I wonder how unlametheweak would feel if you'd said
(I think you meant incite) Joke about illiterate $(ETHNIC_SLUR)s
Where $(ETHNIC_SLUR) happened to match his ethnicity and didn't match the majority ethnicity. Would it be okay if your $(ETHNIC_SLUR) janitor or coworker thought it was funny too?
When I did tech support I worked with a lot of East Indians who would probably find that snippet quite amusing.
Just because people laugh at offensive jokes doesn't make them offensive. Hell if you were working in India and people made racist comments about your ethnic group, you'd probably decide that it was easier to laugh them off than risk losing your job. Ok, it's probably hard to explain to you, since if you were working in India you'd probably not be too unhappy about having to go back home where wages are much higher and you know people.
But if you're an India working in America and you get canned and sent home, you'll probably never get another chance to work in the US again, and you're stuck in a low wage country. So if someone like you cracks an offensive joke, they have no choice but to humour them.
It would be nice if I could feel free to express myself and give a bit of humour to the world without worrying about offending somebody.
Well if you're white and/or from a rich country you can, as your experience with Indians shows.
Say anything good, bad or neutral that involves a "race", and that statement can be said to be "racial", but "racist" implies intolerance and dis-respect, and this is something I just don't see.
We've all seen "please do my homework/job for me. fast response appreciated coz I has a dedline!" type posts to mailing lists. What's racist about the post is suggesting that this is somehow typical of foreigners. The H1B and the Indian name at the end make it racist. There are lazy people and hard working ones in all nationalities after all.
But volume discounts are not illegal as far as I know, so they probably still charge Dell less than the OEM price if they do thousands of installs. Googling around turns up quotes for Vista like "$50 for Home Basic rising to to $100 for Home Premium", but no hard figures and nothing on the record from an OEM.
Looking at the amount of junk installed on Dells by default I think there's probably a significant amount of cash involved. I had a friend in Taiwan who was seriously considering entering her credit card number when the anti virus trial ran out and it started to nag her until I told her it was a waste of time. So presumably the junk companies make a hefty amount of cash out of trialware, maybe fifty companies making a buck each is possible.
On the other hand the fact that Dell discount $50 for no Windows makes me think that the spyware kickback is less than this, and in fact close to zero, since this seems to be close to the rumoured Dell OEM Windows cost.
All this of course makes it very unlikely that Apple would OEM OSX by the way. They'd get $50-$100 off a Dell running OS X most likely at the low end of this, but they presumably make much more off genuine Apple hardware. Dells would also force them to spend more on supporting all commodity PC hardware rather than being able to cherry pick which components like they can do on Apple hardware.
56Whr Lithium Ion Battery (6 cell) how come the Linux system doesn't have this listed?
Lithium is just a plot by M$ to make you less creative. You think Theo de Raadt and Hans Reiser would have achieved what they did if they took their lithium like good little sheeple?
The smart "bosses" are more concerned about the holistic profitability of their business
Yeah right. Smart bosses are probably weighing up the cost/benefit ratio of keeping you on versus laying you off versus butchering you in the stationary cabinet and selling your organs on the blackmarket.
If I recall correctly, there is some free oxygen diffused among the water molecules. The gills on a fish don't perform electrolysis on the water, they just filter out some of the available oxygen.
This is true. And the reason they don't perform electrolysis is because they can't afford to. The energy required to electrolyse water would be more than that they could gain from respiration. You need dissolved O2 which you can extract cheaply. Then you combine it with glucose to give you CO2, H2O and energy.
There are other reactions that life can use like the ones around black smokers and in anaerobic caves, but if you have cold dark water with no O2 and none of the chemicals required for those then there's just nothing for organisms to live on, which is why it ends up being sterile.
You're statement about cell towers is correct, but it's the 25 feet tracking that I'm concerned about. Most users actually don't know they are being tracked whenever they carry their phone.
If you wrap you cellphone with an inch or so of tinfoil and ground that, the resulting Faraday Cage should protect you from being tracked. Note that just turning it off is not enough, since most cellphones can wake up from power off, turn on the radio and give away your location. Since (as you point out) you can't review the code, you can't prove this doesn't happen. Even removing the main battery is not sufficient, since most of them have a small backup battery soldered to the PCB.
