No it isn't; the total value in the system changes over time - the dow jones or whatever tends, in the long term, to rise.
For every buyer there is a seller, for every winner, there must be a loser.
No; mutually profitable trades can be made when something is worth more to the buyer than it is to the seller. That's the fundamental basis of capitalism.
except if a technology is widespread and not proprietary it is rarely a plug-in because you suffer performance penalties
Hardly - in most implementations plugins run as native-code libraries. Witness e.g. winamp, where every single decoder is a plugin - not just the esoteric ones like TTA, but even MP3. And it's quite possibly the best-performing GUI music player out there.
Not necessarily because IE's implementation might provide some of the features we need and suddenly there would be competition between IE's implementation and Adobe's for which is best
Right, but the useful thing there is the competition. Which could happen equally well if there were two competing plugins.
perhaps the ideal would be to hand all video to the OS and let the OS handle it with a single configuration other apps can tap into.
Yeah - which is exactly what video for windows does (which is how IE will play embedded video), and e.g. gstreamer is trying to offer the same thing on linux (I've no idea what mac is doing). These are the appropriate ways for web browsers to play video, not implementing their own separate decoder engine.
You're conflating two things. The problems with flash are caused by flash being proprietary, not flash being a plugin; if MS built flash into IE, we'd still have all the same problems. If you display open standard videos using (say) the embed tag, then it would actually be easier for a disabled person to use - because it would just use their system player, which would presumably be already set up for their own preferences, rather than having to configure the browser's player that's completely separated from the player they watch DVDs etc. on.
Instead of having 100 kids all at the same time, it'd be better to have mini-generations of 33 kids at a time, with seven years between each cohort. (The wiki article says that the key timeframe is birth through age 6). Then for any given individual, instead of having 100 "siblings" off limits, there'd be about 33 siblings but 66 non-siblings (half of which are the right gender).
I don't think it works like that: Westermarck causes people to get weirded out about sex with people they grew up in close contact with, whether or not they're exactly the same age. AIUI.
Because the Web is hardware and platform independent, and plugins are not.
At some point something has to use the native system. Demanding an OS provide the capability to play videos seems far more reasonable than demanding a browser do so - it's a common requirement, not something specific to web browsing.
Because today's Web user is a consumer who doesn't know what a plugin is and doesn't want to manually update it or install a collection of them or be told they don't have the right one.
So ship with sensible defaults - but don't remove the possibility of doing advanced things just because they might confuse some users.
Because there is an almost 10 year old ISO/IEC video standard that is available in the hardware of every PC and mobile, so that they can play the same video that FlashPlayer and QuickTime player play but without having to have the software players.
It's available in the hardware and OS of every PC and mobile. But it's not available in every browser. So why were you arguing that the browser should do the playback again?
Because hardware playback takes much less battery power and less expensive hardware than software playback.
And you think having the/browser/ do the playback will make it/easier/ to use hardware capabilities? Ahahahahahaha. Ha.
Because little plugin makers like Adobe become tin pot dictators and they to play gatekeeper with Web content that should be universally accessible.
That's nothing to what you see from browser makers once html gets complex enough that only multimillion-dollar organizations can make browsers. Which is what will happen if browsers have to implement every single bit of functionality themselves. What's next, different operating systems render their text differently so clearly web browsers should include their own font rendering engines?
Because plugins are an accessibility nightmare compared to HTML.
How? Idiots using flash for static text content are an accessibility nightmare, but for straight-up video, putting it in a video tag rather than an embed tag isn't going to make any difference.
Because plugins are a security nightmare compared to HTML.
With html5 the opposite is true. At this stage we've got a pretty good idea of what is and isn't safe to trust from random websites - think flashblock. But we're used to thinking of HTML as simple documents, that can't possibly harm our computers however maliciously they were crafted. When html5 becomes big, prepare for a whole new swarm of attack vectors.
Because plugins limit hardware innovation, for example, the "smartbook" ARM notebook was rejected by PC makers
If it's impossible to write a video player on ARM, then in plugin-world at least you could write some kind of web browser, and see a degraded version of the internet. Wheras in your world, if you can't write an ARM video player then you can't write a web browser at all. So you're worse off with html than with plugins.
