As a die-hard east coaster, I find it to be rather odd that many of the people that desire to kill wild animals depend upon my tax dollars for their jobs.
That sort of thing is never a one-way street. I think if you consider the hypothetical question "what would happen to me if the federal government and its impact in my life disappeared tomorrow?" you would find that it would impact you every bit as much as that rancher. Probably a whole heck of a lot more.
It seems to be an argument against large, central government that we all somehow get bitching rights about the way the other chooses to live and work, since we're all in some theoretical sense subsidizing one another. It just turns public life into a gigantic wankfest.
If it wasn't for my tax support of their job, there wouldn't be a "debate" around whehter or not we should kill the mountain lion.
You know, they'd be farming or ranching or whatever without agriculture subsidies and other federal support. They'd be somewhat poorer. (or not, if you buy some of the more conservative views, which I mostly don't) They'd also by and large be very happy if there was NOT a federal presence in their lives or their business, which of course won't happen since a lot of the land still belongs to the US government...
As for my "pigheadedness"...Yes. It is a pigheaded point of view. But, there is nothing wrong with it. Most people in the U.S. are permitted to make a choice as to where they live. As long as their choice doesn't impact me, I don't care. But, whether it is a hurricane or a Mountain Lion, the Financial Impact of the issue gives me a right to be as pigheaded as I want.
Not really, no. I mean, of course you have that right, but not because of the way your money is being spent in this case.
Look, I'm with you on the hurricane/flood plain thing. It's dumb that people keep building in the same place over and over again and we keep bailing them out. It's not analogous to a situation where we impose an arbitrary value judgement on wildlife and the hunting thereof. The financial stake isn't there, it's disingenous to pretend that it is. Some people just don't like the idea of nice (or not so nice, really) little animals being hunted.
If you say to them "you can manage the predatory wildlife yourselves but I am not going to pay for it" their answer will be "okay, no problem." Count on it.
Wild Animals? Well, wild animal attacks mean federal tax dollars are spent hunting, killing and/or relocating wild animals. The last time I checked, my tax dollars were used to pay the various Park Rangers that perform these tasks. I damn well do have a say.
Farmers are traditionally the ones who cull the preditors, for obvious reasons. Whether a few rangers are paid to do it is trivia - nobody cares, it doesn't matter, if you stop paying the rangers to do it the debate still exists.
The political question has always been whether people ought to be allowed to hunt predators in their own state, or whether they'll be declared "endangered", which makes hunting them a federal crime. So explain to me why a kiddo in the suburbs ought to have a say in how a community in some other part of the country decides this question for themselves? If they fuck up the ecology in their state they'll certainly pay for it, and you can keep as many lions and tigers and bears in your state as you like.
Either learn to deal with the situation you put yourself into or move.
Killing the predators is certainly one means of dealing with the situation. It works really well: no more predators, the prey are safe.
There are situations where I should have input on where people live. That situation occurs when their choice of housing impacts me financially. Every time there is a hurricane, my tax dollars are spent to rebuild homes right back in the hurricane zone. Every time there is an earthquake, my tax dollars are spent to rebuild the infrastructure that was destroyed.
Those all support your (pigheaded) "it's my tax money" thing a lot better, since in those cases the issue does hingle on federal money being spent. The "wild animal" issue doesn't hinge on money, never has.
Go ahead and configure a P4/3.4Ghz workstation machine with 4gb of RAM on Dell's site for less than $999 and give me the URL. I'd love to see what you come up with.
Right. Which has nothing to do with what I said, but okay.
This configuration is exactly what Steve Jobs used at WWDC and essentially what he's shipping for the Developer Workstations (also $999.00 + ADC Select/Premiere membership, $500.00 or $3,500).
Interesting, if true, but it's a loaner machine which you need to pay for. Yippee. Which still sort of begs the question, what the fuck were you talking about when comparing this to a "$999 Dell"?
I sure hope those kinds of specs aren't necessary to get decent performance out of the new OS X.
Not me. I live in the suburbs. People can choose to live wherever they want. If you choose to live in a hurricane zone, you will have hurricanes. If you choose to live in an earthquake zone, you will have earthquakes. If you choose to live in an area where Mountain Lions, Bobcats and Alligators live, you will see those animals (BTW, there are relatives of the Mountain Lion in Florida).
If people can't handle living in an area where wild animals live, either people should learn to deal with the results of their choice in living arrangements...or they should move.
