Maybe you're outside of the general demographic that they served. 10-15 years ago, there were few people that I knew between 10 and 20 years of age that didn't visit one or more of those sites occasionally, or at least know of them. In some ways, they filled similar niches to what Youtube videos and smartphone games do now, but in a lower-bandwidth, resolution/device-independent way.
Many of the non-interactive videos can be found on Youtube now, rendered into raster video from the original vector source files. Similarly, most of the game concepts have been replicated in one way or another to various mobile devices.
Optical media, at least the writables we as consumers have access to are completely inadequate for long term storage.
What about something like M-Discs? They're a consumer-available optical medium designed for long-term storage. They require a drive with a higher-powered laser to record, but will read in a standard DVD or Blu-ray drive. Of course, their "1000 years of storage" can't really be tested, but the idea of using an inorganic data layer seems like an improvement, and the discs passed some kind of DoD reliability testing.
That's a wonderful idea if I were just working on my own projects. Clang++'s output *is* much cleaner than GCC's. However, it's more difficult to suggest as one of hundreds of developers in a corporate setting. Politics, legal hoops, inertia, verification that there are vendor-supported packages for that compiler on systems that haven't updated to gcc 4.x, etc.
C++ is essentially a mixture of languages at this point, with several ways to do many things. You can still write very C-like code using C data types, with the pitfalls of C (memory leaks, buffer overflows, etc). You can write more modern-style C++ programs using the container classes, iterators, and RAII techniques to avoid C's pitfalls. You can also end up with a program that's an ugly mash of C and C++.
C++ templates, which enable generic programming, are complicated enough to be their own sub-language, and errors that are output by the compiler about any of the templated container classes can be nigh-incomprehensible on their own, and take up a few dozen lines to describe an error like "You need a random-access iterator here, not just a forward iterator".
There are other examples, but essays can be (and have been) written about unnecessary complexity in C++.
Quit going to church and you will finish the task of disassociating yourself from idiots and their idiotic behavior.
If one lived alone in a cabin in the woods, one would still not succeed at escaping irrationality, since there's still one human nearby. People like to pretend that they're rational, but they're fooling themselves. You'll find the only example of non-idiotic humanity riding a unicorn, taking tea with the Flying Spaghetti Monster, in orbit about 1.3 AU out from a teapot inscribed "Bertrand" on the bottom.
So you're willing to sell off your privacy for a few bucks?
Not under those terms, which is why I don't use store-specific cards (since it's already bad enough that credit processors want to track me). If there were a pay service that could replace FB in all aspects, minus ads and data-gathering, I'd be more than interested to look at it.
How does it feel knowing that there are complete strangers out there that think they know you because of the data they collect on you about purchasing habits?
Honestly? It doesn't bother me. Similar to "How does it feel [...] that think they know you because of your pseudonynmous posts on Slashdot?" I don't do anything important on Facebook, similar to how I don't do anything important on Slashdot. Sometimes, I make posts that don't reflect my feelings, just for a change in pace. Facebook wants to see my false information? Meh.
How will you feel about it when someone gets it wrong?
Amused, so far. FB has been trying to guess where I live for years. I don't think that it's ever guessed the right city, and it guesses the right county only occasionally. More commonly, it picks a state across the country where it knows I have a lot of friends, or in another country. I commonly look up products that friends are interested in, but that I don't care about. I mark random ads as offensive. If they can actually filter the signal from the noise, I actually think that's pretty cool, and I hope some papers eventually get written and released, based on the methods. They've done the work, and all based on information that I wouldn't have a problem yelling to random people on a street corner.
