Aww, cry me a river. I make myself a bagged lunch, and I often work 80 hour weeks. There's no reason to eat fast food every day and guzzle sugar water sold in overpriced vending machines.
This is assuming, of course, that you care about your body and your health, and not just on blaming your shitty habits on someone else because you find it inconvenient to take the ten minutes you need in the morning or evening to make yourself a sandwich.
And if that's not enough, you can make yourself a batch of food on the weekends (I used to steam chicken breasts back when I was lifting regularly and needed the extra protein) and keep it in the refrigerator as you eat it over the week.
In fact, if you did this every day save one -- and on that last day, say Friday or whenever, treated yourself to a burger and a coke, you'd still be doing great health-wise, and saving money.
Your comment about learning is all well and good, but if you've been hired to say, work on a project at a company, and you spend company time and resources installing your favorite operating system on the company computer instead of working on said project, you most certainly are costing the company money -- most obviously because you are getting paid a salary to do something that you aren't doing, but there's more to it than that.
I actually did this at my last job -- I hate Windows and I installed Debian without anyone noticing, which took a fair amount of hacking, because our network was locked down well. I found a loop-hole and managed to do a net boot, and after many hours managed to get Debian running. At the time, I would have said that I was more productive, and after a fashion, perhaps I was, but it ended up causing no amount of grief to everyone around me because I didn't do things the same way they did.
Now this was several years ago and OO.org was not as mature as it is now, so I ended up having a lot of problems with doc and xls files, of which there were many. Our company standardized on Lotus Notes -- which doesn't run on Linux -- and I never managed to get it running under WINE, despite reports that it could be done. But other than these small, personal issues, I caused the IT department no amount of pain and trouble. They were used to being able to work with all the Windows machines in a standard way -- suddenly, mine was on the network as a Samba server, which, predictably, was not properly configured by me -- Samba is complicated and their policies were not simple -- and security updates and policies could not be applied to my system. Now granted, I was running Debian, but Debian has security issues too. It just so happens that I was appropriately anal about security, but suppose I hadn't been? See, there's also the issue of accountability. If someone hacks one of our systems, it's nominally speaking the IT department's fault and they have an established flow for dealing with those sorts of things. Well, if my system had been compromised, it's not like upper management would have magically known that the IT department had no control over my machine -- they would have gotten a ton of flack. And then, if they admitted that they had no control over my machine, they would have caught flack for that, too. Heads would of rolled, and not just mine. In retrospect, it was a colossally stupid thing to do, completely self-centered, and it showed no respect whatsoever for the people who are on call 24/7 to fix the substantial IT infrastructure at a company the size of ours.
Now, it turned out, ironically, be to be relatively useful -- it allowed us to pioneer the development of what turned out to be a relatively large project that ran on Linux servers (and as far as I know, still does today). But this was, you have to understand, blind luck. Windows was the wrong choice for the project, and had my computer not already been running Debian, we would have acquired a machine that did. So the end result would have been the same, although it might have run on Redhat instead, and perhaps I wouldn't have been as central to the project as I ended up being.
The point, though, is that you do not live in a bubble, "your" computer at work is actually the company's property, to be used for work and not for play, and although you may sit in front of "your" computer most of the time the system administration duties are generally done by someone else in another department who is going to hate you for making his life more difficult than it already is, even if he likes Linux well enough himself.
To your point about learning, Linux is free and runs on every kind of hardware imaginable; the place to install it therefore is at home on your own box. But wait, you say, you already have Linux installed on your box at home? Well then, what are you going to learn from installing it at work?
While I sympathize with your position, being a Linux fan myself, I have to agree with the GP's comment, even if it was worded a little bit harshly. On company time, do what you are paid to do.
His point, probably, is that people have been looking at the sky -- and making very detailed, scientific observations about celestial bodies -- for many millennia, not just a few centuries. The ancient Egyptians, for example, had a sophisticated understanding of all sorts of relatively complex phenomena that Europeans only figured out comparatively recently -- stuff like the precession of the equinoxes, etc. Given that, it is surprising that something that is apparently fairly easy to observe, on the largest object in the night sky, would have been a mystery for only 400 years.
Even on a human scale, 400 years isn't really that much, when you stop to think about it. Sure, it's longer than our lifespan -- at least 4 times longer, but in practice rather more -- but at the same time, if you're 50, that's only 8 times what you've already experienced yourself. I fully expect that future advances in medicine and genetics will allow humans to live this long. I do not expect, however, that we will be living a thousand years or more any time soon.
Seriously speaking, I'm pretty sure the only non-religious references to Jesus Christ are due to Josephus, a historian of the time. It is accepted by pretty much all historians that Josephus' extant writings have all been carefully copy-edited by the Church over the years. The originals do not exist anymore and analysis of the texts we do have show evidence of tampering.
Having said that, it seems unlikely that the Church inserted JC into the writings of Josephus if no mention was made of him in the originals; what's more likely is that areas where his accounts were not compatible with the gospels were edited until they were. So that suggests that Jesus was a real person, after a fashion.
Of course, he may have been nothing more than a common religious terrorist who simply threatened to destroy the temple around Passover, a festival that (for obvious reasons) had historically inspired Jews into acts of civil disobedience against their Roman masters. To avoid greater interference by Rome, the Jewish elders and the local Roman governor decided that, to be on the safe side, killing him might be easiest. This is a perfectly logical and consistent interpretation of the events surrounding his death, for all we know from Josephus.
(To put destroying the temple in perspective, think "threatening to bomb the WTC").
Not if you spend any time dealing with Asian markets. "Yuan" is a generic term in Chinese for currency; it is used on Taiwan by the ROC, on the mainland by the PRC, in Hong Kong (although they speak Cantonese there and do not pronounce the character the same way Mandarin-speakers do), in Macau (same), and in Singapore. Using "yuan" in any sort of international context is wrong because it fails to specify which region's currency you are discussing.
The "bi" in renminbi means money. "Renmin" means "People", thus "People's Currency". Similarly, on Taiwan, you have "Taibi". For Hong Kong, "Gangbi", etc.
If you'd like, you can think of it a bit like the term "dollar", which is the unit of currency for many, many countries (the US, Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Australia, etc). So people writing documents intended for international consumption will tend to prefer terms like "USD" to dollar.
But this analogy isn't perfect, because no one in the US uses "USD" to refer to their own currency, they all say "dollar". In China, however, almost no one says "yuan". "Renminbi" is more common, but the measure word for pieces, "kuai", is the most common of all. You're most likely to see "yuan" written, but it is not often spoken.
Yes, I work with forex and emerging markets, thanks for asking.
Um, whatever. I lived in China for nearly 5 years, and I speak Mandarin. People say renminbi all the time. Linking to a WP article isn't going to make me think that you're correct here.
