I understand the desire to protect individuals from slander and libel on the net.
I don't. Back in the day, libel laws made sense when mass communication was hard. Basically, you had only three ways of getting information on current events: word of mouth, town meetings or speeches, and the newspaper. One person with a lot of power could spread lies a lot more effectively than a less-powerful person could discredit them, so the power of the legal system was leverage against that imbalance.
However, these days communication with the majority of the civilized world is insanely cheap, easy, and instantaneous. We have access to more news outlets than ever before. An average Joe can have a potential audience of millions without even getting out of bed, if what he has to say is worthwhile. Someone says something bad about you, it's remarkably easy to disprove, discredit, or ignore. Simple as that.
The problem is that we seem to be headed into a society where people think they have some natural right to not be offended or insulted. I couldn't even make up a more perfect example than TFA: a spoiled semi-famous model learned she gets attention when she plays the victim card and sues random people who call her a skank in some anonymous low-traffic Internet blog. What. The. Fuck.
Another example: Leo Laporte interviewed someone on his FLOSS podcast who said he was calling from a city in Japan that was apparently famous for tossing Christians into boiling water centuries ago. Laporte responded with "excellent," in a sort of off-handed sarcastic manner and then moved on with the rest of the interview. Apparently, this enraged the Christian cohort of his open source podcast and he got a bunch of letters demanding an apology for his stated support of boiling Christians in water. If you actually listen to the podcast in question, there's no way you could possibly infer that he was in favor for the boiling of anybody. Nevertheless, enough people chose to take up the supposed victim stance and feign outrage that Laporte was forced to issue a formal apology on the next episode of the podcast.
It's getting ridiculous. This was a country founded on free speech, the ability to say whatever you want, whenever you want, whether it's offensive to someone or not. And like it or not, the option to be anonymous is a cornerstone of free speech. Anyone who is so easily offended by being called a name simply doesn't have a thick enough skin or the self-confidence to make it in a truly free society.
From my reading of the press release and associated comments, it sounds like it was a merger engineered from the start to be a way for some of the largest shareholders to pump up and cash out. The really surprising part was that they were able to take such high-profile businessmen (such as Ted Turner) for a ride in the process.
It's not just HomePlug devices that cause interference with shortwave and similar styles of radio communication, it's just about any household electronics these days. Here's my anecdote.
My dad recently gave me an rather old battery-powered shortwave receiver. We tested it out at his place and it still worked great. When I brought it home, I couldn't use it. In my upstairs office, in the middle of the night, I couldn't pick up a single station. Not even a high-powered religious broadcast or timekeeping station. Instead, all I heard across the entire band was harsh-sounding static with extremely short bleeps and blips thrown in. I started turning things off to see if that would help, and it did. Massively. The biggest offenders were the CFL bulb lighting the room, my desktop computer, and a few switching power supplies, in that order.
So in my home, the only way to listen to shortwave radio is to go upstairs and sit in the dark with almost everything in the house unplugged. Which of course means I can't look up, document, or record any stations that I come across. Unless I go retro and use a candle, notebook, and battery-powered tape recorder. An outdoor antenna is impossible since I live in the city and a rooftop antenna probably wouldn't be far enough away from the interference.
Well then you shouldn't have any problems communicating when there's an emergency because most of the time, the power will have been knocked out anyway, taking everyone's HomePlug networks with it.:)
The SciFi remake even bothered me as an adult (the part where at the beginning of the series, the Cylon chick snaps a human baby's neck.)
There were a spate of other posts ridiculing you for saying this, so I thought I'd reply in support of your comment. I still don't really understand what the intent of that scene was, except to shock the audience. Nothing ever came of it, she never showed any remorse (in fact, none of the Cylons ever did, for anything), and her character was even portrayed as a "good guy" later on.
Anyone who wasn't genuinely bothered by this scene is either not a parent, or is a parent and shouldn't be one.
The show managed to go along the entire time without really being preachy
I'm in total agreement with you up until this point. I'll give credit to the writers that in most cases, the series forced you to look at both sides of some pretty major moral and philosophical questions. However, I was sorely disappointed that they never knocked down the idea of people doing things because "it's what God wants." Being an athiest, I was waiting for somebody to point out that humans and machines alike should be held responsible for their own actions. Not their ancestors' or their species' or their divine theological being's, but theirs.