Or perhaps they should hunt the dangerous animals down and kill them. I'm sure they'd be curious why some chump from the suburbs feels he has input on their decision.
So, based on the fact that Mountain Lions can kill people, should we also go after dogs? According to this site, in the U.S. between 1979 and the late 1990s, over 300 people were killed by dogs. That means your family dog is much more likely to kill you than any "wild animal".
No. It means no such thing. Please tell me you don't believe what you're saying...
For $999 you can get two Dell PCs, a keg of beer, and a night with three Welsh hookers. Don't ask me how I know. The point is, you must be used to paying Apple prices, that figure is way off.
It would have been relatively simple for Apple to personalize each copy of OS X Intel that it sent out to developers. I find it pretty strange that we haven't heard about legal action against whomever distributed their copy. Perhaps Apple purposely didn't watermark the installers so the balance could tilt towards hype without them having to sue a developer.
Barring something truly elaborate, it would simply take two registered developers working in concert to figure out such a watermarking scheme, if they thought to look for it.
Over the years several artists wanting to sell work to museums and/or have work shown in museums/galleries have hit a legal 'glass ceiling' due to the issue of IP.
Is that just another way of saying they didn't want to pay to use the technology, like a game publisher has to?
Professional artists and level designers are too smart to undermine their income by giving away their labor for free.
Strictly speaking that's not true. A lot of video game artists get their start giving their work away, in mods and such. They just don't do it forever...
Congrats to them for their efforts and thanks on behalf of those who enjoy playing it, but let's see a viable open source FPS that competes with, and exceeds, the big-boys. And I mean one developed from the ground up as open source.
The problem is that the "open source" nonsense is just fucking irrelevant one way or the other. Make a killer new game engine, something competitive with Doom 3, and release it under the GPL. What have you got? Not much.
The difficulty in getting a killer new game out is in the content and design, not the cost or difficulty of creating a game engine. Look, there are plenty of mod teams that have access to the doom3 engine's features already. They won't match the commercial doom3-based games, and it's not because they have a game engine which isn't competitive. It's because the game engine is largely irrelevant.
To get a "viable open source FPS that competes with, and exceeds, the big-boys" the first thing you need to do is convince professional artists and level-designers to work really hard for free. Good luck with that.
Beyond that, one of the advantages of them controlling hardware and software is the fact that they can do more rigorous quality control, because they KNOW the configuration your machine will be running.
There isn't any more or less rigor involved in QA when there are fewer variables. The job just takes less time./nitpick
You don't think Carmack develops on a mac because he's a moron do you?
Calling John Carmack...
Somehow I doubt he has abandoned Visual Studio in favor of apple whatever. The fact that NT versions are always done first makes me doubt this even more. Let me guess, you read somewhere that he owns a Mac?
It does, actually. The derived versions must not carry the "GPL" name, though. It's a similar situation for FireFox, with it's trademark license. Basically, that phrase is there to ensure branding. Otherwise, I could create and release a different "GPL" that could effectively lock people out of some of their rights.
Every item asserted by the above paragraph is untrue. Just an FYI for the casual reader.
Lastly, HP can't just open up HP-UX without a huge amount of work; there is code in there which is licensed under arrangements incompatible with the GPL. Case in point: HP licenses the SVR4 codebase, and I believe there is some ongoing litigation involving the contract conditions around that. Can't quite remember the company's name...
Scoff? Scold? Squelch?
Yeah, that really kept Sun from releasing their Unix as open source. Oh wait, it didn't.
Can we please refer to Open Source either using the phrase "Open Source" or with the abbreviation "OSS"?? The "OS" usually stands for "Operating System".
Okay, here's a pet peeve. "OSS" refers to a variety of audio drivers. It's going to need to continue doing that even if we manage to get most people to use "OSS" as an acronym for Open Source Software. So maybe we should reconsider...
Okay, companies which have released as much OSS software as IBM and Sun should listen to HP because... why?
I'm sure the Eclipse people and the OpenSolaris project, among many others, have been waiting with great anxiety for HP's opinion of what they are doing. "Hey guys, stop everything! Martin Fink says we're using the wrong license!"
Even if the guy has a point, it takes some gall for HP to tell these other companies much of anything about how to conduct their OSS business.
Also, 5mn is a miniscule microscopic portion of the amount MS spends in R&D anyways, so it's doubtful this money is gonna help fight crime or spam.