The worst part is, most of these Slashdotters are thinking "Aha, so that's why I don't get any! It's because I'm too smart!"
"... the fact that I never bathed, had no sense of style, and thought a good date would be D&D at my house or maybe a friendly game of Magic the Gathering[tm] had nothing to do with it, after all."
Guys: this study is presumably about intelligence, not nerdiness. The two are not, despite what you may have been told, the same.
Having too much of the latter will definitely get in the way of you reproducing, thank god.
This is all based on the assumption that intelligence, as such, is an inheritable trait. While Idiocracy was an entertaining movie, there is (thankfully) a lot more to how we develop than just our DNA.
I understand your perspective -- I guess I just don't see how the Iraq war can even be compared to something like WW2, the latter being a huge and essentially global conflict initiated by the aggressive actions of our enemies, including an attack on our national soil by the Japanese.
Vietnam and Korea are both much closer in size to Iraq, although the number of deaths even in those cases far exceeded the current toll. Of course from a pro-war perspective, the fact that we didn't win those wars makes them a poor choice for comparison.
I guess what I'm saying is that your point -- whose validity I'm not contesting -- is probably lost on those who don't already agree with your position, because they will simply write it off by saying "Sure, more people died in World War II -- but maybe that's because it was a world war."
You know what really irks me about the Iraq war, though? In the 1st Iraq war, we had 500 thousand troops on the ground in Kuwait. That was a comparatively small operation, and we went in and we kicked ass. Now, we've gone in, we've invaded the country, and we're trying to keep the peace in a centuries old religious blood-feud that makes the troubles in Ireland look like a cakewalk, and we're trying to do it with, post-surge, 180 thousand troops.
I mean, seriously -- what were the civvies thinking? Why didn't they listen to the military brass, who know how to make America kick ass? Pisses me off.
It depends on what he means. If he means that the average policeman is worse than the murdering child rapist that gets bandied about on the evening news from time to time, then obviously not.
However, I would advance that if he means that the average affluent, law-abiding citizen is more likely to be harassed by police than by a criminal, then he may have a point. Growing up, I lived in a relatively affluent suburb in Silicon Valley -- barring the occasional petty theft, there was essentially no crime. This had little to do with our police force, and more to do with the fact that only kleptos steal stuff from their neighbors if they're affluent enough to afford it themselves. You know, an occasional bicycle got stolen, along with the occasional traffic violation -- that sort of thing. Nothing serious.
The police, however, were always around in force. As a teenager, I had long hair, and was routinely harassed by them for no other reason I could see. This wasn't the 1960s and I wasn't a hippie. Nowadays, I'm clean cut and gainfully employed and so I seem to be mostly invisible to them, but I see them pulling over latinos and harassing them on a regular basis (anti-latino sentiment is fairly well established in Califoria, unfortunately -- outside of the cities we don't have a large black population, so latinos are "it").
No one that I know of questions the need for a police force, but it is a fact that people get drunk on power. Frankly, I think that unless you live in a crime-ridden area where you're likely to actually run into a criminal, you're far more likely to have run-ins with the police, which certainly makes them "worse", sans hyperbole.
Also, just as an aside, why is it that the police are always there when they aren't needed, and never there when they are? A friend of mine has a teenage son who ran away nearly a year ago. Of course a missing persons report was filed. At first the cops said that they didn't deal with missing persons until they'd been gone for two weeks or something -- so his mom waited the two weeks and re-filed. Then, nothing. For 8 months. Finally, some jerk at the local PD gives my friend a call to ask for some details about her missing son. This is a 15 year old kid who's been AWOL for almost a year, in a town where the worst infractions are bicycle theft and speeding tickets, and it takes them 8 months to get follow up information on a missing persons report? What exactly are we paying for, here?
I only looked at it for a second, but it seems to me as though it's a simple buffer overrun. See how char LogMesg[11] is allocated right after the various tallies? The stack grows downward, so an overwrite on LogMesg would possibly write directly into those tallies. And indeed, looking at what gets written into LogMesg, it is significantly longer than 11 bytes. My guess (without doing an in-depth analysis) is that it doesn't work on Nov 2 because "second" is one byte longer than "first" and "third", and therefore will corrupt memory differently on that day, presumably in a way that is favorable.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I read that book when I was a teenager and the entire time I was just in awe of the man. Then, later, I went back and reread it and it was basically just a whole string of "... and then I did this... and then I did this... and then I did this... goddamn I'm awesome."
But, as you said, unlike 99 percent of autobiographers, RP was actually a genius. But he definitely hyped himself up. Did you know that in his entire career, he only wrote 37 research papers? Lots of the stuff he did in his life, while definitely cool, has the feel of a publicity stunt.
When I was a kid, I was a little bit precocious and I remember liking it when people told me I was smart. So I did "smart things" on purpose and cultivated the impression of being the child prodigy that my teachers and parents believed I was. In reality, I was nowhere near as brilliant as I pretended to be; it was all a sham. That didn't stop me from going through a phase as a teenager where I was actually conceited enough to believe my own bullshit, though.
Reading Surely You're Joking..., I feel like RP is doing the same thing, only on a far, far more massive scale. Unlike me, he really was a genius to start out with, but you can tell that he deliberately cultivated a larger-than-life persona and that he enjoyed being seen as the eccentric, womanizing super-genius. I mean, I can understand that, who wouldn't? But on some level, it's the same self-absorbed behavior that made people hate me when I was 15.
Having said that, his lectures on physics -- a discipline I don't even like -- are still the best textbooks I've ever had the pleasure of educating myself with.
This is offtopic, re: your sig, but why exactly are you comparing Iraq to a World War? Have things there gotten that bad already? Have I missed something?
I love this petty CEO-bashing that we have here on Slashdot. I don't know much about SugarCRM, and I'll admit that there are idiots who run companies (as there are idiots in any profession) but this elitist attitude is one of the things that annoys me most about nerds. Have you ever run your own company? Made it profitable? Done the accounting? Managed a bunch of people with skills that don't overlap much with your own?
I hate to break it to you guys who are living a daydream here, but that stuff is hard to do and it's even harder to do well. There's definitely some pork-barrel price-fixing of CEO salaries at some of the larger, more established companies out there, but under no circumstance should you ever get the idea that CEOs are stupid or that delegating responsibility to others more knowledgeable than you in any field is somehow stupid or worth looking down upon.
Programming a computer is not that difficult. You can pretend it is in front of your layman friends, but this is Slashdot -- we all program computers, or at least 90% of us do, so don't think we're going to take your word for it when you wax lyrical about how you need to be a genius to get it done.
