This comment is almost literally the entire problem encompassing the Linux platform.
"Just recomplie" (Natch)
Sure. No problem for me, or you.
Tell the average user that who just wants their laptop to recognize their wireless card which requires a niche patch to the kernel to fix, or worse yet someone foolish enough at the end user side to be convinced to run Linux and needs software that they rely on that DOESN'T require a BS in CIS to install when their computer inevitably shits itself.
Want to know why "the year of the Linux desktop" hasn't happened and won't in the foreseeable future? Read. Your. Comment. AGAIN.
Heh, actually I have a variety of platforms including a few embedded devices, SO the additional tools I use, including the shell, compilers and utilities varies from server to server depending on their job or task. The only thing that immediately springs to mind as really being universal across all of my devices is the kernel itself!
Though there may be one or two other utilities or programs that might be common to all of them.... I'm not about to put forth the exertion to check;)
Mine was run over and smashed to a pulp by a GMC Sierra 1500 and it still (kinda) worked. When I plugged it in it was recognized as an iPhone in recovery mode!
Not when other OS's that were designed to be tablet OS's are available in lieu of MS's rushed bastard child that's going to attempt to be relevant in a market that has shown again and again a full desktop OS has no place in.
I'm not "prepared" for a disaster in the truest sense of the word. "Prepared" alludes to the fact that some conscious and extra effort has been taken in order to have something to "fall back" on when you are hit with the unexpected.
I think the better word for me is simply "ready".
I grew up in a rural area and was often out in the woods or field without proper tools or away from modern conveniences so I began to develop what I later learned is called an "Every Day Carry" and just made having a wide and flexible variety of tools and supplies constantly ready and always available.
Right now on my person I have an iPhone 4, a 3" lockback pocket knife, small bags, a spare key in my wallet, my wallet, chapstick (shut up lol!), 50 feet of paracord, and a very compact belt sheath holding a leatherman, a 16gb usb flashdrive, a 700 lumen LED flashlight with spare battery and a small waterproof bison tube with needle, thread and firesteel...
I cannot be found without these items so long as I'm clothed. While my car and home is better equipped, if I was suddenly thrust into the middle of nowhere or into a disaster situation, I'm already carrying 99% of what I need to make it indefinitely assuming ANY resources are available (ie-game, trees, water) using what I'm already carrying and survival skills that were learned growing up.
Everything else extra is just frosting on the cake of survival.
Seriously? At what point should we even bother taking the photograph? Why don't they just cut to the chase and have it draw in whatever the heck we want? I have nothing against retouching photo's, but you still have to work with an original... When the original is hacked to shreds in order to reflect who/whatever the software chooses at the source is there even a point to taking the photo?
Sorry, just my stick in the mud moment of the year. I'm all better now.
Granted, you can "fly" much longer than in more traditional jetpacks, but it seems a bit like bragging about a car that can go 600 miles on a single tank but is permanently tethered to the gas station.
If this is sarcasm, I hope you become visually limited some day soon. Not everyone has perfect vision and us "old farts" find it easier to read when the letters are bigger than the tip of a ballpoint.
Um... click the green "+"... Mac OS >= 10.6 uses that as the "make the window as large as possible" button. Click it again to go back to your previous window size.
I would prefer the lack of white space... My first take on V. 3.0 was "Wow... looks good... but too much wasted space."
I'm not a fan of cluttered up sites, but slashdot has long been able to present practically hideous amounts of information and news in a way that doesn't FEEL cluttered and was also easy to ready without wearing out your scroll wheel in 2 articles. There was a freakishly effective balance struck.
Not so much with the new design... but, again it IS new and unfamiliar to all us sticks in the mud, I'll give it a whirl and see how it flies.
Ummm... Why was your 8th grade son watching the Dave Chappel show? He isn't exactly in the target age group.
There is no way I'd let my kids watch that show and MOST of cable television. Its not a question of appropriateness so much as kids are rarely (if ever) mature enough as pre-teens to handle an adult oriented show.
On the flip side, They can be exposed to it in a situation where it isn't spoon fed to them as mindless entertainment and the problem you seem to have had doesn't present itself, but then There is a pretty solid pre-existing set of lessons about appropriate behavior, even in school laid down there.