That is stupid. $5M might be a "miniscule" portion of their R&D - it's not, but I'll grant it for the sake of argument. Even so, it does not follow that because it is a small amount in relation to their R&D budget, it is not a sufficient sum to aid law enforcement. That inference just does not make a bit of sense.
Of course, not only both your premise and your logic are off here, so is your conclusion. I guess people are jaded when they hear about how much money their elected officials are spending on toys, but five million dollars is a fucking lot of money and police organizations which aren't federal tend to be under-funded. So it could conceivably make a difference.
Meanwhile Xen is gaining ground, is a technically better approach, and is real Open Source. VMWare? Yawn.
Yawn? Some of us need a product with VMWare's features, rather than a product that might have VMWare's features eventually, if enough bored teenagers are somehow inspired to hack on the code.
I was talking about the lack of innovation in Microsoft's products because Microsoft has used the monopoly to kill the competition.
Which is still nonsense, even after posting it twice. I recognize that it's also the conventional wisdom here on Slashdot. People love to blame "monopoly" rather than the simple fact that most software is total crap, and that includes most of the software competing against Microsoft products.
I was talking about the tens (some might say, hundreds) of millions of people who think you have to reboot a computer multiple times a day in order for it to work correctly.
This is exactly what I was talking about: crap that might have been true ten years ago, but isn't anymore. Nobody does that anymore because windows is actually pretty reliable now. Again, just because the dorks on slashdot think it's true, it does not suddenly become true.
But keep living in your fantasyland, people aren't using the alternatives because Microsoft are evil. The fact that the alternatives suck has nothing to do with it.
1) the illegal leveraging of a monopoly that has stifled innovation.
2) the lowering of expectations for the reliability of computers.
1) An out. An excuse for any given software company's lack of success in the market. "That poor little company would have succeeded if it weren't for big, bad Microsoft, never mind the comparably poor quality of its products."
2) Amusing anecdotal evidence for the perceived comparative quality of a software product. "Boy this Linux sure owns my Windows 95 machine, which blue screens all the time! Too bad Windows XP is based on DOS LOL!!!"
Slashdot Mirror
No, it really isn't.
http://www.garagegames.com/makegames/
That sort of thing is never a one-way street. I think if you consider the hypothetical question "what would happen to me if the federal government and its impact in my life disappeared tomorrow?" you would find that it would impact you every bit as much as that rancher. Probably a whole heck of a lot more.
It seems to be an argument against large, central government that we all somehow get bitching rights about the way the other chooses to live and work, since we're all in some theoretical sense subsidizing one another. It just turns public life into a gigantic wankfest.
You know, they'd be farming or ranching or whatever without agriculture subsidies and other federal support. They'd be somewhat poorer. (or not, if you buy some of the more conservative views, which I mostly don't) They'd also by and large be very happy if there was NOT a federal presence in their lives or their business, which of course won't happen since a lot of the land still belongs to the US government...
Not really, no. I mean, of course you have that right, but not because of the way your money is being spent in this case.
Look, I'm with you on the hurricane/flood plain thing. It's dumb that people keep building in the same place over and over again and we keep bailing them out. It's not analogous to a situation where we impose an arbitrary value judgement on wildlife and the hunting thereof. The financial stake isn't there, it's disingenous to pretend that it is. Some people just don't like the idea of nice (or not so nice, really) little animals being hunted.
If you say to them "you can manage the predatory wildlife yourselves but I am not going to pay for it" their answer will be "okay, no problem." Count on it.
Farmers are traditionally the ones who cull the preditors, for obvious reasons. Whether a few rangers are paid to do it is trivia - nobody cares, it doesn't matter, if you stop paying the rangers to do it the debate still exists.
The political question has always been whether people ought to be allowed to hunt predators in their own state, or whether they'll be declared "endangered", which makes hunting them a federal crime. So explain to me why a kiddo in the suburbs ought to have a say in how a community in some other part of the country decides this question for themselves? If they fuck up the ecology in their state they'll certainly pay for it, and you can keep as many lions and tigers and bears in your state as you like.
Killing the predators is certainly one means of dealing with the situation. It works really well: no more predators, the prey are safe.
Those all support your (pigheaded) "it's my tax money" thing a lot better, since in those cases the issue does hingle on federal money being spent. The "wild animal" issue doesn't hinge on money, never has.
Right. Which has nothing to do with what I said, but okay.
Interesting, if true, but it's a loaner machine which you need to pay for. Yippee. Which still sort of begs the question, what the fuck were you talking about when comparing this to a "$999 Dell"?