I've observed the following on my wife's Windows phone: - The Line app doesn't do emote pop-ups like it does on my Android phone. If you want to use emotes, you have to look them up manually - Her phone lacks turn-by-turn navigation, and won't narrate directions. It's useless as a car navigation device for those reasons. - As far as I'm aware, Tubecast is the only Windows app that'll stream to Chromecast, and I think it's Youtube-only - Daily reminders to reboot the phone, with the statement that they don't recommend continuing to operate the phone without restarts - All the games advertised on TV: No Windows Phone version. - No emulators - No on-device scripting environments - No on-device command-line - I like having my ssh +ftp clients+servers available on my phone, because they're easier than connecting a cable - No Dropbox app
I am overjoyed that you don't care about any of the things I've listed...but I do. Most of the items aren't critical requirements on their own, but the combination of all of them together means that using a Windows Phone would be a serious reduction in what my phone could do, for me.
My certainty is that the Windows app store lacks most of the software that I want.
Friday was basically about a genetically engineered woman acting as a message courier. Her biggest worry was racism (artificial people being widely hated by the general populace).
I'd be more interested if they provided a server program to run on my own hardware and act as Nest's intelligent backend+database, without an internet connection. It's bad enough that my electrical utility installed smart meters without the option to stick with the normal, non-connected ones.
I see some potential fun to be had with setting up some home automation, and I see value in pre-built hardware that's designed to work together with other hardware, but it ought to be a system where I have as complete control as possible.
My point was that at no time do they offer you access to two regions at once. I haven't read the full terms of use recently, so I'm not sure how exactly it's worded.
They've paid, but only for the things that are offered by Netflix in their country. Netflix's catalog varies country-by-country (and is unavailable in most countries of the world). People use outside services that are against Netflix's use policies to make it look like they're in another country that has the content they want to see.
Your analogy is wrong. My analogy is saying, "Just because a policy's implementation is flawed does not mean the policy is inherently flawed."
I disagree. My analogy is saying that things don't happen just because you say so. Law should follow the will of the people, scientific or not, because anything else is going to cause conflict within society. I think that your entire way of thinking is wrong, because people won't magically conform to laws just because of consequences. If the world was that direct, we could just set the sentence for every crime as death. One of society's obligations is to help and support other members of that society. Otherwise, it's counterproductive for the individual to participate.
Because the speed limits *totally* wouldn't creep downward as revenue drops, when people start watching their speed closer. The motivation for governments putting up speed cameras isn't safety, it's income, pure and simple.
Don't break the law if you don't wish to have your license revoked, it's basically that simple.
If they revoke my license, I still need to get to work, because my family and I like eating and living in a nice home. I'll just be driving without a license and praying not to get caught. The world isn't as simple as you're making it out to be. Imagine if we applied that same logic to programming, after all. "To write perfect software, don't introduce bugs, it's basically that simple."
You don't care about social networking, but you care about what you consider to be others' unprincipled actions. A tool is a tool...you don't care about the tool itself, you care about the results that it gets you. If starting a social network that you'd consider "principled" would fix everyone else's behavior, then that's the tool that you'd use. It doesn't matter that you "don't care" about social networking, because a great mass of other people do.
"Evil" is a very loaded word, and I wouldn't include data-mining under that label. As far as censorship goes, I think you've got to look at their motivation. Is it their intent to suppress speech? No, it's their intent to play a sophisticated game of "Cover Your Ass".
Want to make a real change? Build up a social network where all income comes through subscription fees rather than advertising and selling information. Don't be a citizen of a country that will require you to put backdoors into the network, and don't host any part of it in such a country. Build it so that it provides every functional benefit that Facebook has, without any of the drawbacks. Until you've got a workable alternative, people will continue using what works for them. You don't find the price acceptable, and neither does Stallman (no surprise there), but the herd won't follow until it's made clear to every one of them exactly what they're paying, and to whom...*and* you get a critical mass of users to move to something else.
You can rail against something that you don't like as much as you want, but it's not going to do any practical good.
Judging from the responses to your posts, your opinion isn't as popular as you might have expected. It's certainly a more extreme position than I'd take.
I don't consider sacrificing privacy for convenience to such a degree and enabling Facebook's behavior by using it to be a very principles move.
To which degree? Providing a fake name, birthdate, and other information, blocking image tags, and posting untagged text information? I suppose that they can extract a fair amount of info about me from information that my friends post, but if I didn't have an account, Facebook has algorithms that would infer most of those connections anyhow.
