For instance, I take music off my my cd's, arrange them, burn them to a cd, and take it to work to listen to? Why? Because I end up paying $17 for one song, I better be able to put the other 14 songs that I ended up paying $17 apiece for on there too.
But of coruse, the RIAA wants to call that piracy.
I won't purchase DVD until there is a fully recordable format. I seldom listen to music straight off the cd's that I purchase and it's not worth my money to "wait and see". Remember the 3 or 4 digital tape formats that were out about 5 years ago? DAT survived because it was easily recordable, and didn't cost an arm and a leg (relatively... dat is still through the roof) to purchase the recorder.
It's really fun when the RA does it, because then, if you have a good microphone you got some bargaining ground the next time you want him/her to disappear from the hall for a few hours..:)
Having mp3's of it on the network shared works VERY well.
There's almost indefinately something wrong with your tables then.
Lynx & Opera have to be the 2 most anal web browsers on the earth (and that's a GOOD thing). Use them to test your HTML, then verify through W3C afterwards just to make sure. Everything will render on every page just right for almost everything after that.:)
Granted I imagine the tone of plenty of people was less than tasteful, but when I don't like something for a good reason, I go out of my way to tell anyone else I know that might be purchasing/using it not to as well.
This is no different. The administrator acted stupidly and lost business because of it. This should have never made it to any news service.
If Ford pulls another stunt like the pinto, and you know someone that's going to buy one, are you going to tell them not to because of the burning effigy AKA gas tank on thier possible new car? I bet you would.
Are you going to tell you relative not to use AOL on general principle? I bet you would.
But of course, that's big business, and they can stand to lose a few dollars, right?
There are a lot of big ISP's (I can think of 2 specifically in Oregon - teleport and internetcds) that are losing money because of the way they address their users' needs, losing to smaller ISP's. Why? WORD OF MOUTH.
Being heated is not nessicarily being rude or inflammatory. A lot of people could use this knowledge in real life, because I deal with assholes like this everyday, they can't make the distinction between angry and downright predatory.
Reading all this got me thinking about something very interesting.
Free Trade implies getting something for free, but trading for it. Hence, you are not getting something for free if you are trading. OTOH, If you are getting something for free, you are not technically trading.
With companies no longer holding financial accountability for their actions, they exert the power that they gain from these finances on those who they benefit most from, their employees. After all, without employees making the goods, there are no consumers.
So the employees get paid less. I hope people here do realize, that when the ratio of average wealth to total wealth decreases, those who have the wealth benefit in a higher priced dollar.
So, the employees strike. But of course, their money is essentially worthless compared to the wealth of the corporation. In other words, striking is pointless if it means starvation.
And once corporations start pulling in larger profits than most governments, shit is going to hit the fan when a overvalued geek and a good ol' boy who likes fellatio disagree.
Gibson couldn't have nailed the societal future more on the head with his sprawl series. You can already see the "megacorps" clawing out of the woodwork.
This is EXACTLY what I was saying in earlier posts.
Protect and Serve is a joke anymore. Protect and Serve only applies for one side of the argument, even if both sides can be right.
If this would have been the million man march Seattle would have a new Mayor and Police Force by now. But of course, this has to do with money, which is everything, right?
Oregon is really weird. Living in all areas of it (now in portland) helps to understand it.
Portland, Eugene, and Ashland (on the california border, small but VERY active) are liberal cities for the most part. They also have the most people.
Anywhere outside of that, including the capital, salem, is redneck central. It's really hilarious to see portland's influence stomp the capital all the time.
So, on the ballot, the liberal views are generally the ones passed (like the one for marijuana in bars, which is almost definately going to pass). Yet, as soon as you get out of those cities it might as well be like these laws never existed. Constantly places like Medford and Salem are trying to ban anything that isn't "proper" (read: christian).
Of course because of these things people end up moving to the larger cities. Places like medford and salem have unemployment rates so high it's disturbing (2 years ago medford had an unemployment rate of over 30%). Therefore, the retirement community (read: christians) tend to settle down there and continue the cycle. It won't be long before Medford is one giant retirement center and Salem is one big church.
Sorry, after all that rambling I didn't make my point heh.
Unless the protestors were trespassing, the cops shouldn't have been there. They shouldn't have been "giving them the opportunity to disperse", because that was the exact opposite of what they were going to do.
See... this is where I think cops make more of a problem by being there than not.
Just like with the whole rodney king thing. The cops got there, they got all "official", and things got violent.
There is active, loud, NON VIOLENT protest and violent protest.