Why is it that expertise -- and let's face it, often as not not even real expertise in the case of the average Slashdot reader -- in one field gives people the attitude that they can mouth off about other people? In the US, one of the most entrepreneur-friendly countries in the entire world, only 38% of business are still around after 6 years (Dun & Bradstreet). This is not because people who start businesses are stupid, it's because running a business is hard. Really hard.
If you ran a company, and you tried to be programmer, lawyer, accountant, financial planner, sales rep, and janitor all at once, you know what would happen? Your company would die. Because, despite what you've been told, law is hard. Accounting is hard. Capital budgeting is hard. Sales -- sales is bust ass. And yes, even cleaning the floors carries a tremendous opportunity cost if your other duties include making the company profitable.
Being able to delegate responsibility -- being able to let someone who really knows what they are doing deal with something you yourself don't understand very well -- is one of the hallmarks of a good manager. And if you think that good managers are common, you obviously haven't worked in a corporate setting for very long. Ever had a PHB who knew nothing about what you were the resident expert at and tried to do your job for you? Tried to micromanage you? Did you ever bitch about that?
Because here you are disparaging a CEO because he doesn't (according to you) know the intricacies of copyright law. Well, odds are you haven't the foggiest idea about copyright law either, since you probably aren't a lawyer, and if you think you do because you read Slashdot, then you are sadly mistaken.
Why don't you go try running a business. Working 90 hour weeks for equity at a start up and not just doing the programming but managing the finances and dealing with the VCs and doing the whole shebang before you come here and mouth off about how CEOs are all morons.
There's a reason these guys get paid so much, even at the mid-cap level, and I hate to disappoint you, it's not because of the good old boys network. It's because they know how to generate wealth, and very few people have that skill. They know how to talk to investors, they know how to delegate responsibility, they know how to run the company. They know how to choose an i-bank when it comes time to IPO. They know how to make it work. And you don't. And I know it may hurt your fragile little Slashdotter whiny-nerd ego to admit it, but there are things other than programming that take real skill. Why, there may even be things harder than programming! Imagine that!
(As an aside, I was in Silicon Valley during the bubble, and I saw first hand what happens when programmers start thinking they can run companies -- 99% of them bite the dust, even with millions of dollars in first phase investment. Why, some of their ideas were even good. Too bad that that's not all it takes to succeed.)
Physical mail is most certainly not "almost dead". Just because you don't use it doesn't mean others don't; I frequently correspond with people I know, especially abroad, via snail mail. Have you ever gotten a hand-written letter from a friend? It's great.
Plus, snail mail will continue to be used for packages and anything else that requires actual shipping of something concrete, not just information. Which means that the infrastructure to mail letters will continue to exist until we have replicators. It is therefore highly probable that people will continue to write letters, even if their number is much reduced from the practice's heyday in the late 19th/early 20th century. It therefore follows that it will never be "dead", at least not by any strict definition of the term.
I think the OP hit the nail right on the head -- these things do not die, they simply leave the limelight. E-mail was at one time hot technology -- it has since become commonplace, and its ubiquity makes it boring to the teenager, who thrives on the new and exciting. The same will likely happen with social networks, which are in actuality just a user-friendly implementation of the web-of-trust or reputation metric that has existed in cryptographic circles for some time now. The technology will eventually become relatively mainstream; it will find its niche and then it too will fade from the limelight.
Relatively few promising or important technologies have become so uncommon that they could reasonably be considered "dead". Among these I count gopher, but its most salient features were absorbed by the world wide web, and so it did not really die so much as evolve. Dial-up BBSs, likewise, are dead in the sense that the ones that exist exist only for the sake of nostalgia -- but again, the internet has largely replaced their functionality, and the problems they were created to solve are better solved by internet anyway. Proprietary pre-internets, like CompuServ, GEnie, and Prodigy are also dead, for the same reason, although they were once very common.
I think Myspace, Facebook, and its predecessors -- many now defunct -- are the social networking equivalent of CompuServ and its ilk. They are centralized, proprietary and incompatible implementations of what essentially amounts to the same basic concept -- a web of trust. While people here on Slashdot often lambaste todays young people for not understanding the importance of privacy, I think the vast majority of them are attracted to services like Facebook precisely because they do value their privacy. People want to share their pictures, want to share their experiences -- but they don't want to do it with everyone on the internet, as we used to with our HTML 3.2 homepages, back when the internet was a safer place.
The web of trust concept provides a perfect system to deal with this problem, as cryptography geeks have been saying for years. Current social networks divide people into friends and non-friends, and they use these distinctions to control what parts of their little chunk of the internet people have access to. It's no surprise to me at all that they prefer this managed approach to the classic "make a web page for everyone to read" approach.
Going forward, I fully expect an open, social networking "protocol" to emerge that allows people to incorporate such distinctions into their own websites without being part of a Facebook or Myspace site. It may be that the open standard takes precedence quickly, as e-mail did, or slowly, as has been the case with IM, but as soon as a technology becomes truly mainstream, interoperability becomes too important and corporate distrust too great to allow any one company to monopolize the field.
You know, I think the question regarding distribution of old child pornography is a difficult one. Obviously, the creation of said pornography involved the abuse of children, which is reprehensible -- but already done, and not undoable. There is child pornography available on TPB, if you look, although they do not host it themselves (much as there is child pornography available on Google, which one could argue they do in fact distribute, through their caching system, but I digress). The question is, does a pedophile downloading and wacking off to children performing sexual acts actually hurt anyone? The creation of the film definitely hurt the actors/actresses involved, no question there, but the mere distribution is something else entirely.
As I see it, there are two main perspectives on this, both of which are valid, but neither of which is consistent with the other, unfortunately.
First, there's the "economic" argument against the distribution of old child pornography, which goes something like this: the distribution of child pornography creates demand for said porn, and creates incentive for the production of more. Therefore, while the actual act of distributing child pornography is not in fact harmful, it may indirectly cause harm to children through secondary, market-like effects.
Second, there's the "sate the pervert" argument for allowing the distribution of old child pornography, which goes something like this: porn arises as a response to the desires of pedophiles, desires that exist with or without pornography. The existence of child pornography allows them to sate their desires without actually acting on their fantasies. Most of them know that society does not accept their particular fetish, and find themselves in a position where they must deny their sexuality in order to remain within the bounds of the law. Denying one's sexuality is hard, and success is all the more difficult if there is no outlet. Allowing old child pornography to be distributed gives them an avenue to satisfy themselves, thus decreasing the likelihood of actual child rape, which most would agree is far more harmful.
Regardless of which position you take -- or even if you accept both as probably being valid, even if they are contradictory -- it is clear that the makers of new child pornography must be persecuted to the fullest extent of the law, as that is where actual child abuse is happening. The distribution of stuff that's already been produced -- it's more of a gray area.