Now, I suspect the issue was not that it's impossible to write a video player for ARM, but rather than Flash licensing prevented it being used. But that's a separate problem; we're talking about plugin vs built-in, and with plugins that themselves follow open standards that simply isn't a problem. Rather, a plugin landscape encourages innovation by letting new hardware/browser makers implement a "bare minimum" html and add features gradually. And from the other side, new proposed features for the web can be introduced as plugins to start with (see SVG), allowing us to use them on sites and try them out before demanding that they be added to every web browser.
Me, I say, it sucks monkey out of the stock market. If it didn't the HFT people wouldn't bother doing it. The money comes from somewhere, and that somewhere is other investors. If it *doesn't* come from somewhere then creating it means there's more money and it comes from everyone via inflation.
The whole point of the stock market is it's not a zero-sum game - the companies you invest in are creating wealth (by building a better mousetrap, from materials and labour that are worth less than the finished product), which goes to their owners, i.e. the stockholders.
Now, you're right in that the money that HFT guys make comes in the immediate from other investors. So flip it around: if all they're doing is creaming off profit, why would anyone ever buy from them or sell to them. Answer: they give you the best prices, the narrowest spreads. That's the service they offer, and that makes things better for everyone else in the market - that's what we mean by providing liquidity.
Me, I'd scale back the whole thing massively because I still haven't had anyone explain adequately to me how, after they've gone public, the company's stock market valuation matters (to the company) for anything at all
The stock price isn't (primarily) for company whose stock it is. The stock price is for the benefit of investors who want to buy/sell it. Having a liquid stock market, with stock prices that go up, encourages those with money to invest it in enterprises which create wealth and benefit society, rather than sitting on it. This is all basic stuff.
The Westermarck effect only occurs if you don't shag. If you start shagging from launch, you can just keep going.
It's a problem for a generation ship - if your second generation consists of say 100 kids who grew up together in the close confines of a spaceship, they're going to see each other like siblings and get seriously weirded out at the notion of having sex with each other.
I've never seen anything using elasticity to lift something that big. The coolest (and most practical) suggestion I've seen for giving rockets an initial leg up is launching them from helium balloons that're already at 20000ft. Not sure how far they got with that one.
Right now there is more suffering being caused by pedophiles than by me not hosting their CP.
The question to ask is not that, but rather: would your hosting their CP result in more or less suffering, overall. Which is more likely to harm children: a pedophile who has ready access to CP, or one who doesn't?
Actually Freenet (and Tor and the various other darknet schemes) are probably completely pointless, and won't make a bit of difference. Would they have helped in Egypt, for example?
They already did - they forced the government to harm its own interests by shutting down the internet completely, rather than just blocking the particular sites they wanted to keep their citizens away from.
Truth is no longer an absolute defence, if the truth was told maliciously - there was a recent case about this (AIUI, boss sent an email around stating that person X had been terminated for lying on his expenses).
In the case of a government in possible collapse, with partial but not full control over the army and police, whether or not there's a law could make quite a difference to whether an ISP will listen to them.
What's your major issue with Australia anyway? The R rated games ban thing? If that's the biggest civil liberties issue in a country, it makes it pretty good by world standards.
What about the ridiculous child porn laws? IIRC they've sent a guy to jail for pictures of Simpsons characters.
Well, first of all, geeks were hardly the early adopters of facebook.
Twitter, maybe. Facebook, no.
Disagree. Back in the days where it still had a The at the start of its name, Facebook was very much a geek thing; of course it was restricted to students at that stage, so maybe you didn't see it.
The only thing my P4 doesn't do is HD video, but I'm okay with that since my 700k connection doesn't do HD either.
You can download videos overnight to watch in the morning, or buy them on bluray. I'm guessing you're not playing recent games either. Nothing wrong with either position of course, but I think you'll find it's not the industry that's changed to make it not worth upgrading, it's you getting older.