I sure hope those kinds of specs aren't necessary to get decent performance out of the new OS X.
Or perhaps they should hunt the dangerous animals down and kill them. I'm sure they'd be curious why some chump from the suburbs feels he has input on their decision.
No. It means no such thing. Please tell me you don't believe what you're saying...
For $999 you can get two Dell PCs, a keg of beer, and a night with three Welsh hookers. Don't ask me how I know. The point is, you must be used to paying Apple prices, that figure is way off.
Barring something truly elaborate, it would simply take two registered developers working in concert to figure out such a watermarking scheme, if they thought to look for it.
Game source != Engine source
Is that just another way of saying they didn't want to pay to use the technology, like a game publisher has to?
Strictly speaking that's not true. A lot of video game artists get their start giving their work away, in mods and such. They just don't do it forever...
The problem is that the "open source" nonsense is just fucking irrelevant one way or the other. Make a killer new game engine, something competitive with Doom 3, and release it under the GPL. What have you got? Not much.
The difficulty in getting a killer new game out is in the content and design, not the cost or difficulty of creating a game engine. Look, there are plenty of mod teams that have access to the doom3 engine's features already. They won't match the commercial doom3-based games, and it's not because they have a game engine which isn't competitive. It's because the game engine is largely irrelevant.
To get a "viable open source FPS that competes with, and exceeds, the big-boys" the first thing you need to do is convince professional artists and level-designers to work really hard for free. Good luck with that.
The coalition of the unwilling?
The way you say that, I get the feeling you don't know: bog people eat brains.
There isn't any more or less rigor involved in QA when there are fewer variables. The job just takes less time.
Calling John Carmack...
Somehow I doubt he has abandoned Visual Studio in favor of apple whatever. The fact that NT versions are always done first makes me doubt this even more. Let me guess, you read somewhere that he owns a Mac?
Anyone like... Apple? They are putting a lot of money into DRM to keep this from happening.
Every item asserted by the above paragraph is untrue. Just an FYI for the casual reader.
Yeah, that really kept Sun from releasing their Unix as open source. Oh wait, it didn't.
Okay, here's a pet peeve. "OSS" refers to a variety of audio drivers. It's going to need to continue doing that even if we manage to get most people to use "OSS" as an acronym for Open Source Software. So maybe we should reconsider...
Okay, companies which have released as much OSS software as IBM and Sun should listen to HP because... why?
I'm sure the Eclipse people and the OpenSolaris project, among many others, have been waiting with great anxiety for HP's opinion of what they are doing. "Hey guys, stop everything! Martin Fink says we're using the wrong license!"
Even if the guy has a point, it takes some gall for HP to tell these other companies much of anything about how to conduct their OSS business.
That is stupid. $5M might be a "miniscule" portion of their R&D - it's not, but I'll grant it for the sake of argument. Even so, it does not follow that because it is a small amount in relation to their R&D budget, it is not a sufficient sum to aid law enforcement. That inference just does not make a bit of sense.
Of course, not only both your premise and your logic are off here, so is your conclusion. I guess people are jaded when they hear about how much money their elected officials are spending on toys, but five million dollars is a fucking lot of money and police organizations which aren't federal tend to be under-funded. So it could conceivably make a difference.
Who are these "editors" of which you speak?
Yawn? Some of us need a product with VMWare's features, rather than a product that might have VMWare's features eventually, if enough bored teenagers are somehow inspired to hack on the code.
Which is still nonsense, even after posting it twice. I recognize that it's also the conventional wisdom here on Slashdot. People love to blame "monopoly" rather than the simple fact that most software is total crap, and that includes most of the software competing against Microsoft products.
This is exactly what I was talking about: crap that might have been true ten years ago, but isn't anymore. Nobody does that anymore because windows is actually pretty reliable now. Again, just because the dorks on slashdot think it's true, it does not suddenly become true.
But keep living in your fantasyland, people aren't using the alternatives because Microsoft are evil. The fact that the alternatives suck has nothing to do with it.
1) An out. An excuse for any given software company's lack of success in the market. "That poor little company would have succeeded if it weren't for big, bad Microsoft, never mind the comparably poor quality of its products."
2) Amusing anecdotal evidence for the perceived comparative quality of a software product. "Boy this Linux sure owns my Windows 95 machine, which blue screens all the time! Too bad Windows XP is based on DOS LOL!!!"