On one hand, it's cool if you think about it, they just sit there and think hey, let's charge these people for something they do every day, and can't stop doing, and requires no effort from our side, and we'll get rich, rich. But thing is, if these people can do this, why on earth should we trust them they won't do even more crazy things in the future ? Why should we trust our country into their hands if they are such ignorant folks ? When will they start charging for every piece of IM message you send ?
And don't forget, you pay all this as an extra above what you pay for having internet service at all.
And what will they do with people who have their own servers ? I can only imagine, however good faith I might have, that they will block every and each "outsider" until they start paying up. For a "service" they do nothing for.
I am not a company. I am not a spammer. But I have a lot of friends and I work in a research institute. I send dozens of valid e-mails every day, and I receive multiples of that number every day (some work related, some mailing lists, and so on). Do they want to charge me ? The institute ?
This whole sh*t smells and walks like another tax. No real reason, no real cause, it's just another way of getting money out of people's pockets.
And it's natural and certain that everybody and dog - besides common people and even some among them - will back this up since they all see the easy money pouring in.
This is stupid, we shall start charging them for every breath they take since they are taking that away from our common airspace and it's just fair if they pay for the privilege.
So, you buy a server, you invest time and/or money to install your mail server. you pay for an internet connection and/or bandwidth usage, you pay for the space your server takes up and the power your server consumes. Then someone knocks on the door and tells you hello mister, from this day on you pay me $x for every mail that leaves your server. Hope the gods would forgive me 'cause I'd certainly smash a chair or two on the guy's head.
In my opinion un-metered plans should not be offered at all, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Hey, please send in your resume to one of these companies, you're their dream employee. Other than that, when you've paid for it, it's not free anymore, even if the meaning of "free" is fairly volatile these days.
You pay for an upload/download capability
I do. then pay for brackets of monthly bandwidth
No, I don't. For one, I would never jump into a capped contract (thankfully we have many options). Then, my off peak hours are not others' off peak hours. I want to use my connection whenever I want for however long I want and for however much data I want. So far, my provider has kept offering such a plan, for 5 years now, with increasing bandwidth.
You want to get a capped connection ? I don't think there's a problem, we can probably find fairly many ISPs that you'd be happy with.
No consumer service I've ever seen has a guaranteed speed claim
Well, you've seen the wrong contracts then. The contract I have has a minimum bandwidth clause and also a maximum out-of-service period limit. But then again, this is not the U.S. here.
99.9+% of life science researchers have never even heard of TeX
99.9% of scientists you happen to know. Certainly not the ones I know - and they are not mathematicians. Speaking for myself I always start by searching for TeX templates at a given journal and/or conference. And, not really surprisingly, the most of the somewhat quality ones all have TeX templates available. It eases our time, and it eases their time spent with the paper. It's nothing wrong with a journal choosing a certain type of submission format (be it a certain Word version or else) and I certainly don't see how this is worth a story submission. It's a journal's own prerogative to ask for whichever formats they see fit and it's the author's responsibility to adhere to those guidelines. That's all.
Who is planning on uploading files they have purchased anyway? That's just dumb.
It's not dumber than lending your CDs to a bunch of people from time to time, it's music you've paid for and let others use it. Yes, I know the scale differs, but we're talking about intentions here which are generally the same.
Even selling used CDs hasn't come under fire. There are plenty of record stores that buy and sell CDs.
Well, maybe in your world it hasn't, but in our world we read articles (even here on/.) about people trying to pass laws about making stores harder to rebuy and resell used CDs.
Next step should be taxing everyone who talks, since by talking you're using their airspace... Let's see, two cents for every word you speak, and I shall be able to by another island every week or so:))
Thing is, I like the mozilla approach ( http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2007/02/offline-zimbr a-with-firefox.html ) better. I think it's because there's no need to install 3rd party apps and such. But thing is, as it seems Google is ahead in this, and if people start adopting it (remains to be seen) then the mozilla approach probably won't stir too much water when it's released.
if the United States stops investment in the world I'd silently add, that a _very_ large part of that money that you speak of being invested is not American money...
About stuff made in the EU. You'd be surprised. It's true China has also flooded the European market with their goods, and many European companies also build their stuff in the far east, it's not true that European countries can't produce enough electronical, clothing, food, vehicle & transportation, etc. goods to meed European demands. It's not as cheap as manufacturing certain stuff in China and such, still, I think I'd dare to say that Europe is far from being so dependent on middle and far east import and manufacturing facilities as the US.