I'm also kinda pissed that the Centaurians didn't turn around their ships at the last moment, drop a nuke on the planet, and then self-combust in a fit of epic lulz.
Well, that's actually a pretty bad comparison because Ronald Moore, the creator of the reimagined BSG played a big role in how the second half of DS9 played out. Moore is the one responsible for all the weird shit that happened in both series, which kinda ruined what I thought would have been otherwise enjoyable stories.
Large cable companies are running out of small mom & pop providers to buy, and have amassed huge cash reserves, which they would like to find something to do with,
Oh, like upgrade their effing infrastructure? Months ago they were complaining about how much money they were losing from "high-bandwidth users," peer-to-peer applications, and streaming video sites. But now they have huge cash reserves?
Kinda like how the RIAA companies always claim to be struggling after losing billions of dollars a year to piracy but turn around to their shareholders and say they're making more sales revenue than they ever have before.
I cant recall the last time I sat down with anyone and chatted about "Cirrus clouds", but this is the crap they teach in 5th grade. Why? Because the 14th century concept of the "new man". Its a failed paradigm that we still cling to: people being smart all around.
There's probably something in your post that I'm misreading or not fully comprehending, because it rather sounds like you're against the idea of people being knowledgeable in a wide variety of subject matter, which would be a completely absurd point of view.
I'm one of those people who might be called a "jack of all trades." I know a little bit more than the average joe about many different topics including (but not limited to) computers and the Internet, music, radio, flying, physics, electronics, writing, meteorology, and biology. While I'm not anywhere near experienced enough in any one of these fields to be classified an expert, I feel that it's more important to know a little bit about everything than it is to devote 100% of your time to one specific endeavor and just limp along in everything else. Unless you have the ability to predict the future, you never know when some trivial bit of knowledge will come in useful. Without exception, those who are informed are better prepared to deal with all manner of situations and problems that life throws at them. (They also have a lot more fun.)
And to address the "failed paradigm," I agree that the public school system is indeed quite broken, but I can tell you that school had fuck all to do with how I learned anything. In elementary and high school, my main recollection is that they taught students only what they needed to know in order to proceed to the next grade. Even back then, I had the feeling that my school was just a form of government-funded daycare. Teachers actively discouraged students from learning or doing more than what was expected. A trend I'm seeing in college these days too. My knowledge is fueled by curiosity, the desire to understand how the world works, and to base all conclusions on provable facts. Values I hope to pass onto my daughter so that she knows how to filter out the bullshit and has the opportunity to lead a full and interesting life.
Google Wave looks interesting, but it's not even released yet so it's impossible to make any predictions at all. There have been many great technologies that were way ahead of their time but overlooked for one mundane reason or another.
This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Lesser General Public License instead of this License.
Although it's important to note that this appears at the very bottom, below the actual (and presumably legally-binding) terms and conditions. So while linking a proprietary application against a GPLv2 library may not technically violate the terms of the license, it does violate the spirit and certainly the intent. Libraries were specifically designed to be incorporated into other programs. When the author placed his library under the GPLv2, he expressly intended for all applications which used the code to be GPLv2 as well. Or else he would have used the LGPL instead.
What I'd be intrested to see..instead of how much we all pay is.. how many customers are served Per tower - and how many towers vs area vs coverage.
I see this trotted out every time the discussion of wireless internet coverage is brought up and it's just not a valid argument.
1) Cell phone companies simply do not put up towers in areas where it is not cost effective for them. Never have, never will.
2) Serving a densely-populated area comes with its own costly challenges as well. A single tower base station can only talk to so many endpoints at the same time. When you roll out more base stations, you have to be careful not to overlap frequencies or cause interference with your equipment or another carrier's. And also, your routing grows in complexity.
I want an easily configurable messaging utility that only allows trusted contacts, and some photo upload and publishing ability (with comments) that piggybacks on the trusted communication.