No, if you care about privacy you need to fashion a faraday cage around your cellphone. You should also get rid of all credit cards and avoid visiting dentists who may implant tracking devices into your teeth. Home dentistry is easy once you get used to it though, if rather painful.
Oh good lord. The party using the library (Apple) is a "user".
If that were true then Tivo would be the user too and they could just opt not to use GPL3. Which would make the whole change pointless.
GPL3 only works if the the people that buy products are the users, not the companies who sell them, because Tivo and Apple want to keep products locked down and the whole point to the GPL3 is that to stop them doing that. If Linux had been licensed under "version 2 or later" I could opt to license it under that and gain whatever additional rights I'd get under v3.
That's not necessarily true. If the KHTML license contains a clause that says that users (note not the copyright owners) may license it under GPL2 "or at their discretion under any later version", I could buy an iPhone opt for GPL3 and demand the right to upgrade KHTML to a later library version. Which means they need to give me their signing keys.
Seems to me that "data" includes their signing keys:-)
What are you waiting for? Send Mr Jobs an email with your impeccable legal argument, and I'm sure he'll release the signing keys so you and everyone else will be able to flash their iPhones with whatever they want.
Actually if Microsoft cared about money, they'd leave Linux well alone. <1% market share is not worth the anti trust hassle. Even if they destroyed it, it's not like Linux users would buy windows licenses anyway. They'd probably rather go and serve Theo De Raadt or Steve Jobs or one of the proprietary Unix vendors. Hell it's open source, it's not really possible to kill it. All that would happen is that Microsoft's numerous enemies would use it as an excuse to gang up on them with patent lawsuits, complaints to the government and so on.
It's not stealing(http://www.lectlaw.com/def2/s074.htm) or piracy(http://www.lectlaw.com/def2/p050.htm)
Spin: arrrr, pirates of the south west Spin: thar be large pipes o'bandwith near ye'ol univarsety. Pirate: yearg, ye may be an ta somethan thar. Spin: what say ye we pull yonder USB hard disk longside yonder NMSU puter and begin tha lutin and plunderin. Pirate: yearg. The master done gaved me a testin machine with a grand ol CDR. Pirate: Avast! Pirate: MP3s off the starboard bow! Spin: stere clear of ye porn pop ups rollin in from tha east. Pirate: I have mah trusty Opera browsa to help me fend em off. Spin: encrypt the data holds, batton down thar security patches, argh thar be spyware abound.
The one major thing to worry about though is that an item that can charge up incredibly fast, contain a lot of electricity, and store it efficiently, can also discharge rapidly and violently...
Hmm, very interesting. Perhaps it could be used as a power source for a HANDHELD DEATH RAY!!!!
Richard Armitrage should't go to prison though, because he said this.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-lesk ly052803.asp That same month one year after the 9/11 attacks Deputy Secretary Armitage made it clear that this mandate would govern U.S. policy towards Hezbollah: "They have a blood debt to us and... we're not going to forget it. They're on the list, their time will come."
The Federation is clearly a very unpleasant society. Eliminating money implies that people must be coerced to work, or perhaps bio engineered to have no choice in the matter like social insects. Most Federation citizens live in a harsh military dictatorship where the ship's captain has absolute power. Federation drones aren't aware of this of course, they are programmed to think that their captain is infallible and they choose to obey his orders, they are still human and that they work without payment for the benefit of society.
But a quick look at the Federation shows this to be untrue. Most people seem to spend their lives on warships, even raising their families on them. The Federation seems to spend most of its resources on these warships, starships with weapons systems so powerful that they can't possibly be designed for peaceful exploration, let alone for non interference. As an advanced society it seems to be curiously dependent on very old works of art, mostly from the 20th Century or from far before.
I suspect that the immense wealth the Federation has must have been generated on slave worlds. A possible analogy would be with slavemaker ants for example, which use other species for all the hard work. It is also possible that flocks of federation starships attack more primitive civilizations like plagues of locusts and use their rather admirable technology to strip them bare and then move on, Independence Day style. This would explain the non human social structure seen on warships where a captain has absolute power and everyone seems to have some sort of military rank. It would also explain the lack of recent works of art and why no one in the Federation seems to do any real work. Like the imperialists of the 19th Century, the Federation is essentially parasitic. Not that Federation drones are aware of any of this of course, possibly some of the exploitation is done by machines or unseen servant races. There are signs of this, Vulcan and Klingon serve on starships without pay i.e. as slaves, but I think it more likely, given the fearsome offensive capabilities of Federation warships that they spend much of their time on conquest but the drones memories are manipulated to hide this lest their dormant sense of humanity awakens causes their insect like social structure to break down.