About USD's worth... well, for about a year I still wait to see what you can do to bring it back up to life, and nothing happened, it just keeps going down.
This is f*cking stupid. The Holocaust has nothing to do with beliefs and/or religions, all it has to do is history. History, which all of us, and all of our - and their (whoever they might be) - children should learn and know about, inside out. We, people, are so stupid and ignorant that we have very hard time avoiding and not repeating mistakes, even if we lived to see and experience the old ones we could've learned from. If we don't even tell the next generations about our history, however bad certain parts of it might be, how will they be able to build their better future ?
I know well about denying history. When I was a school kid our history books - I won't tell which country that was - contained so many bullshit at certain parts, related to certain historical events, that even a fairytale would sound more realistic. Our luck was that we had very good and honest teachers all the way (I certainly couldn't know this back then).
We should not let the education system fall back into the middle ages' cultural level. We can't evolve by going backwards.
So what they need is browser cache, cookies, proxies, and Windows. Well, it seems they will only be able to keep track of a very large number of totally uninteresting people - I mean from a security or threat or else point of view. Why would the feds want information about such people ? As from the advertising point of view, well, I say let them do it, and wait till even the average user crowds start hating them for it.
This is nothing else than the good old protection racketing the maffia used to do, then gangs, and now big corps. If you're big enough, or you have the air of being big enough, you don't need to line up all your supposedly available army, just threaten with a big enough voice that you can. Rest assured, there will be enough ordinary people who will instantly pay you up since they fear even the remote possibility of being smacked, even if that army is non-existent. The catch is, if enough of them pays, we'll never ever find out whether that army exists or not. And, after a while, that's not even important anymore.
Since we don't believe any such thing, we need privacy. We need it in order to escape punishment (legal, social, emotional) at the hand of irrational moral codes. Those codes would have us doing stupid things, such as (for example) refrain from spanking an unruly child who is resistant to the more fashionable forms of inflicted discomfort.
I can't really find words to describe how much I agree with you on this one. For one example, I recently have heard from some members of certain groups calling themselves enlightened and liberal and whatnot that parents should have no right to introduce their children into any religion whatsoever during their childhood, so that the children should be able to pick a religion when they gow up. You know, I go to church, not that regularly, but I do, and I'm religious to an extent, but not a zealot. But I still believe that introducing your children to the religion we, and our ancestors belonged to is part of their moral, cultural, social and family education. If they don't like what they see, well, most (again: most) religions (or rather their institutionalized frameworks) are not something permanent, and you're free to pick something else in your life.
This was just one example, I could come up with some more, not religion-related (like someone giving a parently smack to drive out a loved child from the daily histeria period, only to see that a neighbor has called the police who'll take the kid away before asking questions, and so and so and so on) but the point is very many freedom-taking regulations have been inspired by dumbf*cks of our societies, which, sadly, take up a rather big part of it.
Related to surveillance, well, I'd really have nothing against it if it were automatic, i.e. no people watching us, young ladies' legs (and such) zoomed to their liking (oh yeah, it happens), follow us if they think we are wondering around suspiciously while windowshopping, or bringing down on you a bunch of policemen because you entered the subway with a backpack and have not looked into any camera.
But thing is, automated surveillance is in so early shape and having lower intelligence than a two day newborn, that for a long while from now we will be watched by people behind those cameras. And until this is the case, I just don't want to see more - the problem is, we, I, you, nobody can do anything about it. Even the EU has funds for projects in this area with pretty large sums available, and sadly most of these projects don't seem to create anything that'd be more intelligent - up to now, I must add. But I've not lost all hope yet:)
Just like good politicians and good lawyers: you provoke a fight and make the opponent so angry that people will just forget who began the whole thing and tell them hey, they wanted to fight, no wonder we try to defend ourselves. Thing is, this is a very well proven tactic, and we all should just try to clearly avoid it, and try not to make this "sue me first" outburst look like FOSS wanted to challenge Microsoft in the first place. The FOSS world just needs to be very careful in this matter. Maybe this whole thing is just a FUD campaign with a lot of smoke, but we could never know what they hide under the smoke.