Anyone who has to deal with a cop is already on edge because of the situation. When a 300 cops walk out in riot gear, well... I'll let you connect the dots. Someone's going to crack, and anger, like laughter, is very contagious.
But then again, most cops that I've met in person seem to get a rise out of beating the shit out of someone, so it could have run either way.
We mustn't forget also that washington state is known for bending over backwards for any greenbacks that might be heading to that state. I remember seeing washington senators and representatives on TV that evening after MS got declared an agressive monopoly defending them.
In other words, it is VERY hard for me to see how in the hell this turned into a riot without someone on the other end pushing the protesters into it.
That's not the problem, as you see, a good portion of the "umph" in the WTO, is, you guessed it, the US.
The whole point of protesting the WTO in america is because it affects us the most in a postive factor, and it affects third world countries in a VERY negative manner for that benefit.
So, I would like anyone to explain to me, why the US would be the slightest bit interested in seceding or ignoring one of the provisions laid down by the WTO if they are the ones creating them in the first place.
Remember folks, the US is one of the largest exporters AND importers of goods. Also because of minimum wage and other labor laws we are free from having to worry about being slave-driven, like a lot of people in malaysia and costa rica (which, how hilarious, is where a good deal of intel chips are made) are being exploited for our benefit.
This has a lot more effect than just a few of highstrung hippies (which they're not, a good deal of them are college students and laborers) protesting.
I personally see a large crop of labor unions popping up very soon if this happens. Temp services, in many regards might be just that in today's world. (although it doesn't work nearly as well)
I just wanted to say that this is a very good point brought by Mr. C (i couldn't resist). It's also one of the few articles by him that I've read without dismissing it almost immediately as a flame. (exception of anything perl, of course)
To elaborate, it would be REALLY beneficial if the GUI programmer crowd got together, put together a complete interface design (with help from psychologists trained in interface design), or at least some guidelines that could be posted publicly for ALL to adhere to.
Or, even better yet, it would be nice to see an ORB put to good use and help create a pluggable abstraction layer so that the toolkits (and windowmanagers and environments) can be truly written seperate of the programs. This is what's really needed for the GUI to advance.
Doing this with toolkits would allow for "standard" actions within a program to have a pre-defined keybinding, such as save, open, etc. Then, someone running KDE or GNOME or just standalone WM knows that everytime that they run "super-gnu-toolkit-extremely-lucid-emacs" that control-s (or whatever it's bound to) equals save and overwrite without thinking.
That's my beef with 99% of (especially unix GUI)programs out there, once I get a new one I have to spend at least 30 minutes figuring out all the god damned keybindings/methods for things that appear in every other program.
If extended, this would also allow for things like user-defined UNIFORM widget placement (E on crack) and it would most likely make things like internationalization easier (ie, not having to reinvent the wheel for each different toolkit), and of course, it'll mean that I can use GTK Licq:)
I used to run a BBS, and as many of you older BBSers would know the system operator is prosecutor, not the actual offender.
So, with almost EVERY request for a user account, you would get displayed a copy of the electronic privacy act.
So, if you wanted your messages encrypted you did it yourself, that way the system operator would not be at fault, as the offender took specific measures to slip past the operators' "view".
So, use encryption, use PGP, but don't expect others to act to a "code of privacy", especially if guys with badges start coming into their offices.
Blizzard has a release record so shoddy it's not even funny.
I bought Starcraft the DAY it came out... That night when I finally sat down to play multiplayer I was already the target of a pause-select-pause instant build bug.
Diablo, had so many damn network bugs it wasn't even funny. The greenest ameteur can STILL exploit most of these bugs, and if you have a copy of softice, even more.
Blizzard tries like every other company but the fact is that releasing an untested final release that's bug free is IMPOSSIBLE, unless your game is 5000 lines of code, which I doin't even think Commander Keen was.:)
Yes, but a lot of us think that the pre-1988 olympics were a GOOD thing, that way those who entered really had to work and do a good job to be qualified.
That's the point, you start making Open Source a "sport", and you'll start getting more and more wonderful GPL'd programs like "GTKTrue" (which is a play on gtk-madness induced linux software writers) on freshmeat.
Right now the camps are working together and making software instead of using the NIH (not invented here) methods that created wonderful things like over 8 unices, 3 versions of emacs and free BSD's, and a partridge in a pear tree, among other thigns.
Pushing people to diversify works if it's constructive, but commercializing will NOT help. Let people find out on their own and they will benefit then... It's hard to find professional programmers out there who AREN'T familiar with GNU and BSD, etc. (not VB/NT monkeys who think linux is a program)
The utter irony.. I was just going over this with someone else earlier...
