be beaten to a pulp by a small group of co-operating people out to do better then you. There have been some successes with closed software on embedded systems, but those have been heavily invested in, with lots of developers.
I'm guessing you haven't read much early American pulp SF. The ideal human (white, attractive, fanatically obedient to the state) was very much the order of the day in the fiction of that era.
My point is that only people like that would accept the kind of controls being placed on the American population without a fight.
deposed may not be the right word, but hell, since elections appear to be just as easily won in the courtroom as in the counting room, I wonder how wrong I am.
Not too long after they stop accepting IDs from those states that refuse to take part in Real ID I can see something of a Civil rights thing happening.
Just how long have we got to wait until the Neo conservative ruling class get deposed?
I'm something of a fan of Pulp SF, particularly the early stuff, your EE 'Doc' Smith and the like. His worlds were full of the kind of people who would love this stuff. Fanatically loyal, good clean white folk, ready to believe, and die for, anything a government told them. They were also undeniably Aryan in nature.
When it comes to fiction, especially fiction of such historical importance to the world of SF I am willing to dismiss such concepts as products of a different age and enjoy traversing the early history of SF. However, to see people trying to change America in such a way that only the fictional American Aryans of the 1930's would accept it as is, is a frightening thing indeed.