He's not a seer in any way, he's more an influencer, i.e. when people like him talk about the "future" of computing, they really mean what they would like to see happen, not what they "know" what will happen. And so many people just hang on these people's every word and believe what they say that when they hear these "fortune telling" sessions they start working towards achieving that "future" to not be lost in the big march led by these people, so eventually these "visions" become reality to an extent. And tada, then you can write articles about how "seers" these people were in the first place:)
Some people just don't get it. It's far enough that we let Microsoft so into our lives as they are now, why on earth would I let them have any kind of control over other aspects of my life, e.g. watching tv ? Why would I tolerate a piece of software that, after I pay money for it, makes my life more restricted instead of easing my life ? Am I stupid enough to believe that this way of life is what I've been waiting and working towards during the last decades ? Hell no. Any software and service I pay for I expect to improve the quality of my life on whichever scale and aspect not make it worse. Before some would ask "then why have you payed for it?" I didn't and I won't. And if the answer is that there's nothing to do, this is the only way from now on, then I'd rather stick to the pathetic miserable level I am at now then to willingly contribute into making our lives suck more.
It's easy really. MS is about making profit through sw development (ok, ok, hw and console and etc but you get the point). The FOSS "movement" if I may call it this way has been built around a philosophy, a way of thinking about freedom, freedom to develop, to share, to distribute, to think, and it's much more than "just" Linux (Linux is just a part of it). Today it's lost most of the early juice since many greenhorns join the party who just don't care about the old ideology, but the core ideas are still there, it's just hard to see and sometimes hard to promote without being dismissed. It's partly this which is the cause many would like to "companize" and "enterprise"-ize (see, I'm good at this:))) Linux so as to loose the ideology and even preach that closed development is just as good or better, don't even talk about the "religion" behind FOSS, I suppose it'd be uncomfortable and awkward.
the original saying is "Understanding is a double-edged sword"
You're right, of course, but one one hand I wanted to quote from B5, and since I messed it up, I thought I'd better correct it, since I can't be caught quoting badly from B5 for all eternity to see now can I:) and on the other hand I still prefer the three-edged version: my side, your side and the truth.
And the whole thing about zombie jesus and his invisible sky daddy isn't just some made-up bullshit? Seriously, what's the difference?
It's not the story, it's the behavior. Nobody would give a smelling rat's ass what you believe in if you're seemingly sane, peaceful and tolerant. Otherwise, what you give is what you get.
Slashdot Mirror
...it seems.
On one hand, it's cool if you think about it, they just sit there and think hey, let's charge these people for something they do every day, and can't stop doing, and requires no effort from our side, and we'll get rich, rich. But thing is, if these people can do this, why on earth should we trust them they won't do even more crazy things in the future ? Why should we trust our country into their hands if they are such ignorant folks ? When will they start charging for every piece of IM message you send ?
And don't forget, you pay all this as an extra above what you pay for having internet service at all.
And what will they do with people who have their own servers ? I can only imagine, however good faith I might have, that they will block every and each "outsider" until they start paying up. For a "service" they do nothing for.
I am not a company. I am not a spammer. But I have a lot of friends and I work in a research institute. I send dozens of valid e-mails every day, and I receive multiples of that number every day (some work related, some mailing lists, and so on). Do they want to charge me ? The institute ?
This whole sh*t smells and walks like another tax. No real reason, no real cause, it's just another way of getting money out of people's pockets.
And it's natural and certain that everybody and dog - besides common people and even some among them - will back this up since they all see the easy money pouring in.
This is stupid, we shall start charging them for every breath they take since they are taking that away from our common airspace and it's just fair if they pay for the privilege.
So, you buy a server, you invest time and/or money to install your mail server. you pay for an internet connection and/or bandwidth usage, you pay for the space your server takes up and the power your server consumes. Then someone knocks on the door and tells you hello mister, from this day on you pay me $x for every mail that leaves your server. Hope the gods would forgive me 'cause I'd certainly smash a chair or two on the guy's head.
In my opinion un-metered plans should not be offered at all, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Hey, please send in your resume to one of these companies, you're their dream employee. Other than that, when you've paid for it, it's not free anymore, even if the meaning of "free" is fairly volatile these days.
You pay for an upload/download capability
I do.
then pay for brackets of monthly bandwidth
No, I don't. For one, I would never jump into a capped contract (thankfully we have many options). Then, my off peak hours are not others' off peak hours. I want to use my connection whenever I want for however long I want and for however much data I want. So far, my provider has kept offering such a plan, for 5 years now, with increasing bandwidth.
You want to get a capped connection ? I don't think there's a problem, we can probably find fairly many ISPs that you'd be happy with.
No consumer service I've ever seen has a guaranteed speed claim
Well, you've seen the wrong contracts then. The contract I have has a minimum bandwidth clause and also a maximum out-of-service period limit. But then again, this is not the U.S. here.
