what i am saying strictly depends upon UNIVERSAL human rights. understand? Hihi, this is too easy.
You know, there exists no such thing as "universal human rights". Oh, you can call something that, just the way I can call a hamster the king of England. It just remains a hamster. You're confusing the map with the territory. The "universal human rights" are a collection of words describing how a certain group of people thinks a general ethics should work.
Wait 100 years and that consensus will change. Oh, not dramatically, but in the details. Just like "freedom" had a different meaning a thousand years ago. Just like as little as 500 years ago, huge parts of the species homo sapiens were not even considered human.
Need examples? Women are a great example. Not too long ago, it was a serious matter of discussion as to whether they had a soul at all. Needless to say, a little over a century ago, women being subservient to men was a "fact of life" and those demanding equal rights were the one considered immoral, the opposite of today.
Yes, you will now argue that we are enlightened todady and have seen the truth.
To which I'll reply: 200 years down the road, someone will be holding this precise discussion about something that we consider perfectly normal today. Maybe about the right to choose one's family independent of biological origin, or maybe about the right to change your gender whenever you feel like it, or maybe about the right to take any drug you want, or more likely about something that is so normal for us today that we can't imagine how it could be different.
name one. otherwise, stand up and stand behind democracy What kind of argument is that? Oh wait, the one of the fundamentalist, of course. Just because it might be the best option now doesn't mean it will be forever. The words and works of man are not eternal truths. Thus I prefer to not stand behind any -ism or -y, because it restricts your field of vision.
if you can articulate something better than democracy, you have a valid point. but if you criticize democracy without a better option, you're some sort deluded asshole Yes, I realize that "deluded asshole" is a synonym for "open minded person" in the fundamentalist POV.
however, i don't think you are necessarily evil, just stupid I like this point in the discussion, you know? Aside from the fact that you know almost nothing about me, and are thus making an invalid argument if you argue about my person instead of about my points, it allows me to point out that you are making a fool of yourself. Oh, and also to mention that my IQ is actually off the scale in most non-Mensa tests.
put a little thought into your words, and you'll wind up agreeing with me Hmmm...... actually, no. I think more sense can be found in the output of/dev/urandom.:-)
Re:there is something greater in importance
on
China Censoring Flickr
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
your words are basically "shut up and respect the guy in charge" Yes, evil China. In the west, we never let the guy in charge decide, we always look for what the average person wants. There will never be a war that isn't supported by a vast majority... Err...
that's not wrong according to western values, that's wrong period, according to all human values According to western human values. The human rights of the UN are very strongly western values. When they were drafted, few non-western countries had a say.
it's called democracy, and it is the right and provenance of every single soul on this planet According to which universal truth?
Hold the flamethrower for a second. I don't say tyranny is great. However, this blind love with "democracy" is not productive, either. It blinds you to better alternatives that might emerge, for example.
I would tell you that the world is large enough for several evils, but that wouldn't do your point justice, which... well, if you had a point, it wouldn't do it justice.
This comparison is bogus, using "name brand" hardware and using Dell as a comparison. Errr... not? Actually this is the only way to make a non-bogus comparison - as Apple is also a brand name, you know?
Hm, taking a step back, does it strike anyone else as odd, from a social and cultural perspective, that the entity whose profits depend on the result, i.e. the entity which could not be more biased, has a say and an ear in matters like this at all?
Shouldn't there be an instant "sorry, we're not listening to you, you are too much involved to be a reliable source" rejection? Yes, I know lobbying doesn't work that way. I'm wondering what this says about our society. Something like truth being less important than good argument, perhaps.
Sex is something everyone in the general public understands and can get all upset about, mostly because they've got these messed up morales where killing people is cool while the most natural urge besides eating is evil.
Wiretrips, taps, err. whatever, and privcy, privacathing, privcathingy and warrtanle, warenten... well, whatever, these sound like really complicated things, dude. I mean, like really diffculty to pronun... prunounc... pro-noun-ce, there. They're probably about something that's really hard to understand, right? Hey, look what's on TV!
Politics ain't about right or wrong. It's about giving a good show so they vote you in next time. Tricky subjects make a bad show, people don't want to be confused. They want a simple world with simple rules. If they were interested in the real complexities of the real world, they would run it, instead of letting someone else run it for them.