Publish your status (tweets) as RSS, upload your photos to flickr, and post your rants on blogspot. That's what we did in the olden days. (Two years ago.)
But I've been thinking about ways to break the walled garden and have come to 2 conclusions:
1) The garden is already here. I don't know if there will be anything bigger than Twitter or Facebook, or how long they'll last but they will undoubtedly go down in history next to Email and IRC as far as breakthrough Internet communication methods. They're big enough now that they won't be going away soon. You won't tear half the population away from either just by building the same thing and saying, "here, this one's open." They don't care. Social networking is here to stay and Facebook and Twitter let them do what they want to do.
2) That said, there's really no reason that an open social networking framework couldn't be built upon something like XMPP. Website operators could use this framework to setup niche sites ("death metal macebook" or "gardening rakebook") that users could sign up with and connect with users at other sites without leaving their own. The framework would allow basic instant messaging, status, blogs, media content, etc. The downfall to this is that a) FB and twitter are already too well-entrenched 2) Every website wants to be their own walled garden, completely isolated from the rest of the web unless its on their own narrow terms.
Back when I was a young whippersnapper walking across other peoples' lawns, we had Quake. The game that arguably launched the modern computer gaming scene. Mods could be written for Quake, so new and unintended ways of playing Quake were coming out every day. Player also had full access to the console, so if things got too boring, you change many parameters of the game to liven things up.
One of the best hacks that I can recall, though, was the Quake Guy Tower. The Quake engine had an unusual property when it came to stacking players on top of each other. You could stand on top of another player, but the engine would gradually push you off so if you wanted to stay on top, you had to keep correcting for it. The fun part, however, was that standing on top of someone rendered them completely immobile, even if *they* were standing on top of someone else.
Someone created a very tall map with a teleporter at the top and spread the word that on a certain day, at a certain time, they would try to create a Quake Guy Tower. Stack as many players on top of one another as they could. The map could, somehow, count how many players were stacked. I want to say well over 150 people showed up to participate in the tower. It was quite a thing to behold, standing on the ground and looking up to see a tower of Quake Guys stacked up almost into infinity. I still kick myself that I never took screenshots or video of it.
After the map limit was reached and Quake guys were stacked as high as they could go, someone who knew the map shot at a random spot at the wall, retrieved a Quad, and destroyed the tower in a glorious shower of gibs. Good times. The only reference I can find to the Quake Guy Tower now is a sentence on Blue's News. No pictures, no web page, nothing.
it is a constant dissapointment to me how they are generally much better at reporting accurate news than the news stations themselves.
That's the genius part of the Daily Show. They show politics and the media for how ridiculous they really are. After watching a few episodes, you then watch normal news and start wondering why the anchors aren't cracking jokes at the clip they just played.
The day Fox start reporting actual NEWS is the day Satan goes to work in a snowplow.
FOX is just one of the many news and content properties that Murdoch owns. He also owns the Wall Street Journal, which is still far and away the most respected resource for business news. He's already been trying to genericize it into a general-purpose paper (like he did the WSJ website), I expect he'll render it completely useless eventually. Leaving the Financial Times to take up the slack, I suppose.
Until recently, it was possible to pull down a full PDF copy of any WSJ (one page at a time) with URLs like this: http://online.wsj.com/documents/print/WSJ_-A001-20090518.pdf But apparently Mr. Murdoch has finally gotten around to putting the kibosh on that.
1) Millions of people could be using something else.
Such as? I mean, billions of people worldwide don't read a newspaper on a daily basis. They just pass along important news orally. Ergo, you argue that newspapers everywhere are worthless, right?
2) "Following" people on Twitter is necessarily superficial compared to other media, which offer the same benefits without the message size limit.
So what's wrong with a tool that lets your friend know what you're up to and vice versa? It's a great way to keep your relationship with friends and family members up to date. Everyone is superficial in a social setting. You are being superficial here on Slashdot. People are superficial by nature, and always will be. Twitter doesn't magically change an otherwise deep and thoughtful person into, "OMG hav u seen britney l8ly? lol."
3) Instant knowledge of world events is available in many media, with Twitter again being more superficial than the others.