99.9+% of life science researchers have never even heard of TeX
99.9% of scientists you happen to know. Certainly not the ones I know - and they are not mathematicians. Speaking for myself I always start by searching for TeX templates at a given journal and/or conference. And, not really surprisingly, the most of the somewhat quality ones all have TeX templates available. It eases our time, and it eases their time spent with the paper. It's nothing wrong with a journal choosing a certain type of submission format (be it a certain Word version or else) and I certainly don't see how this is worth a story submission. It's a journal's own prerogative to ask for whichever formats they see fit and it's the author's responsibility to adhere to those guidelines. That's all.
Who is planning on uploading files they have purchased anyway? That's just dumb.
It's not dumber than lending your CDs to a bunch of people from time to time, it's music you've paid for and let others use it. Yes, I know the scale differs, but we're talking about intentions here which are generally the same.
Even selling used CDs hasn't come under fire. There are plenty of record stores that buy and sell CDs.
/.) about people trying to pass laws about making stores harder to rebuy and resell used CDs.
Well, maybe in your world it hasn't, but in our world we read articles (even here on
we gave you what you asked for, and you still abused it
Well, maybe it's just me, but I fail to see how the RIAA has given you or us anything at all in this case.
Next step should be taxing everyone who talks, since by talking you're using their airspace... Let's see, two cents for every word you speak, and I shall be able to by another island every week or so :))
Thing is, I like the mozilla approach ( http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2007/02/offline-zimbr a-with-firefox.html ) better. I think it's because there's no need to install 3rd party apps and such. But thing is, as it seems Google is ahead in this, and if people start adopting it (remains to be seen) then the mozilla approach probably won't stir too much water when it's released.
if the United States stops investment in the world
I'd silently add, that a _very_ large part of that money that you speak of being invested is not American money...
About stuff made in the EU. You'd be surprised. It's true China has also flooded the European market with their goods, and many European companies also build their stuff in the far east, it's not true that European countries can't produce enough electronical, clothing, food, vehicle & transportation, etc. goods to meed European demands. It's not as cheap as manufacturing certain stuff in China and such, still, I think I'd dare to say that Europe is far from being so dependent on middle and far east import and manufacturing facilities as the US.
About USD's worth... well, for about a year I still wait to see what you can do to bring it back up to life, and nothing happened, it just keeps going down.
offending Muslim students whose beliefs
This is f*cking stupid. The Holocaust has nothing to do with beliefs and/or religions, all it has to do is history. History, which all of us, and all of our - and their (whoever they might be) - children should learn and know about, inside out. We, people, are so stupid and ignorant that we have very hard time avoiding and not repeating mistakes, even if we lived to see and experience the old ones we could've learned from. If we don't even tell the next generations about our history, however bad certain parts of it might be, how will they be able to build their better future ?
I know well about denying history. When I was a school kid our history books - I won't tell which country that was - contained so many bullshit at certain parts, related to certain historical events, that even a fairytale would sound more realistic. Our luck was that we had very good and honest teachers all the way (I certainly couldn't know this back then).
We should not let the education system fall back into the middle ages' cultural level. We can't evolve by going backwards.
So what they need is browser cache, cookies, proxies, and Windows. Well, it seems they will only be able to keep track of a very large number of totally uninteresting people - I mean from a security or threat or else point of view. Why would the feds want information about such people ? As from the advertising point of view, well, I say let them do it, and wait till even the average user crowds start hating them for it.
This is nothing else than the good old protection racketing the maffia used to do, then gangs, and now big corps. If you're big enough, or you have the air of being big enough, you don't need to line up all your supposedly available army, just threaten with a big enough voice that you can. Rest assured, there will be enough ordinary people who will instantly pay you up since they fear even the remote possibility of being smacked, even if that army is non-existent. The catch is, if enough of them pays, we'll never ever find out whether that army exists or not. And, after a while, that's not even important anymore.
Since we don't believe any such thing, we need privacy. We need it in order to escape punishment (legal, social, emotional) at the hand of irrational moral codes. Those codes would have us doing stupid things, such as (for example) refrain from spanking an unruly child who is resistant to the more fashionable forms of inflicted discomfort.
:)
I can't really find words to describe how much I agree with you on this one. For one example, I recently have heard from some members of certain groups calling themselves enlightened and liberal and whatnot that parents should have no right to introduce their children into any religion whatsoever during their childhood, so that the children should be able to pick a religion when they gow up. You know, I go to church, not that regularly, but I do, and I'm religious to an extent, but not a zealot. But I still believe that introducing your children to the religion we, and our ancestors belonged to is part of their moral, cultural, social and family education. If they don't like what they see, well, most (again: most) religions (or rather their institutionalized frameworks) are not something permanent, and you're free to pick something else in your life.
