> Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
Oh, you poor fool. All the comments are dross, the difference is that the ones that get moderated up agree with local version of conventional wisdom and are written by people who are somewhat functionally literate.
Slashdot is an echo chamber for your prejudices, Fox News for left wing geeks. If dictators knew about peer moderation, they'd sack all their censors. Peer moderation is the tyranny of the unthinking majority in it's purest form, and unlike other forms of censorship, it doesn't set up a privileged class who can subvert the system.
All software uses ones and zeros, but that doesn't mean that all software is unprotectable under copyright
Under copyright certainly. In patent law it's a bit different. Zeros are in the unencumbered, following the failure of the lawsuit Estate of Pingala vs Microsoft, Sun, Amiga Corp, Atari, IBM, Apple et al 1997. Microsoft later acquired a controlling interest in the Estate of Pingala for a substantial undisclosed sum and negotiated licenses on all their patents.
However, Ones are all owned by Microsoft, following the success of Microsoft's follow up lawsuit, Microsoft and Estate of Pingala vs Sun, Amiga Corp, Atari, IBM, Apple, et al 1998
If Microsoft had succeeded in losing the first lawsuit as they planned, both Zero and One would have been patented of course, but their lawyers were just too damn good.
My iPod can't be a USB mass storage device. It's plugged into the Firewire port. Now you know what complicates it, so let's focus on what to do about it.
SBP-2 is a standard for passing SCSI commands over Firewire. It's supported by default on Windows, Linux and Mac, so SBP-2 hard disks will be recognized on all platforms.
So it's technically possible to build a device which allows Mass Storage Class type access over Firewire. What I, and I guess the GP, want is a device where you can copy a load of mp3s and maybe an m3u playlist and have it recognize them. Since m3u playlists are easy to generate (eg with a dir *.mp3/s/b > playlist.m3u in a batch file), it means you can drag'n'drop files from your friend's MP3 collection to the device, run the batch file and have it play them. Whereas iTunes has to be seen to discourage people doing that because it's illegal. Plus, I can't install iTunes on my work machine. And all the music management apps I've seen, including iTunes, annoy the hell out of me.
That's the problem, and the reason that people don't like it.
It's geeky rather than nerdy. It always annoys me when people confuse a geek, someone highly intelligent and knowledgeable with a nerd, someone with no social skills. Read pages 358 and 654 of Mirriam Webster Extended Edition, 1997 issue.
If only. I use an unbelievably slow Java application every day. It takes two minutes or so to start, and a 30 seconds to a minute or so each time it needs to do any database access.
The odd thing about the IT industry is that the more obviously flawed an idea, the more likely corporate people will decide to base their in house applications on it. A short list - ActiveX controls in webpages, Java anywhere but a webpage, MFC applications based on Document View architecture, and a host of other technologies that are either flat out horrible or just used way outside their natural habitat. All of them are used in some internally written application in every big company I've worked for. These things never get rewritten.
Whereas good technologies that I read about like Taos, or ACE workstations with MIPS processors or the Roadrunner OS, seemed to disappear without being used by anyone.
I guess it's kind of like trolling - if you come up with a nice sensible idea, no one remembers it. One that has design quirks that encourages flamewars between it's zombie fanboys and the rest of the industry will become famous enough to be adopted. Not to take over the industry mind you, just to get used in a few terrible in house applications.
Whereas vxWorks for example, which is an elegant design implemented efficiently has virtually died out.
We always edit our email in vi and then save them to Apu's home directory. Apu is an Indian intern and he then copies them to the home directory of the people on the To and CC lines. If there are office attachments, he carefully deciphers the text content with a hex editor and summarises them in a text file.
He doesn't handle Bcc though, he has religious objections to it. He believes it to be a tool of schemers, quite rightly in my opinion. Same with FYI emails.
I wasn't implying forced was incorrectly spelled. I was just teasing the GP because he was criticising someone else's typing skills and advocating forcing them to work with his choice of tools, whilst at the same time making typographical errors himself. So by his own logic, since I've shown his typing skills to be inadequate, I could suggest that he use my choice of tools / working methods, or even that the choice be taken away from him.
But suggesting the receptionist be forced to work in a different way would be wrong even if he hadn't made a single typo because it violates the Golden Rule. The fact that he did make typos in the same post just made it a more tempting target.