Then there's the even grayer area of computer-generated child pornography. CGI and animation technology have gotten good enough that nearly photo-realistic pornography starring very underage girls and boys who do not in fact exist and thus are not abused in the making of said pornography is possible. However, in many jurisdictions, its distribution is still illegal. Perhaps the proponents of this policy are those who follow the economic argument against the distribution of child pornography that I outlined above -- for the moment, in many places, raping an actual child is easier (cheaper, faster) than simulating such an act on a computer, and so to compete, unscrupulous producers might resort to actual abuse and market it is as simulated.
There's another factor that's worth considering -- even if the distribution of old child pornography is not equivalent to actual child rape, the child who stars in the picture will perhaps be affected psychologically by the knowledge that a traumatic experience in her past is still being used as wack-off material for perverts everywhere, so perhaps distribution cannot be held to be a completely victimless crime, banned out of concern for secondary effects alone.
All in all, it's an interesting discussion and debate. Unfortunately, because it is very much a taboo subject in Europe and North America, there is very little exploration of some of the finer points. I would very much like to see a formal debate on the issue -- THW legalize the distribution of old child pornography -- but unfortunately, that seems unlikely.
That's true -- but Einstein worked out relativity on paper and we spent lots of time trying to figure out how to test the theory long before a nuclear power plant or bomb was produced. These were engineered using the physics that he and others had worked out since 1905. No one "accidentally" stumbled upon a working atomic reactor while messing around with turbines.
If you read the article, you'll see that that's what they claim -- that they "accidentally" stumbled upon this amazing technology.
It's quite rare that anything of any complexity is discovered by accident -- generally, science advances in small steps, not great leaps. In the case of Einstein, people (like Michaelson and Morley) were doing experiments whose results did not agree with the predictions of the prevalent theories of the day, and someone stepped in to explain why. It took us nearly 40 years to do anything like "convert matter to abundant energy" from those initial baby steps.
In the same way that monkeys randomly banging on keyboards don't produce fine works of literature, people messing around with simple machines whose fundamentals have been understood for hundreds of years don't suddenly revolutionize physics.
Of course, both are technically possible, but you'd be a shitty gambler if you bet on those odds.
This is bullshit. People who make the loose/lose mistake are overwhelmingly native speakers. As someone who has spent most of his life living in countries where English was not the local language, I can attest that I have never seen this mistake made by second language learners. It is, however, disturbingly common among Americans in particular.
Your etymology lesson is also completely irrelevant; while los may be the root for both words, that in no way implies that people should make the mistake. First of all, in German, the word for lose is verlieren, which sounds nothing like lose; second of all, words that come from the same root but developed into different words abound, but this has little effect on current speakers, because we don't learn words based on their etymologies: consider that "cipher" and "zero" both have the same root, the Italian word "zefiro" (the latter coming to us via French). You don't randomly mix up cipher and zero, do you?
No, the only reason people mix up loose and lose is because they are spelled similarly and people are bad spellers. It isn't because they are pronounced similarly, because you never here people say "He always looses that game", you only see morons on the internet type it out.
In general, second language learners are much more anal about things like spelling than native speakers, who typically were taught spelling young and stopped having any feedback from teachers on it by the time they were 12 or 13. To someone learning English as a second language, though, English's weird and inconsistent spelling conventions are considered one of the truly difficult aspects of the language, and so, predictably, a great deal of time and effort is expended mastering them.
And even if non-native speakers were prone to making this mistake, what makes you think that we shouldn't correct them? They'll look like idiots if they ever write anything important in English and make that mistake, and it's not the sort of thing that spell check can help them with. In fact, we're doing them a great service. We're doing anyone who makes that mistake a great service.
If you're one of these people that gets annoyed when you get corrected, you're being awfully short-sighted. Despite what you may think, people judge you on things like spelling. Sending in a cover letter? A job application? Hey, let me tell you, if your resume has a spelling mistake on it, it goes straight into the trash at my firm, you can count on it.
Don't deliberately mislead yourself: spelling and grammar are important. Lose vs loose is an easy distinction, and there is no reason whatsoever to fail to make it, native speaker or not.
I think the grandparent's point was that the use of "even" implies that she was somehow more deserving of having her sentence commuted because she found Christ, which is the only detail the OP provides about her.
As a disclaimer, I am against the death penalty in general. But I agree with the GP: what on earth should finding Christ (or Allah, or Buddha, or whomever) have to do with whether your sentence is commuted or not?
Or perhaps the OP was simply noting that Bush, who makes great show of being a Christian, and who credits his own finding of Christ with setting his life right, showed no mercy to someone who perhaps had a similar experience?
It's not really clear, but... "finding God" in no way suggests to me, at least, that a person should be forgiven by a secular state.
Your "point" (what little of it there appears to be) is based entirely on providing examples of behavior that is wrong or illegal and yet widespread, which implies, somehow, that the wrong/illegal behavior this story complains about is acceptable. From your own post:
"Exactly. There seems to be some bizarre prejudice in this industry that if you aren't making any money off of it, then you don't have a right to defend your copyrights and software licenses."
And yet people borrow copyrighted material from websites all the time even if it's free but the author has explicitly requested people not to.
If that isn't a two wrongs make a right defense, then pray tell, what is it? Your response is completely irrelevant to the OP's point. What does people borrowing copyrighted material from websites all the time have to do with anything here, except that in both cases we're dealing with copyright infringement? Oh, oh, let me guess: the fact that people get away with the former in your mind makes the latter ok? Aha! Two wrongs make a right! But wait, read on:
"I'm not saying that we should make an example out of Parallels in particular, but an example might just be what's needed to help reverse this attitude."
Examples? Attitude? What kind of examples are pirates setting? What kind of attitude is the public showing when it does it enmass? Maybe the public needs to remove some motes before it starts complaining about the planks.
Translation: "Piracy is also copyright infringement, and the practice is widespread. Maybe, before people complain, they shouldn't commit the same crime themselves."
This is, again, the essence of the two wrongs make a right defense. Perhaps the problem here is that you don't know what that defense is? Let me make it clear for you, in case you're really just too dense: someone criticizes something as being wrong, and you justify it with some other action which is somehow related and which is also wrong.
This is like saying, because lots of people are murdered every year, we shouldn't complain about a specific murder case.
Hmm, let's see... hey, I've already quoted your entire post! There was actually nothing else in there except essentially "but other people do blah blah blah, which is the same crime, so umm... Oooh, SHINY!"
They've already released Parallels -- the LGPL requires that the release the code used to build the binary that they distributed, not that they do some juggling to get the proprietary bits out of the LGPL'd code and then release that source. Even if the new, modified source produces a binary that is equivalent in function to the old one, if it isn't the actual code used to produce the distributed binary, they're still in violation.