Facebook is a tool that encourages incorrect use. Kind of like a bank, or a credit card. Still, I enjoy the conveniences of direct-deposited paychecks, not carrying around the amounts of cash that would encourage the police to seize it, and paying for things that are difficult to get by cash. Facebook has less utility than a credit card, of course. Therefore, they have less information about me. Although they've done things that I consider annoying, I haven't actually been harmed in a way that I can measure. Part of that is because I haven't given them sufficient leverage to do so.
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means. That's an opinion.
Facebook is intolerable to anyone with actual principles.
"Actual" principles being the principles that you hold, and no one else's principles being "actual", No True Scotsman style.
Social networking is an option for socialization. Almost no one uses it to the exclusion of more traditional social activities, although I agree that Internet socialization is a mere shadow of in-person socialization.
You've either got an oversimplified black-and-white view of the world, or you're just getting a kick out of trolling everyone. Either way, I hope it works out for you. The way I'm living my life is working out wonderfully for me, in spite of our differences of opinion.
You can continue being all "stop liking what I don't like!" I'm gonna get back to talking to my friends and spending time with my wife.
Depends on the plan. I've got unlimited texts and data, don't pay to send or receive calls from mobile devices, and have 10x more minutes for landline calls than I've ever used in a given month. I don't know about payment models for pay-as-you-go plans, because I've never used one, and almost no one that I know has ever had a plan like that.
If Americans are stupid enough to pay to receive SMSes, that's just them being silly
Most plans include unlimited SMS services, but some cheaper ones charge per-message sent or received. There's no reason to insult a nationality over something as stupid as having different phone plans. There are plenty of worthier things to insult America and Americans over, after all.
I know that for most GSM calls, there are a few stream ciphers in common use, and most or all of them can be cracked in realtime. That just covers the connection between your phone and a cell tower, anyhow. It's meant to protect you from eavesdropping, and not much more.
As much as people say that, and as much as it's theoretically true, most schools will include at least some software engineering courses in their computer science degrees. They know what most of their graduates are going to use the degree for.
Doesn't it already work the other way? A seller is offering a product at a stated price. A buyer states that they will pay that price for the product. The sales contract is in effect when the seller ships the product (implicitly accepting the deal), and charges the buyer. If the buyer realizes before the product ships that they'd like to back out of the transaction, they can do so.
At least, that's the theory. In practice, a seller may not be completely honest about whether the product has already shipped or not. And in theory, a seller would check that their price was as it was intended, but in practice, they might not for every transaction.
Browsing the web often involves a fair amount of typing on the web, which isn't comfortable on a tablet. And that I'll often be chatting with one or more friends at the same time, possibly watching a video in another window, etc. If I've got a PC available, it's always going to be my machine of choice, over a tablet. Now, if I'm reading the news before bed or something, a tablet's just fine. But not for much more than the most casual of uses.
I found some information that implies that the Android version will be 4.4, and I think you can sideload Flash on Android devices, even though it's not supported by Adobe any more. (In fact, I just tried it, and it'll run on my Android 5.0 phone just fine)
For desktop Linux, I don't think that Adobe has ever released an ARM port of the plugin, so you'd be out-of-luck if you wanted to run a "real" OS, rather than a mobile one. Well, unless Gnash has gotten good enough to be usable for your purposes. It's been a number of years since I tried it, and it didn't impress me then.
Racism is a belief. Facts can't hold beliefs, although they can be used to support someone's belief. Unreasonable conclusions and unreasonable interpretations of facts can be racist. Facts cannot, and logic cannot.
Say that a bullet-proof study came out saying that blond-haired people are, on average, far less intelligent than brown-haired people (assuming some specific, concrete definition of and way of measuring "intelligence" were to be discovered). In and of itself, that would be a fact. If you add the opinion that "more intelligent is better than less intelligent", then you might come up with the prejudiced opinion that "brown-haired people are better than blond-haired people". That doesn't make the fact itself "colorist". It's only the combination of fact and preconceived opinion that makes the thought colorist.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, I've never heard of any of those websites.