Now my Pentium 3(?) 700 MHz laptop is long in the tooth, and often runs too slow for my taste, but it is just a laptop. I don't use it much except for travel.
And you don't like to watch video or play games while travelling?
now, if they had separate chips on the mobo for sata then the damage would have been contained and you simply disable the onboard controller and install a pci-e card instead.
You can still do that.
And realistically, normal people don't upgrade their computers piecemeal anymore - it's not worth the effort.
They're not liberties granted - who would grant them? They're rights which are mentioned to ensure the government may not infringe upon them, but they would exist even without that.
Have you tested anything AJAXy in firefox? I've found that non-"valid" but perfectly working html (e.g. nesting divs inside tables) can cause firefox's dom to get very confused, and so AJAX-updating parts of your page breaks in surprising ways.
No idea whether this is just firefox being over-fussy, but it's a bug I've come across induced by non-compliant HTML.
Here's what I don't understand: How TF can the screenreader understand a tag but not understand a tag? How hard would it be for the screenreader to preprocess its html and replace with ? Heck, I'll write a couple of lines of perl to do it if you like.
Humans are always going to be able to kill other people - how would you even start to prevent that? So I think working against religion is a better use of my energy than trying to eliminate force.
We don't have a clue how to build machinery that lasts that long, any interstellar craft is still on the highly speculative "if we get a fusion / anti-matter drive" level.
I don't think that's entirely true; there are plans for interstellar ships (Orion?) buildable with current technology. With nuclear pulse propulsion, 0.1c is entirely feasible, and so a pseudo-generation ship could make it to a nearby star more-or-less within a human lifetime.
I did run into some 'social' subsystem (akonadi or some such) that actually launches a MySQL instance with a 50MiB (and growing) seed database to track one thing or another (or something; I haven't the faintest idea what it's trying to do.) Fortunately it can be removed with few consequence
If you really mean akonadi, does kmail still work? I've never been able to manage that, which is really irritating because akonadi breaks all the fricking time and it would be nice to be able to read my emails. But I suspect you mean nepomuk?
Slashdot Mirror
Stock trading is a zero sum game.
No it isn't; the total value in the system changes over time - the dow jones or whatever tends, in the long term, to rise.
For every buyer there is a seller, for every winner, there must be a loser.
No; mutually profitable trades can be made when something is worth more to the buyer than it is to the seller. That's the fundamental basis of capitalism.
except if a technology is widespread and not proprietary it is rarely a plug-in because you suffer performance penalties
Hardly - in most implementations plugins run as native-code libraries. Witness e.g. winamp, where every single decoder is a plugin - not just the esoteric ones like TTA, but even MP3. And it's quite possibly the best-performing GUI music player out there.
Not necessarily because IE's implementation might provide some of the features we need and suddenly there would be competition between IE's implementation and Adobe's for which is best
Right, but the useful thing there is the competition. Which could happen equally well if there were two competing plugins.
perhaps the ideal would be to hand all video to the OS and let the OS handle it with a single configuration other apps can tap into.
Yeah - which is exactly what video for windows does (which is how IE will play embedded video), and e.g. gstreamer is trying to offer the same thing on linux (I've no idea what mac is doing). These are the appropriate ways for web browsers to play video, not implementing their own separate decoder engine.
You're conflating two things. The problems with flash are caused by flash being proprietary, not flash being a plugin; if MS built flash into IE, we'd still have all the same problems. If you display open standard videos using (say) the embed tag, then it would actually be easier for a disabled person to use - because it would just use their system player, which would presumably be already set up for their own preferences, rather than having to configure the browser's player that's completely separated from the player they watch DVDs etc. on.
Instead of having 100 kids all at the same time, it'd be better to have mini-generations of 33 kids at a time, with seven years between each cohort. (The wiki article says that the key timeframe is birth through age 6). Then for any given individual, instead of having 100 "siblings" off limits, there'd be about 33 siblings but 66 non-siblings (half of which are the right gender).
I don't think it works like that: Westermarck causes people to get weirded out about sex with people they grew up in close contact with, whether or not they're exactly the same age. AIUI.