This is why they should have dealt with this issue before release. There is nothing to be "verified" -- the LGPL is very specific.
Slashdot Mirror
Aww, cry me a river. I make myself a bagged lunch, and I often work 80 hour weeks. There's no reason to eat fast food every day and guzzle sugar water sold in overpriced vending machines.
This is assuming, of course, that you care about your body and your health, and not just on blaming your shitty habits on someone else because you find it inconvenient to take the ten minutes you need in the morning or evening to make yourself a sandwich.
And if that's not enough, you can make yourself a batch of food on the weekends (I used to steam chicken breasts back when I was lifting regularly and needed the extra protein) and keep it in the refrigerator as you eat it over the week.
In fact, if you did this every day save one -- and on that last day, say Friday or whenever, treated yourself to a burger and a coke, you'd still be doing great health-wise, and saving money.
But, well, everyone's a victim these days, eh?
Ooo, ouch!
Wait, Letters to Penthouse aren't real?
Your comment about learning is all well and good, but if you've been hired to say, work on a project at a company, and you spend company time and resources installing your favorite operating system on the company computer instead of working on said project, you most certainly are costing the company money -- most obviously because you are getting paid a salary to do something that you aren't doing, but there's more to it than that.
I actually did this at my last job -- I hate Windows and I installed Debian without anyone noticing, which took a fair amount of hacking, because our network was locked down well. I found a loop-hole and managed to do a net boot, and after many hours managed to get Debian running. At the time, I would have said that I was more productive, and after a fashion, perhaps I was, but it ended up causing no amount of grief to everyone around me because I didn't do things the same way they did.
Now this was several years ago and OO.org was not as mature as it is now, so I ended up having a lot of problems with doc and xls files, of which there were many. Our company standardized on Lotus Notes -- which doesn't run on Linux -- and I never managed to get it running under WINE, despite reports that it could be done. But other than these small, personal issues, I caused the IT department no amount of pain and trouble. They were used to being able to work with all the Windows machines in a standard way -- suddenly, mine was on the network as a Samba server, which, predictably, was not properly configured by me -- Samba is complicated and their policies were not simple -- and security updates and policies could not be applied to my system. Now granted, I was running Debian, but Debian has security issues too. It just so happens that I was appropriately anal about security, but suppose I hadn't been? See, there's also the issue of accountability. If someone hacks one of our systems, it's nominally speaking the IT department's fault and they have an established flow for dealing with those sorts of things. Well, if my system had been compromised, it's not like upper management would have magically known that the IT department had no control over my machine -- they would have gotten a ton of flack. And then, if they admitted that they had no control over my machine, they would have caught flack for that, too. Heads would of rolled, and not just mine. In retrospect, it was a colossally stupid thing to do, completely self-centered, and it showed no respect whatsoever for the people who are on call 24/7 to fix the substantial IT infrastructure at a company the size of ours.
Now, it turned out, ironically, be to be relatively useful -- it allowed us to pioneer the development of what turned out to be a relatively large project that ran on Linux servers (and as far as I know, still does today). But this was, you have to understand, blind luck. Windows was the wrong choice for the project, and had my computer not already been running Debian, we would have acquired a machine that did. So the end result would have been the same, although it might have run on Redhat instead, and perhaps I wouldn't have been as central to the project as I ended up being.
The point, though, is that you do not live in a bubble, "your" computer at work is actually the company's property, to be used for work and not for play, and although you may sit in front of "your" computer most of the time the system administration duties are generally done by someone else in another department who is going to hate you for making his life more difficult than it already is, even if he likes Linux well enough himself.
To your point about learning, Linux is free and runs on every kind of hardware imaginable; the place to install it therefore is at home on your own box. But wait, you say, you already have Linux installed on your box at home? Well then, what are you going to learn from installing it at work?
While I sympathize with your position, being a Linux fan myself, I have to agree with the GP's comment, even if it was worded a little bit harshly. On company time, do what you are paid to do.
His point, probably, is that people have been looking at the sky -- and making very detailed, scientific observations about celestial bodies -- for many millennia, not just a few centuries. The ancient Egyptians, for example, had a sophisticated understanding of all sorts of relatively complex phenomena that Europeans only figured out comparatively recently -- stuff like the precession of the equinoxes, etc. Given that, it is surprising that something that is apparently fairly easy to observe, on the largest object in the night sky, would have been a mystery for only 400 years.
Even on a human scale, 400 years isn't really that much, when you stop to think about it. Sure, it's longer than our lifespan -- at least 4 times longer, but in practice rather more -- but at the same time, if you're 50, that's only 8 times what you've already experienced yourself. I fully expect that future advances in medicine and genetics will allow humans to live this long. I do not expect, however, that we will be living a thousand years or more any time soon.
Seriously speaking, I'm pretty sure the only non-religious references to Jesus Christ are due to Josephus, a historian of the time. It is accepted by pretty much all historians that Josephus' extant writings have all been carefully copy-edited by the Church over the years. The originals do not exist anymore and analysis of the texts we do have show evidence of tampering.
Having said that, it seems unlikely that the Church inserted JC into the writings of Josephus if no mention was made of him in the originals; what's more likely is that areas where his accounts were not compatible with the gospels were edited until they were. So that suggests that Jesus was a real person, after a fashion.
Of course, he may have been nothing more than a common religious terrorist who simply threatened to destroy the temple around Passover, a festival that (for obvious reasons) had historically inspired Jews into acts of civil disobedience against their Roman masters. To avoid greater interference by Rome, the Jewish elders and the local Roman governor decided that, to be on the safe side, killing him might be easiest. This is a perfectly logical and consistent interpretation of the events surrounding his death, for all we know from Josephus.
(To put destroying the temple in perspective, think "threatening to bomb the WTC").
Not if you spend any time dealing with Asian markets. "Yuan" is a generic term in Chinese for currency; it is used on Taiwan by the ROC, on the mainland by the PRC, in Hong Kong (although they speak Cantonese there and do not pronounce the character the same way Mandarin-speakers do), in Macau (same), and in Singapore. Using "yuan" in any sort of international context is wrong because it fails to specify which region's currency you are discussing.
The "bi" in renminbi means money. "Renmin" means "People", thus "People's Currency". Similarly, on Taiwan, you have "Taibi". For Hong Kong, "Gangbi", etc.
If you'd like, you can think of it a bit like the term "dollar", which is the unit of currency for many, many countries (the US, Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Australia, etc). So people writing documents intended for international consumption will tend to prefer terms like "USD" to dollar.
But this analogy isn't perfect, because no one in the US uses "USD" to refer to their own currency, they all say "dollar". In China, however, almost no one says "yuan". "Renminbi" is more common, but the measure word for pieces, "kuai", is the most common of all. You're most likely to see "yuan" written, but it is not often spoken.