Most artists guilds require that you use a unique name to be in said guild.
For instance, there is a vaudeville actor named Dennis Miller. When the actors guild found out, they asked that either the vaudeville actor or the comedian Miller change their name.
Obviously because no one in today's world really knows the vaudeville Dennis Miller, he subsequently changed his "stage name" to reflect his middle initial (which i forget).
A name CAN be trademarked if it there is a reasonable amount of association with it. Technically, Bill Gates could easily copyright his name since it is almost synonymous with Microsoft. All this would do is prevent someone else from using the name "Bill Gates" in reference to any non-Microsoft product, of course, with the exception to the "Fair Use" provisions.
IANAL, but AFAIK this is how it works. Anyone care to correct/flame/sic a team of police and rich zealots on me about it?
As someone else pointed out, it's not the religion but the church that is the problem. Just like the Catholics up until about 200-300 years ago they're using heavy-handed tactics to stifle the communication of like-minded people who disagree with the church and it's religious practices.
Now, considering we are on slashdot here, a place that stresses free speech, posting in a forum group called "YOUR RIGHTS ONLINE", how in your right mind can you even step up boldly to support this?
The point is, is that the same laws and morals and respect that gives the Church of Scientology the will and ability to spread their word is being stifled by the Church itself.
You make a decision. I know mine, there is no room in my world for anyone who stifles my ability to create it.
Slashdot Mirror
It really depends on how you define pirated.
For instance, I take music off my my cd's, arrange them, burn them to a cd, and take it to work to listen to? Why? Because I end up paying $17 for one song, I better be able to put the other 14 songs that I ended up paying $17 apiece for on there too.
But of coruse, the RIAA wants to call that piracy.
I won't purchase DVD until there is a fully recordable format. I seldom listen to music straight off the cd's that I purchase and it's not worth my money to "wait and see". Remember the 3 or 4 digital tape formats that were out about 5 years ago? DAT survived because it was easily recordable, and didn't cost an arm and a leg (relatively... dat is still through the roof) to purchase the recorder.
-Erik-
Personally I'd like to see more effort put into the I/O dept with machines... The processor speed makes a very little difference anymore...
:)
That's where athlon gets most of it's speed is from that wonderful 200mhz EV6 bus.
Not to mention on a Unix system CPU speed is even less of a need...
-Erik-
It's really fun when the RA does it, because then, if you have a good microphone you got some bargaining ground the next time you want him/her to disappear from the hall for a few hours.. :)
Having mp3's of it on the network shared works VERY well.
-Erik-
3 words
:)
ADVANCED POWER MANAGEMENT
10 minutes after I leave the only thing left running is the processor fan.
-Erik-
There's almost indefinately something wrong with your tables then.
:)
Lynx & Opera have to be the 2 most anal web browsers on the earth (and that's a GOOD thing). Use them to test your HTML, then verify through W3C afterwards just to make sure. Everything will render on every page just right for almost everything after that.
-Erik-
This I do not get.
Granted I imagine the tone of plenty of people was less than tasteful, but when I don't like something for a good reason, I go out of my way to tell anyone else I know that might be purchasing/using it not to as well.
This is no different. The administrator acted stupidly and lost business because of it. This should have never made it to any news service.
If Ford pulls another stunt like the pinto, and you know someone that's going to buy one, are you going to tell them not to because of the burning effigy AKA gas tank on thier possible new car? I bet you would.
Are you going to tell you relative not to use AOL on general principle? I bet you would.
But of course, that's big business, and they can stand to lose a few dollars, right?
There are a lot of big ISP's (I can think of 2 specifically in Oregon - teleport and internetcds) that are losing money because of the way they address their users' needs, losing to smaller ISP's. Why? WORD OF MOUTH.
Being heated is not nessicarily being rude or inflammatory. A lot of people could use this knowledge in real life, because I deal with assholes like this everyday, they can't make the distinction between angry and downright predatory.
Man the logic here really amazes me.
-Erik-
People seem to forget that our government, technically is a REPUBLIC. Hence, no different than china in a power sense.
They can take anything they'd like technically, if there weren't laws protecting against it.
It's called a hostile takeover. It happens all the time.
-Erik-
My point is - I AM OVER IT. I don't like everything, but I read what I like and discard the rest, only to stop and bitch at people who are bitching.
You've obviously never had rob's job before.
-Erik-
Reading all this got me thinking about something very interesting.
Free Trade implies getting something for free, but trading for it. Hence, you are not getting something for free if you are trading. OTOH, If you are getting something for free, you are not technically trading.
With companies no longer holding financial accountability for their actions, they exert the power that they gain from these finances on those who they benefit most from, their employees. After all, without employees making the goods, there are no consumers.