Because the Web is hardware and platform independent, and plugins are not.
At some point something has to use the native system. Demanding an OS provide the capability to play videos seems far more reasonable than demanding a browser do so - it's a common requirement, not something specific to web browsing.
Because today's Web user is a consumer who doesn't know what a plugin is and doesn't want to manually update it or install a collection of them or be told they don't have the right one.
So ship with sensible defaults - but don't remove the possibility of doing advanced things just because they might confuse some users.
Because there is an almost 10 year old ISO/IEC video standard that is available in the hardware of every PC and mobile, so that they can play the same video that FlashPlayer and QuickTime player play but without having to have the software players.
It's available in the hardware and OS of every PC and mobile. But it's not available in every browser. So why were you arguing that the browser should do the playback again?
Because hardware playback takes much less battery power and less expensive hardware than software playback.
And you think having the /browser/ do the playback will make it /easier/ to use hardware capabilities? Ahahahahahaha. Ha.
Because little plugin makers like Adobe become tin pot dictators and they to play gatekeeper with Web content that should be universally accessible.
That's nothing to what you see from browser makers once html gets complex enough that only multimillion-dollar organizations can make browsers. Which is what will happen if browsers have to implement every single bit of functionality themselves. What's next, different operating systems render their text differently so clearly web browsers should include their own font rendering engines?
Because plugins are an accessibility nightmare compared to HTML.
How? Idiots using flash for static text content are an accessibility nightmare, but for straight-up video, putting it in a video tag rather than an embed tag isn't going to make any difference.
Because plugins are a security nightmare compared to HTML.
With html5 the opposite is true. At this stage we've got a pretty good idea of what is and isn't safe to trust from random websites - think flashblock. But we're used to thinking of HTML as simple documents, that can't possibly harm our computers however maliciously they were crafted. When html5 becomes big, prepare for a whole new swarm of attack vectors.
Because plugins limit hardware innovation, for example, the "smartbook" ARM notebook was rejected by PC makers
If it's impossible to write a video player on ARM, then in plugin-world at least you could write some kind of web browser, and see a degraded version of the internet. Wheras in your world, if you can't write an ARM video player then you can't write a web browser at all. So you're worse off with html than with plugins.
Now, I suspect the issue was not that it's impossible to write a video player for ARM, but rather than Flash licensing prevented it being used. But that's a separate problem; we're talking about plugin vs built-in, and with plugins that themselves follow open standards that simply isn't a problem. Rather, a plugin landscape encourages innovation by letting new hardware/browser makers implement a "bare minimum" html and add features gradually. And from the other side, new proposed features for the web can be introduced as plugins to start with (see SVG), allowing us to use them on sites and try them out before demanding that they be added to every web browser.
Me, I say, it sucks monkey out of the stock market. If it didn't the HFT people wouldn't bother doing it. The money comes from somewhere, and that somewhere is other investors. If it *doesn't* come from somewhere then creating it means there's more money and it comes from everyone via inflation.
The whole point of the stock market is it's not a zero-sum game - the companies you invest in are creating wealth (by building a better mousetrap, from materials and labour that are worth less than the finished product), which goes to their owners, i.e. the stockholders.
Now, you're right in that the money that HFT guys make comes in the immediate from other investors. So flip it around: if all they're doing is creaming off profit, why would anyone ever buy from them or sell to them. Answer: they give you the best prices, the narrowest spreads. That's the service they offer, and that makes things better for everyone else in the market - that's what we mean by providing liquidity.
Me, I'd scale back the whole thing massively because I still haven't had anyone explain adequately to me how, after they've gone public, the company's stock market valuation matters (to the company) for anything at all
The stock price isn't (primarily) for company whose stock it is. The stock price is for the benefit of investors who want to buy/sell it. Having a liquid stock market, with stock prices that go up, encourages those with money to invest it in enterprises which create wealth and benefit society, rather than sitting on it. This is all basic stuff.
It's a problem for a generation ship - if your second generation consists of say 100 kids who grew up together in the close confines of a spaceship, they're going to see each other like siblings and get seriously weirded out at the notion of having sex with each other.