Yes, I work with forex and emerging markets, thanks for asking.
Um, whatever. I lived in China for nearly 5 years, and I speak Mandarin. People say renminbi all the time. Linking to a WP article isn't going to make me think that you're correct here.
You'd be wrong then. There's nothing wrong with saying renminbi.
The worst part is, most of these Slashdotters are thinking "Aha, so that's why I don't get any! It's because I'm too smart!"
"... the fact that I never bathed, had no sense of style, and thought a good date would be D&D at my house or maybe a friendly game of Magic the Gathering[tm] had nothing to do with it, after all."
Guys: this study is presumably about intelligence, not nerdiness. The two are not, despite what you may have been told, the same.
Having too much of the latter will definitely get in the way of you reproducing, thank god.
This is all based on the assumption that intelligence, as such, is an inheritable trait. While Idiocracy was an entertaining movie, there is (thankfully) a lot more to how we develop than just our DNA.
I understand your perspective -- I guess I just don't see how the Iraq war can even be compared to something like WW2, the latter being a huge and essentially global conflict initiated by the aggressive actions of our enemies, including an attack on our national soil by the Japanese.
Vietnam and Korea are both much closer in size to Iraq, although the number of deaths even in those cases far exceeded the current toll. Of course from a pro-war perspective, the fact that we didn't win those wars makes them a poor choice for comparison.
I guess what I'm saying is that your point -- whose validity I'm not contesting -- is probably lost on those who don't already agree with your position, because they will simply write it off by saying "Sure, more people died in World War II -- but maybe that's because it was a world war."
You know what really irks me about the Iraq war, though? In the 1st Iraq war, we had 500 thousand troops on the ground in Kuwait. That was a comparatively small operation, and we went in and we kicked ass. Now, we've gone in, we've invaded the country, and we're trying to keep the peace in a centuries old religious blood-feud that makes the troubles in Ireland look like a cakewalk, and we're trying to do it with, post-surge, 180 thousand troops.
I mean, seriously -- what were the civvies thinking? Why didn't they listen to the military brass, who know how to make America kick ass? Pisses me off.
It depends on what he means. If he means that the average policeman is worse than the murdering child rapist that gets bandied about on the evening news from time to time, then obviously not.
However, I would advance that if he means that the average affluent, law-abiding citizen is more likely to be harassed by police than by a criminal, then he may have a point. Growing up, I lived in a relatively affluent suburb in Silicon Valley -- barring the occasional petty theft, there was essentially no crime. This had little to do with our police force, and more to do with the fact that only kleptos steal stuff from their neighbors if they're affluent enough to afford it themselves. You know, an occasional bicycle got stolen, along with the occasional traffic violation -- that sort of thing. Nothing serious.
The police, however, were always around in force. As a teenager, I had long hair, and was routinely harassed by them for no other reason I could see. This wasn't the 1960s and I wasn't a hippie. Nowadays, I'm clean cut and gainfully employed and so I seem to be mostly invisible to them, but I see them pulling over latinos and harassing them on a regular basis (anti-latino sentiment is fairly well established in Califoria, unfortunately -- outside of the cities we don't have a large black population, so latinos are "it").
No one that I know of questions the need for a police force, but it is a fact that people get drunk on power. Frankly, I think that unless you live in a crime-ridden area where you're likely to actually run into a criminal, you're far more likely to have run-ins with the police, which certainly makes them "worse", sans hyperbole.
Also, just as an aside, why is it that the police are always there when they aren't needed, and never there when they are? A friend of mine has a teenage son who ran away nearly a year ago. Of course a missing persons report was filed. At first the cops said that they didn't deal with missing persons until they'd been gone for two weeks or something -- so his mom waited the two weeks and re-filed. Then, nothing. For 8 months. Finally, some jerk at the local PD gives my friend a call to ask for some details about her missing son. This is a 15 year old kid who's been AWOL for almost a year, in a town where the worst infractions are bicycle theft and speeding tickets, and it takes them 8 months to get follow up information on a missing persons report? What exactly are we paying for, here?
I only looked at it for a second, but it seems to me as though it's a simple buffer overrun. See how char LogMesg[11] is allocated right after the various tallies? The stack grows downward, so an overwrite on LogMesg would possibly write directly into those tallies. And indeed, looking at what gets written into LogMesg, it is significantly longer than 11 bytes. My guess (without doing an in-depth analysis) is that it doesn't work on Nov 2 because "second" is one byte longer than "first" and "third", and therefore will corrupt memory differently on that day, presumably in a way that is favorable.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I read that book when I was a teenager and the entire time I was just in awe of the man. Then, later, I went back and reread it and it was basically just a whole string of "... and then I did this ... and then I did this ... and then I did this ... goddamn I'm awesome."
..., I feel like RP is doing the same thing, only on a far, far more massive scale. Unlike me, he really was a genius to start out with, but you can tell that he deliberately cultivated a larger-than-life persona and that he enjoyed being seen as the eccentric, womanizing super-genius. I mean, I can understand that, who wouldn't? But on some level, it's the same self-absorbed behavior that made people hate me when I was 15.
But, as you said, unlike 99 percent of autobiographers, RP was actually a genius. But he definitely hyped himself up. Did you know that in his entire career, he only wrote 37 research papers? Lots of the stuff he did in his life, while definitely cool, has the feel of a publicity stunt.
When I was a kid, I was a little bit precocious and I remember liking it when people told me I was smart. So I did "smart things" on purpose and cultivated the impression of being the child prodigy that my teachers and parents believed I was. In reality, I was nowhere near as brilliant as I pretended to be; it was all a sham. That didn't stop me from going through a phase as a teenager where I was actually conceited enough to believe my own bullshit, though.
Reading Surely You're Joking
Having said that, his lectures on physics -- a discipline I don't even like -- are still the best textbooks I've ever had the pleasure of educating myself with.
This is offtopic, re: your sig, but why exactly are you comparing Iraq to a World War? Have things there gotten that bad already? Have I missed something?
I love this petty CEO-bashing that we have here on Slashdot. I don't know much about SugarCRM, and I'll admit that there are idiots who run companies (as there are idiots in any profession) but this elitist attitude is one of the things that annoys me most about nerds. Have you ever run your own company? Made it profitable? Done the accounting? Managed a bunch of people with skills that don't overlap much with your own?
I hate to break it to you guys who are living a daydream here, but that stuff is hard to do and it's even harder to do well. There's definitely some pork-barrel price-fixing of CEO salaries at some of the larger, more established companies out there, but under no circumstance should you ever get the idea that CEOs are stupid or that delegating responsibility to others more knowledgeable than you in any field is somehow stupid or worth looking down upon.