Oh yes. You must be talking about that other medium that you lets an entire cadre of friends know about something important that happened to you or that you heard about within minutes of it happening just by quickly shooting off a short message from a computer or cell phone. The non-superficial one.
4) No, it's a means by which protesters disseminate information. It worked in Iran because it's new and the government didn't know how to block it as well as other services at first. It has no inherent advantage in this area.
But you're missing the point that it worked. Better than instant messaging could have. Better than email could have. Better than blogs alone could have. That is important and while the Iranian people may not have achieved their goal, the event will probably earn at least a well-deserved footnote in history. How quickly governments can block Twitter has no bearing on its overall worth. If they control the country's communications, they can block any media.
5) Your point is preposterous. It allows for a deeper understanding of how people use Twitter, sure, but that's not valuable.
To say that there's nothing to be learned about human communication by studying it via a brand-new electronic communications medium is what I call preposterous. Since your so forthright with your opinions, I'm sure you won't mind contactingtheseresearchers and telling them that their work is worthless.
6) And an inferior one at that.
Inferior to what? Concrete examples please, no weasling out with "everything" or "other media" like you have in this post. I'm really curious to know what exactly does Twitter's job better than Twitter. Without being, you know, superficial.
The problem is one of expectations. Linux is good for a great number of audio creation and editing tasks, but no free tools yet have all the bells and whistles that artists are used to on fully-proprietary systems. People would buy the Dell with Linux and all the pre-installed audio applications, and they're going to have the expectation that the box is going to be as easy to use and as fully-featured as a modern professional audio workstation. When they find that it isn't, they'll recoil something fierce. It's the same reason that few companies have ever put their weight behind putting together a nice retail version of Linux and selling it on store shelves next to Windows and OS X updates. While I argue that it would be perfectly possible now, early experiments ten years ago were a disaster because the Linux desktop and its hardware support was nowhere near ready for mass consumption.
In short, the Linux audio ecosystem is, right now, in the same state that the Linux desktop was ten years ago. It will get better, but it will take time, effort, and support.
Also worth pointing out that you can download the installer which gives you an uncripped, unexpiring installation of Reaper for evaluation and buy a license for it if you like it after 30 days. This was something I didn't realize before. I'm trying it now.
The only thing the article's author was locked in to was the belief that they must have the latest and greatest version of everything. If it works, DON'T FIX IT.
The Linux audio ecosystem is evolving so rapidly that you often don't have much choice if you want to run certain applications or have access to certain features. There are several great Linux audio apps that are sorely outdated on Ubuntu 9.04, a distribution that usually prides itself on delivering the latest versions of stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't. Back in the day, libel laws made sense when mass communication was hard. Basically, you had only three ways of getting information on current events: word of mouth, town meetings or speeches, and the newspaper. One person with a lot of power could spread lies a lot more effectively than a less-powerful person could discredit them, so the power of the legal system was leverage against that imbalance.
However, these days communication with the majority of the civilized world is insanely cheap, easy, and instantaneous. We have access to more news outlets than ever before. An average Joe can have a potential audience of millions without even getting out of bed, if what he has to say is worthwhile. Someone says something bad about you, it's remarkably easy to disprove, discredit, or ignore. Simple as that.
The problem is that we seem to be headed into a society where people think they have some natural right to not be offended or insulted. I couldn't even make up a more perfect example than TFA: a spoiled semi-famous model learned she gets attention when she plays the victim card and sues random people who call her a skank in some anonymous low-traffic Internet blog. What. The. Fuck.
Another example: Leo Laporte interviewed someone on his FLOSS podcast who said he was calling from a city in Japan that was apparently famous for tossing Christians into boiling water centuries ago. Laporte responded with "excellent," in a sort of off-handed sarcastic manner and then moved on with the rest of the interview. Apparently, this enraged the Christian cohort of his open source podcast and he got a bunch of letters demanding an apology for his stated support of boiling Christians in water. If you actually listen to the podcast in question, there's no way you could possibly infer that he was in favor for the boiling of anybody. Nevertheless, enough people chose to take up the supposed victim stance and feign outrage that Laporte was forced to issue a formal apology on the next episode of the podcast.