I've never seen anything using elasticity to lift something that big. The coolest (and most practical) suggestion I've seen for giving rockets an initial leg up is launching them from helium balloons that're already at 20000ft. Not sure how far they got with that one.
Right now there is more suffering being caused by pedophiles than by me not hosting their CP.
The question to ask is not that, but rather: would your hosting their CP result in more or less suffering, overall. Which is more likely to harm children: a pedophile who has ready access to CP, or one who doesn't?
Actually Freenet (and Tor and the various other darknet schemes) are probably completely pointless, and won't make a bit of difference. Would they have helped in Egypt, for example?
They already did - they forced the government to harm its own interests by shutting down the internet completely, rather than just blocking the particular sites they wanted to keep their citizens away from.
Citation - or rather, moral justification - needed. Kant would certainly see a difference between the two cases.
Truth is no longer an absolute defence, if the truth was told maliciously - there was a recent case about this (AIUI, boss sent an email around stating that person X had been terminated for lying on his expenses).
For me, stability. Linux 2.6 has gotten worse and worse, wheras I recently switched to FreeBSD and it's been rock solid. ZFS is nice too.
In the case of a government in possible collapse, with partial but not full control over the army and police, whether or not there's a law could make quite a difference to whether an ISP will listen to them.
What's your major issue with Australia anyway? The R rated games ban thing? If that's the biggest civil liberties issue in a country, it makes it pretty good by world standards.
What about the ridiculous child porn laws? IIRC they've sent a guy to jail for pictures of Simpsons characters.
Nothing you can afford can handle a "Big DDOS attack".
Pfft. The sun box I picked up for free can do it just fine - because it serves static pages, and is configured to do just that and nothing else.
Well, first of all, geeks were hardly the early adopters of facebook. Twitter, maybe. Facebook, no.
Disagree. Back in the days where it still had a The at the start of its name, Facebook was very much a geek thing; of course it was restricted to students at that stage, so maybe you didn't see it.
The only thing my P4 doesn't do is HD video, but I'm okay with that since my 700k connection doesn't do HD either.
You can download videos overnight to watch in the morning, or buy them on bluray. I'm guessing you're not playing recent games either. Nothing wrong with either position of course, but I think you'll find it's not the industry that's changed to make it not worth upgrading, it's you getting older.
Now my Pentium 3(?) 700 MHz laptop is long in the tooth, and often runs too slow for my taste, but it is just a laptop. I don't use it much except for travel.
And you don't like to watch video or play games while travelling?
now, if they had separate chips on the mobo for sata then the damage would have been contained and you simply disable the onboard controller and install a pci-e card instead.
You can still do that.
And realistically, normal people don't upgrade their computers piecemeal anymore - it's not worth the effort.
The proprietary format Fairplay (AAC with DRM) was only if you bought iTunes music. This was exactly the same as WindowsPlayForSure model.
No it isn't. MS licenses their DRM to anyone who wants to run a music store, at the same fixed price/track. Apple won't let anyone else use theirs.
They're not liberties granted - who would grant them? They're rights which are mentioned to ensure the government may not infringe upon them, but they would exist even without that.
No idea whether this is just firefox being over-fussy, but it's a bug I've come across induced by non-compliant HTML.
Here's what I don't understand: How TF can the screenreader understand a tag but not understand a tag? How hard would it be for the screenreader to preprocess its html and replace with ? Heck, I'll write a couple of lines of perl to do it if you like.
Humans are always going to be able to kill other people - how would you even start to prevent that? So I think working against religion is a better use of my energy than trying to eliminate force.
I don't think that's entirely true; there are plans for interstellar ships (Orion?) buildable with current technology. With nuclear pulse propulsion, 0.1c is entirely feasible, and so a pseudo-generation ship could make it to a nearby star more-or-less within a human lifetime.
If you really mean akonadi, does kmail still work? I've never been able to manage that, which is really irritating because akonadi breaks all the fricking time and it would be nice to be able to read my emails. But I suspect you mean nepomuk?