I've highlighted forced in a different way in this post, since it's a golden rule violation rather than a typo, sorry for any confusion caused by the original post;-)
What kind of terminals? vt100, xterminals or some sort of windows citrix or similar terminals? I've used all and with splitvt and screen I'd rather be on a 19200 vt100 terminal than a citrix terminal on a lously network. In all seriousness though for a lot of applications I think text only would make more sense than gui based. At the dentist the other day and the receptionist was going back and forth between the mouse and the keyboard. I think that if she had been forced to learn the , and similar keystrokes it would have saved a good two minutes for getting my data in the system.
Dang it! I missed it in the preview. That should read "<tab>, <shift><tab>"
Maybe your account should be modified to only allow Extrans to save us a few minutes. Or you should be 'forced' to read every 'lously' word of the preview.
But if you abolished copyright law, people would not need to bother with releasing source code to GPL'd software, they'd just keep their modifications to themselves. Book companies wouldn't bother to pay authors either, since they own the printing press and would be allowed to print as many books as they wanted without needing to pay royalties. And if you abolished patents, something similar would happen - people that owned factories would make and sell whatever they wanted and not bother to pay the original inventors.
So if you invented something that you couldn't mass produce on your own, you'd be better off keeping it secret. I think it's a good example of how anarchy will quickly lead to a tyranny of the most powerful.
Oh, come on. What distro, or for that matter, 'ANY OPEN SOURCE PRODUCT', doesn't come with a whole world of mailing lists, faq's and forums. Nothing special there. Move along.
The pages seem to load faster on the gentoo-wiki than most others though.
Dude, lots of people in third world countries depend on unpatched Red Hat 6.2 boxes for their Linux needs. He's happy with his box, and so are they. Why spoil it?
The GPL shows that sometimes you have to take away minor freedoms to protect more important ones. The fact that most people don't understand only underlines the necessity. If DRM is banned, the studios will be forced to release their songs in an unencumbered format, and this will in the long run give people a more important freedom than being able to use iTunes now.
"Those that sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither liberty or security"
Do you actually think it's not a right, or are you just playing devil's advocate?
Yes, I do think that. The people that wrote it were extremely careful with words and if they described something as a privilege that can be revoked in extreme circumstances (habeas corpus) and something else as an inalienable right which the government cannot revoke under any circumstances (freedom from prior restaint in speech or writing) then the two things are in different categories.
Also, I think that they were aware that habeas corpus is not an inalienable right, for the simple reason that it's not a right people would have without a government in place. If you recall the bit in the Declaration of Independence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inalienable_rights#Or igins
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men."
So the Constitution doesn't grant you any rights at all, it actually stops the government from taking away rights you would have if it didn't exist. So freedom of speech, something which you would have without a government is a right, and the government is absolutely forbidden from infringing it, no matter what. But Habeas Corpus is not some inalienable right "endowed by the Creator", it's part of the legal system. Which is why the constitution describes it as a privilege, I believe in this sense
A privilegeetymologically "private law" or law relating to a specific individualis an honour, or permissive activity granted by another person or a government. A privilege is not a right and in some cases can be revoked. For example, in some countries driving on publicly maintained roads is a privilege; in others it is a right. If one violates certain rules, driving privileges can be revoked, and if one causes harm to another while exercising the right to travel just compensation may be sought and awarded.
Further evidence is that they say it can be revoked
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Here there is no clause about revoking it to protect the public safety in times of rebellion of invasion.
The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.
He said
The Constitution doesn't say every individual in the United States or citizen is hereby granted or assured the right of habeas corpus. It doesn't say that. It simply says the right shall not be suspended except in cases of rebellion or invasion.
Note it's a privilege not an inalienable right, and they specifically allow for situations like "rebellion or invasion" where the public safety may require it to safeguarded, which is his point. The point is that if al Qaeda were setting of dirty bombs all over the place, habeas corpus would be suspended, unlike the other inalienable rights.
The GP did not say anything about a new law limiting unconstitutional speech, only application of existing laws against treason to those speaking (and acting) in a treasonous manner.
Speech is not treasonous in itself, at least in any society I want to live in. Part of the cost of living in a free society is that people may say things which you violently disagree with, and he's using that right.
I personally think you have come up with a new definition for IRONY: defending the First Amendment rights of an Attorney General who does not believe those First Amendment rights exist in the first place!