There are signs that the Federation has extensive virtual reality technology, though characteristically this is portrayed as being used frivolously. My theory is that Federation drones live in a sort of Matrix like virtual reality where the Federation is benign and they are still human. Perhaps the Federation was originally like this, before its crazed imperialism, unsustainable military budget and advanced technology turned it into something much nastier. If this is true, it's a nice Orwellian touch that the Federation's sometime (and possibly fictitious) competitor the Borg Collective is used to scare Federation drones into compliance by portraying it inside Federation virtual reality as behaving much the way the Federation must do in reality.
As far as I know, deep oceans are almost sterile. There's life on the surface and for some distance down. And there's life around ocean vents. But there's probably big chunks of ocean with not much in it - it is cold and dark and there is no oxygen so that literally nothing can live there. So you'd pipe your waste there and rely on dilution to make it harmless by the time it gets to places with life.
Even if there are a few bugs, you could test the effects of what you're dumping on them before you do it, and check back regularly afterwards. You can suck up sterile seawater and pre-dilute the waste too or even pasteurise it, if you're worried about colonies of bacteria growing on the end of the pipe.
Seem to me if you dumped sewage or industrial waste carefully into the deep ocean, it would get diluted to the point where it was harmless before anything encountered it. Depending on the waste, it could be dumped in a way that it sinks several kilometres to the ocean floor (e.g. solid nuclear waste), or rises to the point where bacteria can break it down (sewage). Either way, the enormous dilution factor should make any that reaches the surface harmless.
Unless they employed eugenics at some point in their history, there's no guarantee that even an advanced society doesn't have "normal" people. That's something that always pissed me off about Star Trek (even as a fan): everyone was a super-genius, unless you dedicated yourself to raising grapes in France or you were a junior member of an away team.;-)
You need to think about British Teeth. British people (including me) tend to have crooked teeth. Americans tend not to. Now why I was growing up, the dentist employed a receptionist who's job was to keep people away. The dentist you see got paid pretty well just to be there, he had no financial incentive to treat people. Now in America, it's presumably not the same - dentists actively market cosmetic dental treatment, because that's where the money is. And parents will scrape together the money to pay for it.
Now in civilisation a few hundred years more advanced but still free, it's likely that all sorts of medical treatments would be available, everything from teeth straightening to IQ enhancements and drugs that make you look healthy or age less quickly. In which case, you wouldn't meet anyone stupid or ugly.
Come to think of it Scandinavia is not particularly capitalist but the same would probably apply there. I think unless we end up in some totalitarian dystopia, it's probably inevitable.
Or buy a phone that doesn't make you jump through hoops to use it? I can't believe you're actually saying people should use kludges just to use a phone. Amazing.
It's not just a phone, it's the iPhone. Apple fans queued overnight to get one. Some dude sold his corneas on eBay just to get the $500. He can't see for shit anymore unless he holds it a few inches from his face, but he's got his iPhone and he growls at people like a dog when they try to take it away.
You've got to be more careful. Apple fans monitor these forums. What you posted may get you bitten by some blind fanatic.
Good point. Hope you'll say the same when people point out that scientists that question global warming are 'not climatologists' or 'have accepted money from big oil'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Freeman According to Valve's documentary book on the game, Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar, the name Gordon Freeman is an homage to Freeman Dyson.
Slashdot Mirror
(I think you meant incite)
I wonder how unlametheweak would feel if you'd said
(I think you meant incite)
Joke about illiterate $(ETHNIC_SLUR)s
Where $(ETHNIC_SLUR) happened to match his ethnicity and didn't match the majority ethnicity. Would it be okay if your $(ETHNIC_SLUR) janitor or coworker thought it was funny too?
When I did tech support I worked with a lot of East Indians who would probably find that snippet quite amusing.