Why should Nintendo drop Wii Sports from the package? It's the biggest, best piece of advertisement they have. It's Wii Tennis, or Wii Bowling, that sells grandmothers and fathers on buying their own Wii after having played a round or two at their kids place.
The law is like every other specialized field; it develops its own language for a reason. True, that.
The problem with law is that none of the people involved knows anything about language, nor have any experts in the field been invited. In math and physics, that's not much of a problem because the language is largely mathematics, which is the field of expertise for one group, and close enough for the other, and more importantly is a well-defined language. In law, however, the specialized language has a huge overlap with the normal spoken language in the same field, so much that it reads as if it were just regular english/german/whatever.
In other terms, Jane Doe will readily understand either what "e=mc^2" or that it is some math thing she lacks the knowledge to understand. Jane Doe will not readily understand that "intent to use" may not mean the same thing she thinks it does, and the fact that it is a phrase in a specialized language with a specific meaning is not readily apparent.
IMHO, lawyers should have to take either math or linguistics as secondary fields or not be allowed to write laws.
Why's there a "however" inbetween. It's both right. SELinux is complex and hard to understand. Heck, I should know I've given speeches at half a dozen conferences about it. And at the same time, it is the most secure option Linux has at this time.
Yes, there are alternatives. Yes, some of them are easier to understand. No, none of them give you the level and sophistication of SELinux, not even close. No, that's not likely to change very much. Security is hard to do.
I am a business user. I've never even owned a private mobile phone.
Calendar and Addressbook are the primary business needs I have on a mobile phone. Maybe a good tool to write down some short notes, would stop me from sending SMS or Mail to myself.
All those other "business applications" on a friggin' phone can kiss my behind. I don't have the time to waste on a tiny screen fiddling around with a miniature keyboard in some futile attempt to produce a spreadsheet or a text document. If I need business stuff done, I have a notebook for that, or a secretary I can call and dictate to if I left the notebook behind.
Actually, what exactly is the business use of being able to edit spreadsheets on your mobile phone? I'm sure you'll be able to get real quality work done on the plane, on a tiny screen with an even smaller keyboard.
Appointments, sure. Calender, addressbook, a bit of websurfing to get directions or a map - all that I can understand. But "business applications" on a mobile phone, to me that yells that your business isn't important or profitable enough for a notebook or that you're too disorganized to finish things before leaving for the trip.
One look at a picture is enough to convince me that this is no competitor because they (MS, and the MS Mobile devision) simply still don't get it.
Why? There's the "Start" bar right up on the screen. Aside from the 12-year-old nonsense of the start menu itself, the bar takes up precious screen estate all the time. On a desktop screen, that's a nuissance. On a mobile screen where every pixel counts, it plain out sucks.
More importantly: It's a brilliant indicator for the mindset. MS insists on cluttering the screen with its logo and a couple status icons. Apple builds as if they wanted to actually use the thing.
Some flaws in the article:
While AbiWord and NeoOffice are both available through X11, That's OpenOffice that's available through X11. NeoOffice doesn't need X11 (and soon, see other frontpage story, OpenOffice won't, either). NeoOffice also is absolutely no hassle to install, though OpenOffice is a little more troublesome.
There is no technical reason why Mac OS X can't run on other hardware, True, strictly speaking, but the author completely ignores that Apple is a hardware company, not a software company the way MS is.
Aside from that:
the operating system is simple, stable, secure, well designed, and well built. Check, check, check, check and check.
It is also expensive. Check. I've never before spent so much money on software aside from games. However, I've never before consistently felt like it's worth it. True, there's a lot of freeware on windos and Free Software on Linux. However, let's be honest, 99% of the windos freeware is crap wrapped in last year's newspaper. Lots of Free Software is in permanent beta and has never been touched by anyone knowing anything about user interface design. On the contrary, many $20 Mac apps are excellent in reliability and user interface, and easily beat comparable $100 windos applications.
If "mature" means "sucked dry and left to die" in his dictionary, I think he's right.
I used to be a big WoD fan. Played Vampire for years, liked Werewolf better, threw a lot of time into Mage and am still dreaming of doing a really, proper Wraith session one day.
But for all I care, nothing good has come out of White Wolf for years now. It all seems to be a cashing-in because they lack new ideas. Lots of the recent stuff reminds one of Games Workshop, who are well known for publishing a new edition every few years simply so lots of people buy everything again.
eventually people will be moving to Vista when it becomes the sole option on new machines. Or the pain has become so much that they look for alternatives.