Yeah, it must be a new definition since it does fit any of the ones here. I guess if he defended his comments under the First Amendment whilst simultaneously denying other people that protection, you'd have a point.
But even if he doesn't believe in the First Amendment (which I see no evidence of at the moment BTW), he still has rights under it, and I could still support those rights, even if he's said some stupid things in the past.
E.g. he was quoted as drawing up a long list of types of prisoner mistreatments all of which were classified as 'not torture'. I strongly disagree with the AG saying this sort of thing, but it's still constitutionally protected free speech as far as I can see.
And in this case, what he's saying isn't stupid of treasonous, just a bit lawyery. Other people have pointed out that Habeas Corpus is a privilege not a right and can be suspended in times of invasion or rebellion. In countries that have actually lived through existential threats, this has happened several times without the system collapsing into dictatorship, e.g. the internment of fascists in WWII in the UK. Come to think of it, I think even in the US I believe it was suspended in the Civil War.
You may not agree with him, but tossing around words like treasonous as a synonym for disagreeable makes you sound even more totalitarian than he does.
Anybody who speaks against the constitution, and votes as such, should be found guilty of treason. Perhaps England had a good idea about placing heads on pikes at the city gates. It reminds me of the Gadsden slogan: Don't Tread On Me.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I'm guessing a law punishing people for speaking unconstitionally would certainly violate the first amendment. Arguably, punishing people voting unconstitutionally would violate peaceable assembly.
The check on laws is not to censor the speech of the lawmakers, it's to have an impartial Supreme Court which can strike down laws which are unconstitutional, like the one you're proposing.
And it's worth pointing out that the people who's heads ended up on city gates in Medieval England were usually campaigning for freedom rather than against it.
Hmm, but there have been lots of examples in human history where very distant lands were conquered, and their inhabitants killed or enslaved by a marginally more sophisticated civilisation.
I think the mistake is to look at rationality of imperialism from the perspective of the whole civilisation rather than from the conquistadors. E.g. Spain and England may not have have made a profit from their empires, but the people that ruled them did, and so did the people who did the conquering. The masses back home, who actually made a net loss can be told that the invasion benefits them indirectly, by spreading their culture and religion, securing resources etc. And having an external enemy helps keep the people at home in line. Essentially, the ruling class of the country gets subsidisied by the masses to expand their control over new territory, and can use the threat of an external enemy to gain more control back home.
I always thought the aliens in V could plausibly be motivated by something like this, even if travelling 8.7 light years for water doesn't make much sense economically.
Slashdot Mirror
> Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
Oh, you poor fool. All the comments are dross, the difference is that the ones that get moderated up agree with local version of conventional wisdom and are written by people who are somewhat functionally literate.
Slashdot is an echo chamber for your prejudices, Fox News for left wing geeks. If dictators knew about peer moderation, they'd sack all their censors. Peer moderation is the tyranny of the unthinking majority in it's purest form, and unlike other forms of censorship, it doesn't set up a privileged class who can subvert the system.
All software uses ones and zeros, but that doesn't mean that all software is unprotectable under copyright
Under copyright certainly. In patent law it's a bit different. Zeros are in the unencumbered, following the failure of the lawsuit Estate of Pingala vs Microsoft, Sun, Amiga Corp, Atari, IBM, Apple et al 1997. Microsoft later acquired a controlling interest in the Estate of Pingala for a substantial undisclosed sum and negotiated licenses on all their patents.
However, Ones are all owned by Microsoft, following the success of Microsoft's follow up lawsuit, Microsoft and Estate of Pingala vs Sun, Amiga Corp, Atari, IBM, Apple, et al 1998
If Microsoft had succeeded in losing the first lawsuit as they planned, both Zero and One would have been patented of course, but their lawyers were just too damn good.
My iPod can't be a USB mass storage device. It's plugged into the Firewire port. Now you know what complicates it, so let's focus on what to do about it.
/s /b > playlist.m3u in a batch file), it means you can drag'n'drop files from your friend's MP3 collection to the device, run the batch file and have it play them. Whereas iTunes has to be seen to discourage people doing that because it's illegal. Plus, I can't install iTunes on my work machine. And all the music management apps I've seen, including iTunes, annoy the hell out of me.
No, but it could be an SBP-2 device.
SBP-2 is a standard for passing SCSI commands over Firewire. It's supported by default on Windows, Linux and Mac, so SBP-2 hard disks will be recognized on all platforms.