Maybe you're outside of the general demographic that they served. 10-15 years ago, there were few people that I knew between 10 and 20 years of age that didn't visit one or more of those sites occasionally, or at least know of them. In some ways, they filled similar niches to what Youtube videos and smartphone games do now, but in a lower-bandwidth, resolution/device-independent way.
Many of the non-interactive videos can be found on Youtube now, rendered into raster video from the original vector source files. Similarly, most of the game concepts have been replicated in one way or another to various mobile devices.
Optical media, at least the writables we as consumers have access to are completely inadequate for long term storage.
What about something like M-Discs? They're a consumer-available optical medium designed for long-term storage. They require a drive with a higher-powered laser to record, but will read in a standard DVD or Blu-ray drive. Of course, their "1000 years of storage" can't really be tested, but the idea of using an inorganic data layer seems like an improvement, and the discs passed some kind of DoD reliability testing.
That's a wonderful idea if I were just working on my own projects. Clang++'s output *is* much cleaner than GCC's. However, it's more difficult to suggest as one of hundreds of developers in a corporate setting. Politics, legal hoops, inertia, verification that there are vendor-supported packages for that compiler on systems that haven't updated to gcc 4.x, etc.
C++ is essentially a mixture of languages at this point, with several ways to do many things. You can still write very C-like code using C data types, with the pitfalls of C (memory leaks, buffer overflows, etc). You can write more modern-style C++ programs using the container classes, iterators, and RAII techniques to avoid C's pitfalls. You can also end up with a program that's an ugly mash of C and C++.
C++ templates, which enable generic programming, are complicated enough to be their own sub-language, and errors that are output by the compiler about any of the templated container classes can be nigh-incomprehensible on their own, and take up a few dozen lines to describe an error like "You need a random-access iterator here, not just a forward iterator".
There are other examples, but essays can be (and have been) written about unnecessary complexity in C++.
Quit going to church and you will finish the task of disassociating yourself from idiots and their idiotic behavior.
If one lived alone in a cabin in the woods, one would still not succeed at escaping irrationality, since there's still one human nearby. People like to pretend that they're rational, but they're fooling themselves. You'll find the only example of non-idiotic humanity riding a unicorn, taking tea with the Flying Spaghetti Monster, in orbit about 1.3 AU out from a teapot inscribed "Bertrand" on the bottom.
So you're willing to sell off your privacy for a few bucks?
Not under those terms, which is why I don't use store-specific cards (since it's already bad enough that credit processors want to track me). If there were a pay service that could replace FB in all aspects, minus ads and data-gathering, I'd be more than interested to look at it.
How does it feel knowing that there are complete strangers out there that think they know you because of the data they collect on you about purchasing habits?
Honestly? It doesn't bother me. Similar to "How does it feel [...] that think they know you because of your pseudonynmous posts on Slashdot?" I don't do anything important on Facebook, similar to how I don't do anything important on Slashdot. Sometimes, I make posts that don't reflect my feelings, just for a change in pace. Facebook wants to see my false information? Meh.
How will you feel about it when someone gets it wrong?
Amused, so far. FB has been trying to guess where I live for years. I don't think that it's ever guessed the right city, and it guesses the right county only occasionally. More commonly, it picks a state across the country where it knows I have a lot of friends, or in another country. I commonly look up products that friends are interested in, but that I don't care about. I mark random ads as offensive. If they can actually filter the signal from the noise, I actually think that's pretty cool, and I hope some papers eventually get written and released, based on the methods. They've done the work, and all based on information that I wouldn't have a problem yelling to random people on a street corner.
I've observed the following on my wife's Windows phone:
- The Line app doesn't do emote pop-ups like it does on my Android phone. If you want to use emotes, you have to look them up manually
- Her phone lacks turn-by-turn navigation, and won't narrate directions. It's useless as a car navigation device for those reasons.