Just because people laugh at offensive jokes doesn't make them offensive. Hell if you were working in India and people made racist comments about your ethnic group, you'd probably decide that it was easier to laugh them off than risk losing your job. Ok, it's probably hard to explain to you, since if you were working in India you'd probably not be too unhappy about having to go back home where wages are much higher and you know people.
But if you're an India working in America and you get canned and sent home, you'll probably never get another chance to work in the US again, and you're stuck in a low wage country. So if someone like you cracks an offensive joke, they have no choice but to humour them.
It would be nice if I could feel free to express myself and give a bit of humour to the world without worrying about offending somebody.
Well if you're white and/or from a rich country you can, as your experience with Indians shows.
Say anything good, bad or neutral that involves a "race", and that statement can be said to be "racial", but "racist" implies intolerance and dis-respect, and this is something I just don't see.
We've all seen "please do my homework/job for me. fast response appreciated coz I has a dedline!" type posts to mailing lists. What's racist about the post is suggesting that this is somehow typical of foreigners. The H1B and the Indian name at the end make it racist. There are lazy people and hard working ones in all nationalities after all.
Do you have any figures for Dell OEM pricing or incentives from trialware or crapware?
6 .html
The cost per Vista Home Basic OEM is about $99 to end users.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070124-869
But volume discounts are not illegal as far as I know, so they probably still charge Dell less than the OEM price if they do thousands of installs. Googling around turns up quotes for Vista like "$50 for Home Basic rising to to $100 for Home Premium", but no hard figures and nothing on the record from an OEM.
Looking at the amount of junk installed on Dells by default I think there's probably a significant amount of cash involved. I had a friend in Taiwan who was seriously considering entering her credit card number when the anti virus trial ran out and it started to nag her until I told her it was a waste of time. So presumably the junk companies make a hefty amount of cash out of trialware, maybe fifty companies making a buck each is possible.
On the other hand the fact that Dell discount $50 for no Windows makes me think that the spyware kickback is less than this, and in fact close to zero, since this seems to be close to the rumoured Dell OEM Windows cost.
All this of course makes it very unlikely that Apple would OEM OSX by the way. They'd get $50-$100 off a Dell running OS X most likely at the low end of this, but they presumably make much more off genuine Apple hardware. Dells would also force them to spend more on supporting all commodity PC hardware rather than being able to cherry pick which components like they can do on Apple hardware.
56Whr Lithium Ion Battery (6 cell)
how come the Linux system doesn't have this listed?
Lithium is just a plot by M$ to make you less creative. You think Theo de Raadt and Hans Reiser would have achieved what they did if they took their lithium like good little sheeple?
That sounds pretty racist. So Indians are not allowed to ask the white master race technical questions or something? Seriously, what's the problem.
The smart "bosses" are more concerned about the holistic profitability of their business
Yeah right. Smart bosses are probably weighing up the cost/benefit ratio of keeping you on versus laying you off versus butchering you in the stationary cabinet and selling your organs on the blackmarket.
If I recall correctly, there is some free oxygen diffused among the water molecules. The gills on a fish don't perform electrolysis on the water, they just filter out some of the available oxygen.
This is true. And the reason they don't perform electrolysis is because they can't afford to. The energy required to electrolyse water would be more than that they could gain from respiration. You need dissolved O2 which you can extract cheaply. Then you combine it with glucose to give you CO2, H2O and energy.
There are other reactions that life can use like the ones around black smokers and in anaerobic caves, but if you have cold dark water with no O2 and none of the chemicals required for those then there's just nothing for organisms to live on, which is why it ends up being sterile.
You're statement about cell towers is correct, but it's the 25 feet tracking that I'm concerned about. Most users actually don't know they are being tracked whenever they carry their phone.
If you wrap you cellphone with an inch or so of tinfoil and ground that, the resulting Faraday Cage should protect you from being tracked. Note that just turning it off is not enough, since most cellphones can wake up from power off, turn on the radio and give away your location. Since (as you point out) you can't review the code, you can't prove this doesn't happen. Even removing the main battery is not sufficient, since most of them have a small backup battery soldered to the PCB.