So it's technically possible to build a device which allows Mass Storage Class type access over Firewire. What I, and I guess the GP, want is a device where you can copy a load of mp3s and maybe an m3u playlist and have it recognize them. Since m3u playlists are easy to generate (eg with a dir *.mp3
That's the problem, and the reason that people don't like it.
Bzzt! WRONG!
It's geeky rather than nerdy. It always annoys me when people confuse a geek, someone highly intelligent and knowledgeable with a nerd, someone with no social skills. Read pages 358 and 654 of Mirriam Webster Extended Edition, 1997 issue.
Interesting. What chipset do you use for the GSM / WCDMA? Where do you get the network signallig stacks from?
How will you get an open source phone through type approval?
If only. I use an unbelievably slow Java application every day. It takes two minutes or so to start, and a 30 seconds to a minute or so each time it needs to do any database access.
The odd thing about the IT industry is that the more obviously flawed an idea, the more likely corporate people will decide to base their in house applications on it. A short list - ActiveX controls in webpages, Java anywhere but a webpage, MFC applications based on Document View architecture, and a host of other technologies that are either flat out horrible or just used way outside their natural habitat. All of them are used in some internally written application in every big company I've worked for. These things never get rewritten.
Whereas good technologies that I read about like Taos, or ACE workstations with MIPS processors or the Roadrunner OS, seemed to disappear without being used by anyone.
I guess it's kind of like trolling - if you come up with a nice sensible idea, no one remembers it. One that has design quirks that encourages flamewars between it's zombie fanboys and the rest of the industry will become famous enough to be adopted. Not to take over the industry mind you, just to get used in a few terrible in house applications.
Whereas vxWorks for example, which is an elegant design implemented efficiently has virtually died out.
We always edit our email in vi and then save them to Apu's home directory. Apu is an Indian intern and he then copies them to the home directory of the people on the To and CC lines. If there are office attachments, he carefully deciphers the text content with a hex editor and summarises them in a text file.
He doesn't handle Bcc though, he has religious objections to it. He believes it to be a tool of schemers, quite rightly in my opinion. Same with FYI emails.
Meh.
http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/index.php/Meh
I wasn't implying forced was incorrectly spelled. I was just teasing the GP because he was criticising someone else's typing skills and advocating forcing them to work with his choice of tools, whilst at the same time making typographical errors himself. So by his own logic, since I've shown his typing skills to be inadequate, I could suggest that he use my choice of tools / working methods, or even that the choice be taken away from him.
;-)
But suggesting the receptionist be forced to work in a different way would be wrong even if he hadn't made a single typo because it violates the Golden Rule. The fact that he did make typos in the same post just made it a more tempting target.
I've highlighted forced in a different way in this post, since it's a golden rule violation rather than a typo, sorry for any confusion caused by the original post
But if you abolished copyright law, people would not need to bother with releasing source code to GPL'd software, they'd just keep their modifications to themselves. Book companies wouldn't bother to pay authors either, since they own the printing press and would be allowed to print as many books as they wanted without needing to pay royalties. And if you abolished patents, something similar would happen - people that owned factories would make and sell whatever they wanted and not bother to pay the original inventors.
So if you invented something that you couldn't mass produce on your own, you'd be better off keeping it secret. I think it's a good example of how anarchy will quickly lead to a tyranny of the most powerful.
They'd be safer in North Korea I think. The Canadians are obviously working for The Man, judging from the last few posts I've read.
Oh, come on. What distro, or for that matter, 'ANY OPEN SOURCE PRODUCT', doesn't come with a whole world of mailing lists, faq's and forums. Nothing special there. Move along.
The pages seem to load faster on the gentoo-wiki than most others though.
Dude, lots of people in third world countries depend on unpatched Red Hat 6.2 boxes for their Linux needs. He's happy with his box, and so are they. Why spoil it?
in gentoo u just need emerge --backport --fuck-upstream --unrollloops --skip-rarely-taken-else-clauses --inlinelimit=9999999999999999999999
?Mean you
HP48GX My Love I. RPN you once grok, back going is not.
The GPL shows that sometimes you have to take away minor freedoms to protect more important ones. The fact that most people don't understand only underlines the necessity. If DRM is banned, the studios will be forced to release their songs in an unencumbered format, and this will in the long run give people a more important freedom than being able to use iTunes now.