- As far as I'm aware, Tubecast is the only Windows app that'll stream to Chromecast, and I think it's Youtube-only
- Daily reminders to reboot the phone, with the statement that they don't recommend continuing to operate the phone without restarts
- All the games advertised on TV: No Windows Phone version.
- No emulators
- No on-device scripting environments
- No on-device command-line
- I like having my ssh +ftp clients+servers available on my phone, because they're easier than connecting a cable
- No Dropbox app
I am overjoyed that you don't care about any of the things I've listed...but I do. Most of the items aren't critical requirements on their own, but the combination of all of them together means that using a Windows Phone would be a serious reduction in what my phone could do, for me.
My certainty is that the Windows app store lacks most of the software that I want.
Friday was basically about a genetically engineered woman acting as a message courier. Her biggest worry was racism (artificial people being widely hated by the general populace).
I'd be more interested if they provided a server program to run on my own hardware and act as Nest's intelligent backend+database, without an internet connection. It's bad enough that my electrical utility installed smart meters without the option to stick with the normal, non-connected ones.
I see some potential fun to be had with setting up some home automation, and I see value in pre-built hardware that's designed to work together with other hardware, but it ought to be a system where I have as complete control as possible.
My point was that at no time do they offer you access to two regions at once. I haven't read the full terms of use recently, so I'm not sure how exactly it's worded.
They've paid, but only for the things that are offered by Netflix in their country. Netflix's catalog varies country-by-country (and is unavailable in most countries of the world). People use outside services that are against Netflix's use policies to make it look like they're in another country that has the content they want to see.
Your analogy is wrong. My analogy is saying, "Just because a policy's implementation is flawed does not mean the policy is inherently flawed."
I disagree. My analogy is saying that things don't happen just because you say so. Law should follow the will of the people, scientific or not, because anything else is going to cause conflict within society. I think that your entire way of thinking is wrong, because people won't magically conform to laws just because of consequences. If the world was that direct, we could just set the sentence for every crime as death. One of society's obligations is to help and support other members of that society. Otherwise, it's counterproductive for the individual to participate.
Don't break the law if you don't wish to have your license revoked, it's basically that simple.
If they revoke my license, I still need to get to work, because my family and I like eating and living in a nice home. I'll just be driving without a license and praying not to get caught. The world isn't as simple as you're making it out to be. Imagine if we applied that same logic to programming, after all. "To write perfect software, don't introduce bugs, it's basically that simple."
You don't care about social networking, but you care about what you consider to be others' unprincipled actions. A tool is a tool...you don't care about the tool itself, you care about the results that it gets you. If starting a social network that you'd consider "principled" would fix everyone else's behavior, then that's the tool that you'd use. It doesn't matter that you "don't care" about social networking, because a great mass of other people do.
"Evil" is a very loaded word, and I wouldn't include data-mining under that label. As far as censorship goes, I think you've got to look at their motivation. Is it their intent to suppress speech? No, it's their intent to play a sophisticated game of "Cover Your Ass".
Want to make a real change? Build up a social network where all income comes through subscription fees rather than advertising and selling information. Don't be a citizen of a country that will require you to put backdoors into the network, and don't host any part of it in such a country. Build it so that it provides every functional benefit that Facebook has, without any of the drawbacks. Until you've got a workable alternative, people will continue using what works for them. You don't find the price acceptable, and neither does Stallman (no surprise there), but the herd won't follow until it's made clear to every one of them exactly what they're paying, and to whom...*and* you get a critical mass of users to move to something else.
You can rail against something that you don't like as much as you want, but it's not going to do any practical good.
I don't consider sacrificing privacy for convenience to such a degree and enabling Facebook's behavior by using it to be a very principles move.
To which degree? Providing a fake name, birthdate, and other information, blocking image tags, and posting untagged text information? I suppose that they can extract a fair amount of info about me from information that my friends post, but if I didn't have an account, Facebook has algorithms that would infer most of those connections anyhow.