No, if you care about privacy you need to fashion a faraday cage around your cellphone. You should also get rid of all credit cards and avoid visiting dentists who may implant tracking devices into your teeth. Home dentistry is easy once you get used to it though, if rather painful.
Oh good lord. The party using the library (Apple) is a "user".
If that were true then Tivo would be the user too and they could just opt not to use GPL3. Which would make the whole change pointless.
GPL3 only works if the the people that buy products are the users, not the companies who sell them, because Tivo and Apple want to keep products locked down and the whole point to the GPL3 is that to stop them doing that. If Linux had been licensed under "version 2 or later" I could opt to license it under that and gain whatever additional rights I'd get under v3.
That's not necessarily true. If the KHTML license contains a clause that says that users (note not the copyright owners) may license it under GPL2 "or at their discretion under any later version", I could buy an iPhone opt for GPL3 and demand the right to upgrade KHTML to a later library version. Which means they need to give me their signing keys.
Seems to me that "data" includes their signing keys :-)
What are you waiting for? Send Mr Jobs an email with your impeccable legal argument, and I'm sure he'll release the signing keys so you and everyone else will be able to flash their iPhones with whatever they want.
Actually if Microsoft cared about money, they'd leave Linux well alone. <1% market share is not worth the anti trust hassle. Even if they destroyed it, it's not like Linux users would buy windows licenses anyway. They'd probably rather go and serve Theo De Raadt or Steve Jobs or one of the proprietary Unix vendors. Hell it's open source, it's not really possible to kill it. All that would happen is that Microsoft's numerous enemies would use it as an excuse to gang up on them with patent lawsuits, complaints to the government and so on.
It's not stealing(http://www.lectlaw.com/def2/s074.htm) or piracy(http://www.lectlaw.com/def2/p050.htm)
Spin: arrrr, pirates of the south west
Spin: thar be large pipes o'bandwith near ye'ol univarsety.
Pirate: yearg, ye may be an ta somethan thar.
Spin: what say ye we pull yonder USB hard disk longside yonder NMSU puter and begin tha lutin and plunderin.
Pirate: yearg. The master done gaved me a testin machine with a grand ol CDR.
Pirate: Avast!
Pirate: MP3s off the starboard bow!
Spin: stere clear of ye porn pop ups rollin in from tha east.
Pirate: I have mah trusty Opera browsa to help me fend em off.
Spin: encrypt the data holds, batton down thar security patches, argh thar be spyware abound.
The one major thing to worry about though is that an item that can charge up incredibly fast, contain a lot of electricity, and store it efficiently, can also discharge rapidly and violently...
Hmm, very interesting. Perhaps it could be used as a power source for a HANDHELD DEATH RAY!!!!
It would most certainly be indicative of an "OMG teh evil conspiracy!" if I were to suggest that I've been on the worse end of a similar situation.
What? You trashed some idealistic youngster's hopes and dreams on the orders of your corporate masters? How much did you get paid?
I get the impression that Bush will be very busy in the last few days pardoning Cheney.
Richard Armitrage should't go to prison though, because he said this.
k ly052803.asp ... we're not going to forget it. They're on the list, their time will come."
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-les
That same month one year after the 9/11 attacks Deputy Secretary Armitage made it clear that this mandate would govern U.S. policy towards Hezbollah: "They have a blood debt to us and
Best. Threat. Evar.
Somewhere in Mount Olympus, the Gods must be hurling bolts of self awareness.
The Federation is clearly a very unpleasant society. Eliminating money implies that people must be coerced to work, or perhaps bio engineered to have no choice in the matter like social insects. Most Federation citizens live in a harsh military dictatorship where the ship's captain has absolute power. Federation drones aren't aware of this of course, they are programmed to think that their captain is infallible and they choose to obey his orders, they are still human and that they work without payment for the benefit of society.
But a quick look at the Federation shows this to be untrue. Most people seem to spend their lives on warships, even raising their families on them. The Federation seems to spend most of its resources on these warships, starships with weapons systems so powerful that they can't possibly be designed for peaceful exploration, let alone for non interference. As an advanced society it seems to be curiously dependent on very old works of art, mostly from the 20th Century or from far before.