"Those that sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither liberty or security"
Yes, I do think that. The people that wrote it were extremely careful with words and if they described something as a privilege that can be revoked in extreme circumstances (habeas corpus) and something else as an inalienable right which the government cannot revoke under any circumstances (freedom from prior restaint in speech or writing) then the two things are in different categories.
Also, I think that they were aware that habeas corpus is not an inalienable right, for the simple reason that it's not a right people would have without a government in place. If you recall the bit in the Declaration of Independence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inalienable_rights#O
So the Constitution doesn't grant you any rights at all, it actually stops the government from taking away rights you would have if it didn't exist. So freedom of speech, something which you would have without a government is a right, and the government is absolutely forbidden from infringing it, no matter what. But Habeas Corpus is not some inalienable right "endowed by the Creator", it's part of the legal system. Which is why the constitution describes it as a privilege, I believe in this sense
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privilege
Further evidence is that they say it can be revoked
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_One_of_the_U
Compare and contrast with freedom of speech / freedom from prior restraint:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in
Here there is no clause about revoking it to protect the public safety in times of rebellion of invasion.
http://www.usconstitution.net/xconst_A1Sec9.html
He said
Note it's a privilege not an inalienable right, and they specifically allow for situations like "rebellion or invasion" where the public safety may require it to safeguarded, which is his point. The point is that if al Qaeda were setting of dirty bombs all over the place, habeas corpus would be suspended, unlike the other inalienable rights.
The GP did not say anything about a new law limiting unconstitutional speech, only application of existing laws against treason to those speaking (and acting) in a treasonous manner.
Speech is not treasonous in itself, at least in any society I want to live in. Part of the cost of living in a free society is that people may say things which you violently disagree with, and he's using that right.
I personally think you have come up with a new definition for IRONY: defending the First Amendment rights of an Attorney General who does not believe those First Amendment rights exist in the first place!
Yeah, it must be a new definition since it does fit any of the ones here. I guess if he defended his comments under the First Amendment whilst simultaneously denying other people that protection, you'd have a point.
But even if he doesn't believe in the First Amendment (which I see no evidence of at the moment BTW), he still has rights under it, and I could still support those rights, even if he's said some stupid things in the past.
E.g. he was quoted as drawing up a long list of types of prisoner mistreatments all of which were classified as 'not torture'. I strongly disagree with the AG saying this sort of thing, but it's still constitutionally protected free speech as far as I can see.
And in this case, what he's saying isn't stupid of treasonous, just a bit lawyery. Other people have pointed out that Habeas Corpus is a privilege not a right and can be suspended in times of invasion or rebellion. In countries that have actually lived through existential threats, this has happened several times without the system collapsing into dictatorship, e.g. the internment of fascists in WWII in the UK. Come to think of it, I think even in the US I believe it was suspended in the Civil War.
You may not agree with him, but tossing around words like treasonous as a synonym for disagreeable makes you sound even more totalitarian than he does.
Yeah, let's crucify all the extremists!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment
I'm guessing a law punishing people for speaking unconstitionally would certainly violate the first amendment. Arguably, punishing people voting unconstitutionally would violate peaceable assembly.
The check on laws is not to censor the speech of the lawmakers, it's to have an impartial Supreme Court which can strike down laws which are unconstitutional, like the one you're proposing.
And it's worth pointing out that the people who's heads ended up on city gates in Medieval England were usually campaigning for freedom rather than against it.
IHBT, IHL, I know.
4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42
Mysterious, huh?
Hmm, but there have been lots of examples in human history where very distant lands were conquered, and their inhabitants killed or enslaved by a marginally more sophisticated civilisation.
I think the mistake is to look at rationality of imperialism from the perspective of the whole civilisation rather than from the conquistadors. E.g. Spain and England may not have have made a profit from their empires, but the people that ruled them did, and so did the people who did the conquering. The masses back home, who actually made a net loss can be told that the invasion benefits them indirectly, by spreading their culture and religion, securing resources etc. And having an external enemy helps keep the people at home in line. Essentially, the ruling class of the country gets subsidisied by the masses to expand their control over new territory, and can use the threat of an external enemy to gain more control back home.
I always thought the aliens in V could plausibly be motivated by something like this, even if travelling 8.7 light years for water doesn't make much sense economically.
Or maybe George Lucas doesn't know what a parsec is.