When XP was introduced, there really weren't any. Apple wasn't, and Linux on the desktop was a joke. Today, Linux is still way behind, but it's reached the "useable by non-geeks" area. And OSX is clearly superior to Vista, both in technology and (especially) user experience.
Sure, lots of people will buy new machines with Vista. But monopoly-lockin requires a strong monopoly, and MS is losing that. As soon as Word is not a safe format to send to random people anymore because the chances that they can't open it is considerable, regular people will wonder about alternatives and question the "there's no computing outside the MS world" paradigm they've been force-fed.
This one sums up well what the problem with lobbyists is:
Although lobbyists would tell the committee one thing in private, they got cold feet when asked to verify the information publicly, under oath. They're all liars. Even the good ones who are lobbying for "your" side. Good to see that at least some politicians are smart enough to challenge them this way.
Err... Balmer is the CEO of a convicted criminal corporation.
In a country where convicted criminals can lose the right to vote, you can also go to the White House for being one? That's not really something that can be explained in english without getting into some kind of semantic Moebius loop, can it?
He's right about CVS, and more or less about SVN. Except for one thing: Subversion works. Not only in the technical sense, but in the sense that you can work with it, you can easily explain it to new developers, there is integration into lots of IDEs, code editors and other tools and the list goes on and on. (last, but not least: Trac!).
I used to be passionate about arch, for example. I'm fairly sure I would've been about GIT had it existed back then. But then I learned that to get real work done in the real world, the theoretical basis of your version control system matters little. If the system doesn't work for my developers - who like many projects are doing this for their fun and in their spare time - then it doesn't work, period. If I can't explain it to the boss at work, it won't get installed.
And that's why Subversion is everywhere and arch is, where exactly?
Now Linus is a man with his feet on the earth, so GIT may have a different fate. Wake me when Eclipse and Textmate have built-in GIT support and at least half of my potential developers know it.
why in the world would anyone run emulation when they can run Windows natively with bootcamp. If you're going to play games you would obviously want the most speed you can get. Actually, if 10% less frames-per-second means I don't have to go through the whole nightmare of rebooting into windos, I'll do it without at second thought.
There are lots of advantages: I can keep all the stuff running in the background (mail, downloads, etc.). I don't have to reboot (time!) plus all the hassle (windos needs to re-sync with tbe Mighty Mouse after every reboot, for example). Having it in a VM also means I can make a copy of that and if XP corrupts itself again for no reason at all, I have a backup I can restore with a simple copy. Finally, there are a number of games that people keep running even when they're doing something else. Many people don't log out of their favorite MMORPG when they check mails, surf a bit, etc. - now us Mac users can do that too because we don't have to reboot anymore.
For that and many other advantages, I'll be happy to accept a reasonable speed impact, if there even is one.
So you're saying that all of Robert Soloway's crimes aggregated is worse then the taking of one single life? Please tell me I'm wrong. Which comparison operator do you use?
You are comparing things that are different. It is only because there is a limited number of responses (fines and jail time, essentially) that they must be made comparable on some scale. Which is a longwinded way of saying: I don't think you can equate it on an ethical level, which is what you're trying to do.
On a judicial level, yes that is what I am saying. Many small crimes can add up to more than one large crime.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, there exists no such thing as "universal human rights". Oh, you can call something that, just the way I can call a hamster the king of England. It just remains a hamster. You're confusing the map with the territory. The "universal human rights" are a collection of words describing how a certain group of people thinks a general ethics should work.
Wait 100 years and that consensus will change. Oh, not dramatically, but in the details. Just like "freedom" had a different meaning a thousand years ago. Just like as little as 500 years ago, huge parts of the species homo sapiens were not even considered human.
Need examples? Women are a great example. Not too long ago, it was a serious matter of discussion as to whether they had a soul at all. Needless to say, a little over a century ago, women being subservient to men was a "fact of life" and those demanding equal rights were the one considered immoral, the opposite of today.
Yes, you will now argue that we are enlightened todady and have seen the truth.