Programming a computer is not that difficult. You can pretend it is in front of your layman friends, but this is Slashdot -- we all program computers, or at least 90% of us do, so don't think we're going to take your word for it when you wax lyrical about how you need to be a genius to get it done.
Why is it that expertise -- and let's face it, often as not not even real expertise in the case of the average Slashdot reader -- in one field gives people the attitude that they can mouth off about other people? In the US, one of the most entrepreneur-friendly countries in the entire world, only 38% of business are still around after 6 years (Dun & Bradstreet). This is not because people who start businesses are stupid, it's because running a business is hard. Really hard.
If you ran a company, and you tried to be programmer, lawyer, accountant, financial planner, sales rep, and janitor all at once, you know what would happen? Your company would die. Because, despite what you've been told, law is hard. Accounting is hard. Capital budgeting is hard. Sales -- sales is bust ass. And yes, even cleaning the floors carries a tremendous opportunity cost if your other duties include making the company profitable.
Being able to delegate responsibility -- being able to let someone who really knows what they are doing deal with something you yourself don't understand very well -- is one of the hallmarks of a good manager. And if you think that good managers are common, you obviously haven't worked in a corporate setting for very long. Ever had a PHB who knew nothing about what you were the resident expert at and tried to do your job for you? Tried to micromanage you? Did you ever bitch about that?
Because here you are disparaging a CEO because he doesn't (according to you) know the intricacies of copyright law. Well, odds are you haven't the foggiest idea about copyright law either, since you probably aren't a lawyer, and if you think you do because you read Slashdot, then you are sadly mistaken.
Why don't you go try running a business. Working 90 hour weeks for equity at a start up and not just doing the programming but managing the finances and dealing with the VCs and doing the whole shebang before you come here and mouth off about how CEOs are all morons.
There's a reason these guys get paid so much, even at the mid-cap level, and I hate to disappoint you, it's not because of the good old boys network. It's because they know how to generate wealth, and very few people have that skill. They know how to talk to investors, they know how to delegate responsibility, they know how to run the company. They know how to choose an i-bank when it comes time to IPO. They know how to make it work. And you don't. And I know it may hurt your fragile little Slashdotter whiny-nerd ego to admit it, but there are things other than programming that take real skill. Why, there may even be things harder than programming! Imagine that!
(As an aside, I was in Silicon Valley during the bubble, and I saw first hand what happens when programmers start thinking they can run companies -- 99% of them bite the dust, even with millions of dollars in first phase investment. Why, some of their ideas were even good. Too bad that that's not all it takes to succeed.)
Physical mail is most certainly not "almost dead". Just because you don't use it doesn't mean others don't; I frequently correspond with people I know, especially abroad, via snail mail. Have you ever gotten a hand-written letter from a friend? It's great.
Plus, snail mail will continue to be used for packages and anything else that requires actual shipping of something concrete, not just information. Which means that the infrastructure to mail letters will continue to exist until we have replicators. It is therefore highly probable that people will continue to write letters, even if their number is much reduced from the practice's heyday in the late 19th/early 20th century. It therefore follows that it will never be "dead", at least not by any strict definition of the term.
I think the OP hit the nail right on the head -- these things do not die, they simply leave the limelight. E-mail was at one time hot technology -- it has since become commonplace, and its ubiquity makes it boring to the teenager, who thrives on the new and exciting. The same will likely happen with social networks, which are in actuality just a user-friendly implementation of the web-of-trust or reputation metric that has existed in cryptographic circles for some time now. The technology will eventually become relatively mainstream; it will find its niche and then it too will fade from the limelight.
Relatively few promising or important technologies have become so uncommon that they could reasonably be considered "dead". Among these I count gopher, but its most salient features were absorbed by the world wide web, and so it did not really die so much as evolve. Dial-up BBSs, likewise, are dead in the sense that the ones that exist exist only for the sake of nostalgia -- but again, the internet has largely replaced their functionality, and the problems they were created to solve are better solved by internet anyway. Proprietary pre-internets, like CompuServ, GEnie, and Prodigy are also dead, for the same reason, although they were once very common.
I think Myspace, Facebook, and its predecessors -- many now defunct -- are the social networking equivalent of CompuServ and its ilk. They are centralized, proprietary and incompatible implementations of what essentially amounts to the same basic concept -- a web of trust. While people here on Slashdot often lambaste todays young people for not understanding the importance of privacy, I think the vast majority of them are attracted to services like Facebook precisely because they do value their privacy. People want to share their pictures, want to share their experiences -- but they don't want to do it with everyone on the internet, as we used to with our HTML 3.2 homepages, back when the internet was a safer place.
The web of trust concept provides a perfect system to deal with this problem, as cryptography geeks have been saying for years. Current social networks divide people into friends and non-friends, and they use these distinctions to control what parts of their little chunk of the internet people have access to. It's no surprise to me at all that they prefer this managed approach to the classic "make a web page for everyone to read" approach.
Going forward, I fully expect an open, social networking "protocol" to emerge that allows people to incorporate such distinctions into their own websites without being part of a Facebook or Myspace site. It may be that the open standard takes precedence quickly, as e-mail did, or slowly, as has been the case with IM, but as soon as a technology becomes truly mainstream, interoperability becomes too important and corporate distrust too great to allow any one company to monopolize the field.
You know, I think the question regarding distribution of old child pornography is a difficult one. Obviously, the creation of said pornography involved the abuse of children, which is reprehensible -- but already done, and not undoable. There is child pornography available on TPB, if you look, although they do not host it themselves (much as there is child pornography available on Google, which one could argue they do in fact distribute, through their caching system, but I digress). The question is, does a pedophile downloading and wacking off to children performing sexual acts actually hurt anyone? The creation of the film definitely hurt the actors/actresses involved, no question there, but the mere distribution is something else entirely.
As I see it, there are two main perspectives on this, both of which are valid, but neither of which is consistent with the other, unfortunately.
First, there's the "economic" argument against the distribution of old child pornography, which goes something like this: the distribution of child pornography creates demand for said porn, and creates incentive for the production of more. Therefore, while the actual act of distributing child pornography is not in fact harmful, it may indirectly cause harm to children through secondary, market-like effects.
Second, there's the "sate the pervert" argument for allowing the distribution of old child pornography, which goes something like this: porn arises as a response to the desires of pedophiles, desires that exist with or without pornography. The existence of child pornography allows them to sate their desires without actually acting on their fantasies. Most of them know that society does not accept their particular fetish, and find themselves in a position where they must deny their sexuality in order to remain within the bounds of the law. Denying one's sexuality is hard, and success is all the more difficult if there is no outlet. Allowing old child pornography to be distributed gives them an avenue to satisfy themselves, thus decreasing the likelihood of actual child rape, which most would agree is far more harmful.