I suspect that the immense wealth the Federation has must have been generated on slave worlds. A possible analogy would be with slavemaker ants for example, which use other species for all the hard work. It is also possible that flocks of federation starships attack more primitive civilizations like plagues of locusts and use their rather admirable technology to strip them bare and then move on, Independence Day style. This would explain the non human social structure seen on warships where a captain has absolute power and everyone seems to have some sort of military rank. It would also explain the lack of recent works of art and why no one in the Federation seems to do any real work. Like the imperialists of the 19th Century, the Federation is essentially parasitic. Not that Federation drones are aware of any of this of course, possibly some of the exploitation is done by machines or unseen servant races. There are signs of this, Vulcan and Klingon serve on starships without pay i.e. as slaves, but I think it more likely, given the fearsome offensive capabilities of Federation warships that they spend much of their time on conquest but the drones memories are manipulated to hide this lest their dormant sense of humanity awakens causes their insect like social structure to break down.
There are signs that the Federation has extensive virtual reality technology, though characteristically this is portrayed as being used frivolously. My theory is that Federation drones live in a sort of Matrix like virtual reality where the Federation is benign and they are still human. Perhaps the Federation was originally like this, before its crazed imperialism, unsustainable military budget and advanced technology turned it into something much nastier. If this is true, it's a nice Orwellian touch that the Federation's sometime (and possibly fictitious) competitor the Borg Collective is used to scare Federation drones into compliance by portraying it inside Federation virtual reality as behaving much the way the Federation must do in reality.
As far as I know, deep oceans are almost sterile. There's life on the surface and for some distance down. And there's life around ocean vents. But there's probably big chunks of ocean with not much in it - it is cold and dark and there is no oxygen so that literally nothing can live there. So you'd pipe your waste there and rely on dilution to make it harmless by the time it gets to places with life.
Even if there are a few bugs, you could test the effects of what you're dumping on them before you do it, and check back regularly afterwards. You can suck up sterile seawater and pre-dilute the waste too or even pasteurise it, if you're worried about colonies of bacteria growing on the end of the pipe.
It's the untreated sewage/industrial waste that I object to
Do you believe in Homeopathy then?
Seem to me if you dumped sewage or industrial waste carefully into the deep ocean, it would get diluted to the point where it was harmless before anything encountered it. Depending on the waste, it could be dumped in a way that it sinks several kilometres to the ocean floor (e.g. solid nuclear waste), or rises to the point where bacteria can break it down (sewage). Either way, the enormous dilution factor should make any that reaches the surface harmless.
Unless they employed eugenics at some point in their history, there's no guarantee that even an advanced society doesn't have "normal" people. That's something that always pissed me off about Star Trek (even as a fan): everyone was a super-genius, unless you dedicated yourself to raising grapes in France or you were a junior member of an away team. ;-)
You need to think about British Teeth. British people (including me) tend to have crooked teeth. Americans tend not to. Now why I was growing up, the dentist employed a receptionist who's job was to keep people away. The dentist you see got paid pretty well just to be there, he had no financial incentive to treat people. Now in America, it's presumably not the same - dentists actively market cosmetic dental treatment, because that's where the money is. And parents will scrape together the money to pay for it.
Now in civilisation a few hundred years more advanced but still free, it's likely that all sorts of medical treatments would be available, everything from teeth straightening to IQ enhancements and drugs that make you look healthy or age less quickly. In which case, you wouldn't meet anyone stupid or ugly.
Come to think of it Scandinavia is not particularly capitalist but the same would probably apply there. I think unless we end up in some totalitarian dystopia, it's probably inevitable.
Or buy a phone that doesn't make you jump through hoops to use it? I can't believe you're actually saying people should use kludges just to use a phone. Amazing.
It's not just a phone, it's the iPhone. Apple fans queued overnight to get one. Some dude sold his corneas on eBay just to get the $500. He can't see for shit anymore unless he holds it a few inches from his face, but he's got his iPhone and he growls at people like a dog when they try to take it away.
You've got to be more careful. Apple fans monitor these forums. What you posted may get you bitten by some blind fanatic.
Good point. Hope you'll say the same when people point out that scientists that question global warming are 'not climatologists' or 'have accepted money from big oil'.
Gordon Freeman is named after Freeman Dyson.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Freeman
According to Valve's documentary book on the game, Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar, the name Gordon Freeman is an homage to Freeman Dyson.