To which I'll reply: 200 years down the road, someone will be holding this precise discussion about something that we consider perfectly normal today. Maybe about the right to choose one's family independent of biological origin, or maybe about the right to change your gender whenever you feel like it, or maybe about the right to take any drug you want, or more likely about something that is so normal for us today that we can't imagine how it could be different.
Oh, and also to mention that my IQ is actually off the scale in most non-Mensa tests. put a little thought into your words, and you'll wind up agreeing with me Hmmm...
Hold the flamethrower for a second. I don't say tyranny is great. However, this blind love with "democracy" is not productive, either. It blinds you to better alternatives that might emerge, for example.
I would tell you that the world is large enough for several evils, but that wouldn't do your point justice, which... well, if you had a point, it wouldn't do it justice.
Hm, taking a step back, does it strike anyone else as odd, from a social and cultural perspective, that the entity whose profits depend on the result, i.e. the entity which could not be more biased, has a say and an ear in matters like this at all?
Shouldn't there be an instant "sorry, we're not listening to you, you are too much involved to be a reliable source" rejection? Yes, I know lobbying doesn't work that way. I'm wondering what this says about our society. Something like truth being less important than good argument, perhaps.
Wrong. Here's why:
Sex is something everyone in the general public understands and can get all upset about, mostly because they've got these messed up morales where killing people is cool while the most natural urge besides eating is evil.
Wiretrips, taps, err. whatever, and privcy, privacathing, privcathingy and warrtanle, warenten... well, whatever, these sound like really complicated things, dude. I mean, like really diffculty to pronun... prunounc... pro-noun-ce, there. They're probably about something that's really hard to understand, right? Hey, look what's on TV!
Politics ain't about right or wrong. It's about giving a good show so they vote you in next time. Tricky subjects make a bad show, people don't want to be confused. They want a simple world with simple rules. If they were interested in the real complexities of the real world, they would run it, instead of letting someone else run it for them.
A party guilty of a crime is delaying the collection of evidence against them.
What else is new? Sack of rice fell over in China?
Why should Nintendo drop Wii Sports from the package? It's the biggest, best piece of advertisement they have. It's Wii Tennis, or Wii Bowling, that sells grandmothers and fathers on buying their own Wii after having played a round or two at their kids place.
The problem with law is that none of the people involved knows anything about language, nor have any experts in the field been invited. In math and physics, that's not much of a problem because the language is largely mathematics, which is the field of expertise for one group, and close enough for the other, and more importantly is a well-defined language. In law, however, the specialized language has a huge overlap with the normal spoken language in the same field, so much that it reads as if it were just regular english/german/whatever.
In other terms, Jane Doe will readily understand either what "e=mc^2" or that it is some math thing she lacks the knowledge to understand. Jane Doe will not readily understand that "intent to use" may not mean the same thing she thinks it does, and the fact that it is a phrase in a specialized language with a specific meaning is not readily apparent.
IMHO, lawyers should have to take either math or linguistics as secondary fields or not be allowed to write laws.
Why's there a "however" inbetween. It's both right. SELinux is complex and hard to understand. Heck, I should know I've given speeches at half a dozen conferences about it. And at the same time, it is the most secure option Linux has at this time.
Yes, there are alternatives.
Yes, some of them are easier to understand.
No, none of them give you the level and sophistication of SELinux, not even close.
No, that's not likely to change very much. Security is hard to do.
Especially because it's not even really true.
I am a business user. I've never even owned a private mobile phone.
Calendar and Addressbook are the primary business needs I have on a mobile phone. Maybe a good tool to write down some short notes, would stop me from sending SMS or Mail to myself.
All those other "business applications" on a friggin' phone can kiss my behind. I don't have the time to waste on a tiny screen fiddling around with a miniature keyboard in some futile attempt to produce a spreadsheet or a text document. If I need business stuff done, I have a notebook for that, or a secretary I can call and dictate to if I left the notebook behind.
Actually, what exactly is the business use of being able to edit spreadsheets on your mobile phone? I'm sure you'll be able to get real quality work done on the plane, on a tiny screen with an even smaller keyboard.
Appointments, sure. Calender, addressbook, a bit of websurfing to get directions or a map - all that I can understand. But "business applications" on a mobile phone, to me that yells that your business isn't important or profitable enough for a notebook or that you're too disorganized to finish things before leaving for the trip.
One look at a picture is enough to convince me that this is no competitor because they (MS, and the MS Mobile devision) simply still don't get it.