Facebook is a tool that encourages incorrect use. Kind of like a bank, or a credit card. Still, I enjoy the conveniences of direct-deposited paychecks, not carrying around the amounts of cash that would encourage the police to seize it, and paying for things that are difficult to get by cash. Facebook has less utility than a credit card, of course. Therefore, they have less information about me. Although they've done things that I consider annoying, I haven't actually been harmed in a way that I can measure. Part of that is because I haven't given them sufficient leverage to do so.
That's just a fact.
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means. That's an opinion.
Facebook is intolerable to anyone with actual principles.
"Actual" principles being the principles that you hold, and no one else's principles being "actual", No True Scotsman style.
Social networking is an option for socialization. Almost no one uses it to the exclusion of more traditional social activities, although I agree that Internet socialization is a mere shadow of in-person socialization.
You've either got an oversimplified black-and-white view of the world, or you're just getting a kick out of trolling everyone. Either way, I hope it works out for you. The way I'm living my life is working out wonderfully for me, in spite of our differences of opinion.
You can continue being all "stop liking what I don't like!" I'm gonna get back to talking to my friends and spending time with my wife.
Depends on the plan. I've got unlimited texts and data, don't pay to send or receive calls from mobile devices, and have 10x more minutes for landline calls than I've ever used in a given month. I don't know about payment models for pay-as-you-go plans, because I've never used one, and almost no one that I know has ever had a plan like that.
If Americans are stupid enough to pay to receive SMSes, that's just them being silly
Most plans include unlimited SMS services, but some cheaper ones charge per-message sent or received. There's no reason to insult a nationality over something as stupid as having different phone plans. There are plenty of worthier things to insult America and Americans over, after all.
I know that for most GSM calls, there are a few stream ciphers in common use, and most or all of them can be cracked in realtime. That just covers the connection between your phone and a cell tower, anyhow. It's meant to protect you from eavesdropping, and not much more.
As much as people say that, and as much as it's theoretically true, most schools will include at least some software engineering courses in their computer science degrees. They know what most of their graduates are going to use the degree for.
Doesn't it already work the other way? A seller is offering a product at a stated price. A buyer states that they will pay that price for the product. The sales contract is in effect when the seller ships the product (implicitly accepting the deal), and charges the buyer. If the buyer realizes before the product ships that they'd like to back out of the transaction, they can do so.
At least, that's the theory. In practice, a seller may not be completely honest about whether the product has already shipped or not. And in theory, a seller would check that their price was as it was intended, but in practice, they might not for every transaction.
Browsing the web often involves a fair amount of typing on the web, which isn't comfortable on a tablet. And that I'll often be chatting with one or more friends at the same time, possibly watching a video in another window, etc. If I've got a PC available, it's always going to be my machine of choice, over a tablet. Now, if I'm reading the news before bed or something, a tablet's just fine. But not for much more than the most casual of uses.
I found some information that implies that the Android version will be 4.4, and I think you can sideload Flash on Android devices, even though it's not supported by Adobe any more. (In fact, I just tried it, and it'll run on my Android 5.0 phone just fine)
For desktop Linux, I don't think that Adobe has ever released an ARM port of the plugin, so you'd be out-of-luck if you wanted to run a "real" OS, rather than a mobile one. Well, unless Gnash has gotten good enough to be usable for your purposes. It's been a number of years since I tried it, and it didn't impress me then.
Racism is a belief. Facts can't hold beliefs, although they can be used to support someone's belief. Unreasonable conclusions and unreasonable interpretations of facts can be racist. Facts cannot, and logic cannot.
Say that a bullet-proof study came out saying that blond-haired people are, on average, far less intelligent than brown-haired people (assuming some specific, concrete definition of and way of measuring "intelligence" were to be discovered). In and of itself, that would be a fact. If you add the opinion that "more intelligent is better than less intelligent", then you might come up with the prejudiced opinion that "brown-haired people are better than blond-haired people". That doesn't make the fact itself "colorist". It's only the combination of fact and preconceived opinion that makes the thought colorist.