It's getting ridiculous. This was a country founded on free speech, the ability to say whatever you want, whenever you want, whether it's offensive to someone or not. And like it or not, the option to be anonymous is a cornerstone of free speech. Anyone who is so easily offended by being called a name simply doesn't have a thick enough skin or the self-confidence to make it in a truly free society.
From my reading of the press release and associated comments, it sounds like it was a merger engineered from the start to be a way for some of the largest shareholders to pump up and cash out. The really surprising part was that they were able to take such high-profile businessmen (such as Ted Turner) for a ride in the process.
While we're tilting at windmills, we might as well hope that they'll also stop suing and imposing over-reaching DRM on their fans and customers.
It's not just HomePlug devices that cause interference with shortwave and similar styles of radio communication, it's just about any household electronics these days. Here's my anecdote.
My dad recently gave me an rather old battery-powered shortwave receiver. We tested it out at his place and it still worked great. When I brought it home, I couldn't use it. In my upstairs office, in the middle of the night, I couldn't pick up a single station. Not even a high-powered religious broadcast or timekeeping station. Instead, all I heard across the entire band was harsh-sounding static with extremely short bleeps and blips thrown in. I started turning things off to see if that would help, and it did. Massively. The biggest offenders were the CFL bulb lighting the room, my desktop computer, and a few switching power supplies, in that order.
So in my home, the only way to listen to shortwave radio is to go upstairs and sit in the dark with almost everything in the house unplugged. Which of course means I can't look up, document, or record any stations that I come across. Unless I go retro and use a candle, notebook, and battery-powered tape recorder. An outdoor antenna is impossible since I live in the city and a rooftop antenna probably wouldn't be far enough away from the interference.
Kinda sucks since I'm a softy for old tech.
Well then you shouldn't have any problems communicating when there's an emergency because most of the time, the power will have been knocked out anyway, taking everyone's HomePlug networks with it. :)
There were a spate of other posts ridiculing you for saying this, so I thought I'd reply in support of your comment. I still don't really understand what the intent of that scene was, except to shock the audience. Nothing ever came of it, she never showed any remorse (in fact, none of the Cylons ever did, for anything), and her character was even portrayed as a "good guy" later on.
Anyone who wasn't genuinely bothered by this scene is either not a parent, or is a parent and shouldn't be one.
I'm in total agreement with you up until this point. I'll give credit to the writers that in most cases, the series forced you to look at both sides of some pretty major moral and philosophical questions. However, I was sorely disappointed that they never knocked down the idea of people doing things because "it's what God wants." Being an athiest, I was waiting for somebody to point out that humans and machines alike should be held responsible for their own actions. Not their ancestors' or their species' or their divine theological being's, but theirs.
I'm also kinda pissed that the Centaurians didn't turn around their ships at the last moment, drop a nuke on the planet, and then self-combust in a fit of epic lulz.
Well, that's actually a pretty bad comparison because Ronald Moore, the creator of the reimagined BSG played a big role in how the second half of DS9 played out. Moore is the one responsible for all the weird shit that happened in both series, which kinda ruined what I thought would have been otherwise enjoyable stories.
Oh, like upgrade their effing infrastructure? Months ago they were complaining about how much money they were losing from "high-bandwidth users," peer-to-peer applications, and streaming video sites. But now they have huge cash reserves?
Kinda like how the RIAA companies always claim to be struggling after losing billions of dollars a year to piracy but turn around to their shareholders and say they're making more sales revenue than they ever have before.
But artists never will, so I fail to see the downsize there.
There's probably something in your post that I'm misreading or not fully comprehending, because it rather sounds like you're against the idea of people being knowledgeable in a wide variety of subject matter, which would be a completely absurd point of view.
I'm one of those people who might be called a "jack of all trades." I know a little bit more than the average joe about many different topics including (but not limited to) computers and the Internet, music, radio, flying, physics, electronics, writing, meteorology, and biology. While I'm not anywhere near experienced enough in any one of these fields to be classified an expert, I feel that it's more important to know a little bit about everything than it is to devote 100% of your time to one specific endeavor and just limp along in everything else. Unless you have the ability to predict the future, you never know when some trivial bit of knowledge will come in useful. Without exception, those who are informed are better prepared to deal with all manner of situations and problems that life throws at them. (They also have a lot more fun.)