Regardless of which position you take -- or even if you accept both as probably being valid, even if they are contradictory -- it is clear that the makers of new child pornography must be persecuted to the fullest extent of the law, as that is where actual child abuse is happening. The distribution of stuff that's already been produced -- it's more of a gray area.
Then there's the even grayer area of computer-generated child pornography. CGI and animation technology have gotten good enough that nearly photo-realistic pornography starring very underage girls and boys who do not in fact exist and thus are not abused in the making of said pornography is possible. However, in many jurisdictions, its distribution is still illegal. Perhaps the proponents of this policy are those who follow the economic argument against the distribution of child pornography that I outlined above -- for the moment, in many places, raping an actual child is easier (cheaper, faster) than simulating such an act on a computer, and so to compete, unscrupulous producers might resort to actual abuse and market it is as simulated.
There's another factor that's worth considering -- even if the distribution of old child pornography is not equivalent to actual child rape, the child who stars in the picture will perhaps be affected psychologically by the knowledge that a traumatic experience in her past is still being used as wack-off material for perverts everywhere, so perhaps distribution cannot be held to be a completely victimless crime, banned out of concern for secondary effects alone.
All in all, it's an interesting discussion and debate. Unfortunately, because it is very much a taboo subject in Europe and North America, there is very little exploration of some of the finer points. I would very much like to see a formal debate on the issue -- THW legalize the distribution of old child pornography -- but unfortunately, that seems unlikely.
For what it's worth, Google also links to child porn -- perhaps we should put them on the blacklist as well?
That's true -- but Einstein worked out relativity on paper and we spent lots of time trying to figure out how to test the theory long before a nuclear power plant or bomb was produced. These were engineered using the physics that he and others had worked out since 1905. No one "accidentally" stumbled upon a working atomic reactor while messing around with turbines.
If you read the article, you'll see that that's what they claim -- that they "accidentally" stumbled upon this amazing technology.
It's quite rare that anything of any complexity is discovered by accident -- generally, science advances in small steps, not great leaps. In the case of Einstein, people (like Michaelson and Morley) were doing experiments whose results did not agree with the predictions of the prevalent theories of the day, and someone stepped in to explain why. It took us nearly 40 years to do anything like "convert matter to abundant energy" from those initial baby steps.
In the same way that monkeys randomly banging on keyboards don't produce fine works of literature, people messing around with simple machines whose fundamentals have been understood for hundreds of years don't suddenly revolutionize physics.
Of course, both are technically possible, but you'd be a shitty gambler if you bet on those odds.
This is bullshit. People who make the loose/lose mistake are overwhelmingly native speakers. As someone who has spent most of his life living in countries where English was not the local language, I can attest that I have never seen this mistake made by second language learners. It is, however, disturbingly common among Americans in particular.
Your etymology lesson is also completely irrelevant; while los may be the root for both words, that in no way implies that people should make the mistake. First of all, in German, the word for lose is verlieren, which sounds nothing like lose; second of all, words that come from the same root but developed into different words abound, but this has little effect on current speakers, because we don't learn words based on their etymologies: consider that "cipher" and "zero" both have the same root, the Italian word "zefiro" (the latter coming to us via French). You don't randomly mix up cipher and zero, do you?
No, the only reason people mix up loose and lose is because they are spelled similarly and people are bad spellers. It isn't because they are pronounced similarly, because you never here people say "He always looses that game", you only see morons on the internet type it out.
In general, second language learners are much more anal about things like spelling than native speakers, who typically were taught spelling young and stopped having any feedback from teachers on it by the time they were 12 or 13. To someone learning English as a second language, though, English's weird and inconsistent spelling conventions are considered one of the truly difficult aspects of the language, and so, predictably, a great deal of time and effort is expended mastering them.
And even if non-native speakers were prone to making this mistake, what makes you think that we shouldn't correct them? They'll look like idiots if they ever write anything important in English and make that mistake, and it's not the sort of thing that spell check can help them with. In fact, we're doing them a great service. We're doing anyone who makes that mistake a great service.
If you're one of these people that gets annoyed when you get corrected, you're being awfully short-sighted. Despite what you may think, people judge you on things like spelling. Sending in a cover letter? A job application? Hey, let me tell you, if your resume has a spelling mistake on it, it goes straight into the trash at my firm, you can count on it.
Don't deliberately mislead yourself: spelling and grammar are important. Lose vs loose is an easy distinction, and there is no reason whatsoever to fail to make it, native speaker or not.
I think the grandparent's point was that the use of "even" implies that she was somehow more deserving of having her sentence commuted because she found Christ, which is the only detail the OP provides about her.
... "finding God" in no way suggests to me, at least, that a person should be forgiven by a secular state.
As a disclaimer, I am against the death penalty in general. But I agree with the GP: what on earth should finding Christ (or Allah, or Buddha, or whomever) have to do with whether your sentence is commuted or not?
Or perhaps the OP was simply noting that Bush, who makes great show of being a Christian, and who credits his own finding of Christ with setting his life right, showed no mercy to someone who perhaps had a similar experience?
It's not really clear, but
Your "point" (what little of it there appears to be) is based entirely on providing examples of behavior that is wrong or illegal and yet widespread, which implies, somehow, that the wrong/illegal behavior this story complains about is acceptable. From your own post:
If that isn't a two wrongs make a right defense, then pray tell, what is it? Your response is completely irrelevant to the OP's point. What does people borrowing copyrighted material from websites all the time have to do with anything here, except that in both cases we're dealing with copyright infringement? Oh, oh, let me guess: the fact that people get away with the former in your mind makes the latter ok? Aha! Two wrongs make a right! But wait, read on:
Translation: "Piracy is also copyright infringement, and the practice is widespread. Maybe, before people complain, they shouldn't commit the same crime themselves."
This is, again, the essence of the two wrongs make a right defense. Perhaps the problem here is that you don't know what that defense is? Let me make it clear for you, in case you're really just too dense: someone criticizes something as being wrong, and you justify it with some other action which is somehow related and which is also wrong.
This is like saying, because lots of people are murdered every year, we shouldn't complain about a specific murder case.
Hmm, let's see... hey, I've already quoted your entire post! There was actually nothing else in there except essentially "but other people do blah blah blah, which is the same crime, so umm... Oooh, SHINY!"
They've already released Parallels -- the LGPL requires that the release the code used to build the binary that they distributed, not that they do some juggling to get the proprietary bits out of the LGPL'd code and then release that source. Even if the new, modified source produces a binary that is equivalent in function to the old one, if it isn't the actual code used to produce the distributed binary, they're still in violation.
This is why they should have dealt with this issue before release. There is nothing to be "verified" -- the LGPL is very specific.