This was just one example, I could come up with some more, not religion-related (like someone giving a parently smack to drive out a loved child from the daily histeria period, only to see that a neighbor has called the police who'll take the kid away before asking questions, and so and so and so on) but the point is very many freedom-taking regulations have been inspired by dumbf*cks of our societies, which, sadly, take up a rather big part of it.
Related to surveillance, well, I'd really have nothing against it if it were automatic, i.e. no people watching us, young ladies' legs (and such) zoomed to their liking (oh yeah, it happens), follow us if they think we are wondering around suspiciously while windowshopping, or bringing down on you a bunch of policemen because you entered the subway with a backpack and have not looked into any camera.
But thing is, automated surveillance is in so early shape and having lower intelligence than a two day newborn, that for a long while from now we will be watched by people behind those cameras. And until this is the case, I just don't want to see more - the problem is, we, I, you, nobody can do anything about it. Even the EU has funds for projects in this area with pretty large sums available, and sadly most of these projects don't seem to create anything that'd be more intelligent - up to now, I must add. But I've not lost all hope yet
Now they seem to want to fight us.
Just like good politicians and good lawyers: you provoke a fight and make the opponent so angry that people will just forget who began the whole thing and tell them hey, they wanted to fight, no wonder we try to defend ourselves. Thing is, this is a very well proven tactic, and we all should just try to clearly avoid it, and try not to make this "sue me first" outburst look like FOSS wanted to challenge Microsoft in the first place. The FOSS world just needs to be very careful in this matter. Maybe this whole thing is just a FUD campaign with a lot of smoke, but we could never know what they hide under the smoke.
He's not a seer in any way, he's more an influencer, i.e. when people like him talk about the "future" of computing, they really mean what they would like to see happen, not what they "know" what will happen. And so many people just hang on these people's every word and believe what they say that when they hear these "fortune telling" sessions they start working towards achieving that "future" to not be lost in the big march led by these people, so eventually these "visions" become reality to an extent. And tada, then you can write articles about how "seers" these people were in the first place :)
Some people just don't get it. It's far enough that we let Microsoft so into our lives as they are now, why on earth would I let them have any kind of control over other aspects of my life, e.g. watching tv ? Why would I tolerate a piece of software that, after I pay money for it, makes my life more restricted instead of easing my life ? Am I stupid enough to believe that this way of life is what I've been waiting and working towards during the last decades ? Hell no. Any software and service I pay for I expect to improve the quality of my life on whichever scale and aspect not make it worse. Before some would ask "then why have you payed for it?" I didn't and I won't. And if the answer is that there's nothing to do, this is the only way from now on, then I'd rather stick to the pathetic miserable level I am at now then to willingly contribute into making our lives suck more.
Well, I'll be smacked for this, but I don't believe Linux is dead unless Netcraft confirms it :)
It's easy really. MS is about making profit through sw development (ok, ok, hw and console and etc but you get the point). The FOSS "movement" if I may call it this way has been built around a philosophy, a way of thinking about freedom, freedom to develop, to share, to distribute, to think, and it's much more than "just" Linux (Linux is just a part of it). Today it's lost most of the early juice since many greenhorns join the party who just don't care about the old ideology, but the core ideas are still there, it's just hard to see and sometimes hard to promote without being dismissed. It's partly this which is the cause many would like to "companize" and "enterprise"-ize (see, I'm good at this :))) Linux so as to loose the ideology and even preach that closed development is just as good or better, don't even talk about the "religion" behind FOSS, I suppose it'd be uncomfortable and awkward.
Oh, what's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet
F*ck the name, you can call it every way you want, I still don't want any of it.
the original saying is "Understanding is a double-edged sword"
:) and on the other hand I still prefer the three-edged version: my side, your side and the truth.
You're right, of course, but one one hand I wanted to quote from B5, and since I messed it up, I thought I'd better correct it, since I can't be caught quoting badly from B5 for all eternity to see now can I
Well, it's very hard to debate though that it's a very good business model, paying customers, for life.
And the whole thing about zombie jesus and his invisible sky daddy isn't just some made-up bullshit? Seriously, what's the difference?
It's not the story, it's the behavior. Nobody would give a smelling rat's ass what you believe in if you're seemingly sane, peaceful and tolerant. Otherwise, what you give is what you get.
correction: "understanding is a three-edged sword"...