And to address the "failed paradigm," I agree that the public school system is indeed quite broken, but I can tell you that school had fuck all to do with how I learned anything. In elementary and high school, my main recollection is that they taught students only what they needed to know in order to proceed to the next grade. Even back then, I had the feeling that my school was just a form of government-funded daycare. Teachers actively discouraged students from learning or doing more than what was expected. A trend I'm seeing in college these days too. My knowledge is fueled by curiosity, the desire to understand how the world works, and to base all conclusions on provable facts. Values I hope to pass onto my daughter so that she knows how to filter out the bullshit and has the opportunity to lead a full and interesting life.
Google Wave looks interesting, but it's not even released yet so it's impossible to make any predictions at all. There have been many great technologies that were way ahead of their time but overlooked for one mundane reason or another.
The criteria is 'derivative work', not 'link to'. Linking is sometimes a rule of thumb in this area, but it isn't decisive.
From the horse's mouth:
Although it's important to note that this appears at the very bottom, below the actual (and presumably legally-binding) terms and conditions. So while linking a proprietary application against a GPLv2 library may not technically violate the terms of the license, it does violate the spirit and certainly the intent. Libraries were specifically designed to be incorporated into other programs. When the author placed his library under the GPLv2, he expressly intended for all applications which used the code to be GPLv2 as well. Or else he would have used the LGPL instead.
I see this trotted out every time the discussion of wireless internet coverage is brought up and it's just not a valid argument.
1) Cell phone companies simply do not put up towers in areas where it is not cost effective for them. Never have, never will.
2) Serving a densely-populated area comes with its own costly challenges as well. A single tower base station can only talk to so many endpoints at the same time. When you roll out more base stations, you have to be careful not to overlap frequencies or cause interference with your equipment or another carrier's. And also, your routing grows in complexity.
Publish your status (tweets) as RSS, upload your photos to flickr, and post your rants on blogspot. That's what we did in the olden days. (Two years ago.)
But I've been thinking about ways to break the walled garden and have come to 2 conclusions:
1) The garden is already here. I don't know if there will be anything bigger than Twitter or Facebook, or how long they'll last but they will undoubtedly go down in history next to Email and IRC as far as breakthrough Internet communication methods. They're big enough now that they won't be going away soon. You won't tear half the population away from either just by building the same thing and saying, "here, this one's open." They don't care. Social networking is here to stay and Facebook and Twitter let them do what they want to do.
2) That said, there's really no reason that an open social networking framework couldn't be built upon something like XMPP. Website operators could use this framework to setup niche sites ("death metal macebook" or "gardening rakebook") that users could sign up with and connect with users at other sites without leaving their own. The framework would allow basic instant messaging, status, blogs, media content, etc. The downfall to this is that a) FB and twitter are already too well-entrenched 2) Every website wants to be their own walled garden, completely isolated from the rest of the web unless its on their own narrow terms.
This.
And also, I'm 100% positive that I will turn on the news tomorrow and hear the media refer to this DouchNet as a group of hackers.
Back when I was a young whippersnapper walking across other peoples' lawns, we had Quake. The game that arguably launched the modern computer gaming scene. Mods could be written for Quake, so new and unintended ways of playing Quake were coming out every day. Player also had full access to the console, so if things got too boring, you change many parameters of the game to liven things up.
One of the best hacks that I can recall, though, was the Quake Guy Tower. The Quake engine had an unusual property when it came to stacking players on top of each other. You could stand on top of another player, but the engine would gradually push you off so if you wanted to stay on top, you had to keep correcting for it. The fun part, however, was that standing on top of someone rendered them completely immobile, even if *they* were standing on top of someone else.