So the employees get paid less. I hope people here do realize, that when the ratio of average wealth to total wealth decreases, those who have the wealth benefit in a higher priced dollar.
So, the employees strike. But of course, their money is essentially worthless compared to the wealth of the corporation. In other words, striking is pointless if it means starvation.
And once corporations start pulling in larger profits than most governments, shit is going to hit the fan when a overvalued geek and a good ol' boy who likes fellatio disagree.
Gibson couldn't have nailed the societal future more on the head with his sprawl series. You can already see the "megacorps" clawing out of the woodwork.
-Erik-
You call 16 cents an hour to make $150 tennis shoes "richer"?
-Erik-
This is EXACTLY what I was saying in earlier posts.
Protect and Serve is a joke anymore. Protect and Serve only applies for one side of the argument, even if both sides can be right.
If this would have been the million man march Seattle would have a new Mayor and Police Force by now. But of course, this has to do with money, which is everything, right?
-Erik-
You forget one thing though.
Military needs money. Therefore, Military is not nearly as significant.
"I don't wanna"
"Well hand us over your equity, you might as well now becaues in a year it's already going to be gone"
"Ok, I wanna"
-Erik-
Oregon is really weird. Living in all areas of it (now in portland) helps to understand it.
:)
Portland, Eugene, and Ashland (on the california border, small but VERY active) are liberal cities for the most part. They also have the most people.
Anywhere outside of that, including the capital, salem, is redneck central. It's really hilarious to see portland's influence stomp the capital all the time.
So, on the ballot, the liberal views are generally the ones passed (like the one for marijuana in bars, which is almost definately going to pass). Yet, as soon as you get out of those cities it might as well be like these laws never existed. Constantly places like Medford and Salem are trying to ban anything that isn't "proper" (read: christian).
Of course because of these things people end up moving to the larger cities. Places like medford and salem have unemployment rates so high it's disturbing (2 years ago medford had an unemployment rate of over 30%). Therefore, the retirement community (read: christians) tend to settle down there and continue the cycle. It won't be long before Medford is one giant retirement center and Salem is one big church.
But we still have no sales tax.
-Erik-
PROTECT AND SERVE - THAT IS THE POLICE'S JOB!
Man, I cannot tell you how much it angers me to hear such STUPIDITY AND IGNORANCE on this forum.
No cop takes the oath "to deprive and destroy".
-Erik-
Conformity is dictated by the masses.
:)
Hence, conformity is a socialist agenda, you pinko.
-Erik-
Sorry, after all that rambling I didn't make my point heh.
Unless the protestors were trespassing, the cops shouldn't have been there. They shouldn't have been "giving them the opportunity to disperse", because that was the exact opposite of what they were going to do.
-Erik-
See... this is where I think cops make more of a problem by being there than not.
Just like with the whole rodney king thing. The cops got there, they got all "official", and things got violent.
There is active, loud, NON VIOLENT protest and violent protest.
Anyone who has to deal with a cop is already on edge because of the situation. When a 300 cops walk out in riot gear, well... I'll let you connect the dots. Someone's going to crack, and anger, like laughter, is very contagious.
But then again, most cops that I've met in person seem to get a rise out of beating the shit out of someone, so it could have run either way.
We mustn't forget also that washington state is known for bending over backwards for any greenbacks that might be heading to that state. I remember seeing washington senators and representatives on TV that evening after MS got declared an agressive monopoly defending them.
In other words, it is VERY hard for me to see how in the hell this turned into a riot without someone on the other end pushing the protesters into it.
-Erik-
That's not the problem, as you see, a good portion of the "umph" in the WTO, is, you guessed it, the US.
The whole point of protesting the WTO in america is because it affects us the most in a postive factor, and it affects third world countries in a VERY negative manner for that benefit.
So, I would like anyone to explain to me, why the US would be the slightest bit interested in seceding or ignoring one of the provisions laid down by the WTO if they are the ones creating them in the first place.
Remember folks, the US is one of the largest exporters AND importers of goods. Also because of minimum wage and other labor laws we are free from having to worry about being slave-driven, like a lot of people in malaysia and costa rica (which, how hilarious, is where a good deal of intel chips are made) are being exploited for our benefit.
This has a lot more effect than just a few of highstrung hippies (which they're not, a good deal of them are college students and laborers) protesting.