Why? There's the "Start" bar right up on the screen. Aside from the 12-year-old nonsense of the start menu itself, the bar takes up precious screen estate all the time. On a desktop screen, that's a nuissance. On a mobile screen where every pixel counts, it plain out sucks.
More importantly: It's a brilliant indicator for the mindset. MS insists on cluttering the screen with its logo and a couple status icons. Apple builds as if they wanted to actually use the thing.
Aside from that: the operating system is simple, stable, secure, well designed, and well built. Check, check, check, check and check. It is also expensive. Check.
I've never before spent so much money on software aside from games. However, I've never before consistently felt like it's worth it. True, there's a lot of freeware on windos and Free Software on Linux. However, let's be honest, 99% of the windos freeware is crap wrapped in last year's newspaper. Lots of Free Software is in permanent beta and has never been touched by anyone knowing anything about user interface design. On the contrary, many $20 Mac apps are excellent in reliability and user interface, and easily beat comparable $100 windos applications.
If "mature" means "sucked dry and left to die" in his dictionary, I think he's right.
I used to be a big WoD fan. Played Vampire for years, liked Werewolf better, threw a lot of time into Mage and am still dreaming of doing a really, proper Wraith session one day.
But for all I care, nothing good has come out of White Wolf for years now. It all seems to be a cashing-in because they lack new ideas. Lots of the recent stuff reminds one of Games Workshop, who are well known for publishing a new edition every few years simply so lots of people buy everything again.
When XP was introduced, there really weren't any. Apple wasn't, and Linux on the desktop was a joke. Today, Linux is still way behind, but it's reached the "useable by non-geeks" area. And OSX is clearly superior to Vista, both in technology and (especially) user experience.
Sure, lots of people will buy new machines with Vista. But monopoly-lockin requires a strong monopoly, and MS is losing that. As soon as Word is not a safe format to send to random people anymore because the chances that they can't open it is considerable, regular people will wonder about alternatives and question the "there's no computing outside the MS world" paradigm they've been force-fed.
Anyone got any insight into when it'll launch in Europe?
;-)
Cingular isn't exactly a large provider over here.
Err... Balmer is the CEO of a convicted criminal corporation.
In a country where convicted criminals can lose the right to vote, you can also go to the White House for being one? That's not really something that can be explained in english without getting into some kind of semantic Moebius loop, can it?
He's right about CVS, and more or less about SVN. Except for one thing: Subversion works. Not only in the technical sense, but in the sense that you can work with it, you can easily explain it to new developers, there is integration into lots of IDEs, code editors and other tools and the list goes on and on. (last, but not least: Trac!).
I used to be passionate about arch, for example. I'm fairly sure I would've been about GIT had it existed back then. But then I learned that to get real work done in the real world, the theoretical basis of your version control system matters little. If the system doesn't work for my developers - who like many projects are doing this for their fun and in their spare time - then it doesn't work, period. If I can't explain it to the boss at work, it won't get installed.
And that's why Subversion is everywhere and arch is, where exactly?
Now Linus is a man with his feet on the earth, so GIT may have a different fate. Wake me when Eclipse and Textmate have built-in GIT support and at least half of my potential developers know it.
There are lots of advantages: I can keep all the stuff running in the background (mail, downloads, etc.). I don't have to reboot (time!) plus all the hassle (windos needs to re-sync with tbe Mighty Mouse after every reboot, for example).
Having it in a VM also means I can make a copy of that and if XP corrupts itself again for no reason at all, I have a backup I can restore with a simple copy.
Finally, there are a number of games that people keep running even when they're doing something else. Many people don't log out of their favorite MMORPG when they check mails, surf a bit, etc. - now us Mac users can do that too because we don't have to reboot anymore.
For that and many other advantages, I'll be happy to accept a reasonable speed impact, if there even is one.
You are comparing things that are different. It is only because there is a limited number of responses (fines and jail time, essentially) that they must be made comparable on some scale. Which is a longwinded way of saying: I don't think you can equate it on an ethical level, which is what you're trying to do.
On a judicial level, yes that is what I am saying. Many small crimes can add up to more than one large crime.
Don't look that flawed to me.
XP: No AV included
Vista: No AV included
Report says: "Vista no improvement over XP"
Report is pretty much correct.