Someone created a very tall map with a teleporter at the top and spread the word that on a certain day, at a certain time, they would try to create a Quake Guy Tower. Stack as many players on top of one another as they could. The map could, somehow, count how many players were stacked. I want to say well over 150 people showed up to participate in the tower. It was quite a thing to behold, standing on the ground and looking up to see a tower of Quake Guys stacked up almost into infinity. I still kick myself that I never took screenshots or video of it.
After the map limit was reached and Quake guys were stacked as high as they could go, someone who knew the map shot at a random spot at the wall, retrieved a Quad, and destroyed the tower in a glorious shower of gibs. Good times. The only reference I can find to the Quake Guy Tower now is a sentence on Blue's News. No pictures, no web page, nothing.
That's the genius part of the Daily Show. They show politics and the media for how ridiculous they really are. After watching a few episodes, you then watch normal news and start wondering why the anchors aren't cracking jokes at the clip they just played.
FOX is just one of the many news and content properties that Murdoch owns. He also owns the Wall Street Journal, which is still far and away the most respected resource for business news. He's already been trying to genericize it into a general-purpose paper (like he did the WSJ website), I expect he'll render it completely useless eventually. Leaving the Financial Times to take up the slack, I suppose.
Until recently, it was possible to pull down a full PDF copy of any WSJ (one page at a time) with URLs like this: http://online.wsj.com/documents/print/WSJ_-A001-20090518.pdf But apparently Mr. Murdoch has finally gotten around to putting the kibosh on that.
On top of that,
makes me want to break pencils and kick puppies.
Such as? I mean, billions of people worldwide don't read a newspaper on a daily basis. They just pass along important news orally. Ergo, you argue that newspapers everywhere are worthless, right?
So what's wrong with a tool that lets your friend know what you're up to and vice versa? It's a great way to keep your relationship with friends and family members up to date. Everyone is superficial in a social setting. You are being superficial here on Slashdot. People are superficial by nature, and always will be. Twitter doesn't magically change an otherwise deep and thoughtful person into, "OMG hav u seen britney l8ly? lol."
Oh yes. You must be talking about that other medium that you lets an entire cadre of friends know about something important that happened to you or that you heard about within minutes of it happening just by quickly shooting off a short message from a computer or cell phone. The non-superficial one.
But you're missing the point that it worked. Better than instant messaging could have. Better than email could have. Better than blogs alone could have. That is important and while the Iranian people may not have achieved their goal, the event will probably earn at least a well-deserved footnote in history. How quickly governments can block Twitter has no bearing on its overall worth. If they control the country's communications, they can block any media.
To say that there's nothing to be learned about human communication by studying it via a brand-new electronic communications medium is what I call preposterous. Since your so forthright with your opinions, I'm sure you won't mind contacting these researchers and telling them that their work is worthless.
Inferior to what? Concrete examples please, no weasling out with "everything" or "other media" like you have in this post. I'm really curious to know what exactly does Twitter's job better than Twitter. Without being, you know, superficial.
Uhh, why?
The problem is one of expectations. Linux is good for a great number of audio creation and editing tasks, but no free tools yet have all the bells and whistles that artists are used to on fully-proprietary systems. People would buy the Dell with Linux and all the pre-installed audio applications, and they're going to have the expectation that the box is going to be as easy to use and as fully-featured as a modern professional audio workstation. When they find that it isn't, they'll recoil something fierce. It's the same reason that few companies have ever put their weight behind putting together a nice retail version of Linux and selling it on store shelves next to Windows and OS X updates. While I argue that it would be perfectly possible now, early experiments ten years ago were a disaster because the Linux desktop and its hardware support was nowhere near ready for mass consumption.
In short, the Linux audio ecosystem is, right now, in the same state that the Linux desktop was ten years ago. It will get better, but it will take time, effort, and support.
Also worth pointing out that you can download the installer which gives you an uncripped, unexpiring installation of Reaper for evaluation and buy a license for it if you like it after 30 days. This was something I didn't realize before. I'm trying it now.
The Linux audio ecosystem is evolving so rapidly that you often don't have much choice if you want to run certain applications or have access to certain features. There are several great Linux audio apps that are sorely outdated on Ubuntu 9.04, a distribution that usually prides itself on delivering the latest versions of stuff.