I personally see a large crop of labor unions popping up very soon if this happens. Temp services, in many regards might be just that in today's world. (although it doesn't work nearly as well)
-Erik-
I just wanted to say that this is a very good point brought by Mr. C (i couldn't resist). It's also one of the few articles by him that I've read without dismissing it almost immediately as a flame. (exception of anything perl, of course)
:)
To elaborate, it would be REALLY beneficial if the GUI programmer crowd got together, put together a complete interface design (with help from psychologists trained in interface design), or at least some guidelines that could be posted publicly for ALL to adhere to.
Or, even better yet, it would be nice to see an ORB put to good use and help create a pluggable abstraction layer so that the toolkits (and windowmanagers and environments) can be truly written seperate of the programs. This is what's really needed for the GUI to advance.
Doing this with toolkits would allow for "standard" actions within a program to have a pre-defined keybinding, such as save, open, etc. Then, someone running KDE or GNOME or just standalone WM knows that everytime that they run "super-gnu-toolkit-extremely-lucid-emacs" that control-s (or whatever it's bound to) equals save and overwrite without thinking.
That's my beef with 99% of (especially unix GUI)programs out there, once I get a new one I have to spend at least 30 minutes figuring out all the god damned keybindings/methods for things that appear in every other program.
If extended, this would also allow for things like user-defined UNIFORM widget placement (E on crack) and it would most likely make things like internationalization easier (ie, not having to reinvent the wheel for each different toolkit), and of course, it'll mean that I can use GTK Licq
-Erik-
Read what he said again:
NO AMD, which is intel's brightest and most visual competitor.
-Erik-
I used to run a BBS, and as many of you older BBSers would know the system operator is prosecutor, not the actual offender.
So, with almost EVERY request for a user account, you would get displayed a copy of the electronic privacy act.
So, if you wanted your messages encrypted you did it yourself, that way the system operator would not be at fault, as the offender took specific measures to slip past the operators' "view".
So, use encryption, use PGP, but don't expect others to act to a "code of privacy", especially if guys with badges start coming into their offices.
Blizzard has a release record so shoddy it's not even funny.
:)
I bought Starcraft the DAY it came out... That night when I finally sat down to play multiplayer I was already the target of a pause-select-pause instant build bug.
Diablo, had so many damn network bugs it wasn't even funny. The greenest ameteur can STILL exploit most of these bugs, and if you have a copy of softice, even more.
Blizzard tries like every other company but the fact is that releasing an untested final release that's bug free is IMPOSSIBLE, unless your game is 5000 lines of code, which I doin't even think Commander Keen was.
-Erik-
Yes, but a lot of us think that the pre-1988 olympics were a GOOD thing, that way those who entered really had to work and do a good job to be qualified.
That's the point, you start making Open Source a "sport", and you'll start getting more and more wonderful GPL'd programs like "GTKTrue" (which is a play on gtk-madness induced linux software writers) on freshmeat.
Right now the camps are working together and making software instead of using the NIH (not invented here) methods that created wonderful things like over 8 unices, 3 versions of emacs and free BSD's, and a partridge in a pear tree, among other thigns.
Pushing people to diversify works if it's constructive, but commercializing will NOT help. Let people find out on their own and they will benefit then... It's hard to find professional programmers out there who AREN'T familiar with GNU and BSD, etc. (not VB/NT monkeys who think linux is a program)
-Erik-
The utter irony.. I was just going over this with someone else earlier...
Most artists guilds require that you use a unique name to be in said guild.
For instance, there is a vaudeville actor named Dennis Miller. When the actors guild found out, they asked that either the vaudeville actor or the comedian Miller change their name.
Obviously because no one in today's world really knows the vaudeville Dennis Miller, he subsequently changed his "stage name" to reflect his middle initial (which i forget).
A name CAN be trademarked if it there is a reasonable amount of association with it. Technically, Bill Gates could easily copyright his name since it is almost synonymous with Microsoft. All this would do is prevent someone else from using the name "Bill Gates" in reference to any non-Microsoft product, of course, with the exception to the "Fair Use" provisions.
IANAL, but AFAIK this is how it works. Anyone care to correct/flame/sic a team of police and rich zealots on me about it?
-Erik-
As someone else pointed out, it's not the religion but the church that is the problem. Just like the Catholics up until about 200-300 years ago they're using heavy-handed tactics to stifle the communication of like-minded people who disagree with the church and it's religious practices.
Now, considering we are on slashdot here, a place that stresses free speech, posting in a forum group called "YOUR RIGHTS ONLINE", how in your right mind can you even step up boldly to support this?
The point is, is that the same laws and morals and respect that gives the Church of Scientology the will and ability to spread their word is being stifled by the Church itself.
You make a decision. I know mine, there is no room in my world for anyone who stifles my ability to create it.
-Erik-