I understand that you are trying to play devils advocate and all of that, which buys you some leniency, but everything you wrote after "Maybe they aren't trying to fool anyone" proved more and more with each passing word that you really don't get it. At all.
Of course it's not actually "restoring" the reality of the south in the mid 1880's as almost no one is actively suppressing the reality that nigger was used commonly back then as a way of describing an African slave.
It didn't have any shock value then because there wasn't over 100 years of hatred and cultural stigma behind the word then. It was a crude "slang" term for a piece of property, like calling a bluetooth headset a "bluetooth" or an iPod Touch an "iTouch". People thought nothing of it because it was more of way of describing something and less an insult.
I know you were giving an example, but 100 years from now "thee, thine and thy" will NOT be considered shocking and slanderous because they never were associated with something abhorrent to begin with. Even if I played along with that train of thought, then Shakespeare's plays should STILL be preformed with the original words even though they were never meant to be a shock because to change them wouldn't preserve the spirit of the play!
This is in stark contrast to Mark Twain's work because the entire STORY was meant to be shocking and carry a message. Granted, HOW the shock was delivered has changed over the years, back when it was written, to feature a black man as one of the main characters was unheard of! It was the equivalent of yelling your dreaded "n" word in a crowded mall today. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was designed to get attention and share a message and it does even today. Culture may have changed the angle of which the message is delivered but the message itself is the same and has just as much impact.
You talk about preserving the story... or preserving the "spirit" of the work... Pulling the word "nigger" out of the story would do nothing but distort it because unlike hurling it as an insult, the spirit of the story was to show that Jim was considered unimportant. When I read the story many years ago, I found I didn't even blink at the occurrence of the word "nigger" after the second or third time because it's not there for shock value and isn't in the context to be... so it isn't shocking! It becomes his name and influences, even encourages, you to look down upon one of the only decent people in the entire story with true virtues. It was there to constantly remind you of Jim's RACE, that he was black. Just as Mark Twain intended.
So just how can you spend time on the actual story when the actual story has been destroyed by the removal of those "offensive terms"?
The word isn't the problem. It's the meaning, the force, behind it and in the story, that negative undertone is NEEDED in order for it's message to be CORRECT.
How can you object to censorship when you are so ready to justify it? When Mark Twain wrote Huck Finn, nigger WASN'T the most vile word in English language, but it was, even then, mildly distasteful. The only reason left to find "nigger" or "injun" so distracting is that the word carries too much weight with the READER. To me, it's no more or less distracting to see "nigger" as it is to see "shit" or "damn".
Discussing the book without using "offensive" terms is easy... DON'T use them. Call Nigger Jim, JIM! He had a "real" name, use it!'' As for the "think of the child-runs angle, is it really that hard to help kids understand that not using certain words is simply being polite? It's like teaching them not to swear.
Letting yourself be distracted by the meaning behind a specific word is a very poor excuse to shit upon ANY story and the meaning behind it, especially so when it's such an important work. It'd be like censoring 1984 these days.
I'm done. I do apologize if I got a little overboard, but you could chalk it up to playing ANTI-devils advocate.
There is no way a school is going to make children read a book with the word nigger in it.
There was a time I'd call "BS" on that statement, heck my entire class including myself was assigned the adventures of Huck Finn when I was in high school and we read it, discussed it and completed the assignment without issue or complaint.
Now...
It's gotten so sad.
People have gotten so used to seeing something reduxed out in order to bury their heads in the sand from something uncomfortable that they think the "lesser" evil is to simply blank it out...
There "lesser" of the evils is to leave the book ALONE. This isn't even a slippery slope argument, absolutely NO good has come from or CAN come of censorship.
The sheer attempt to make everything "safe" for a small (very?) group of individuals by using censorship damages the REST of us (read; society, culture, history) far more than what a few words could EVER do to a few people who have been convinced they don't want to see something objectionable.
The problem with your logic is that the kid will continue to use the word even if they know what it means! Yes, they are seeking a reaction, but if there are CONSTANT and CONSISTENT consequences for using ""bad"" words, then they will not.
Being a parent is a lot of work. Relying on censorship to protect your offspawn is lazy parenting at best and BAD parenting at worst.
Slashdot Mirror
This comment is almost literally the entire problem encompassing the Linux platform.
"Just recomplie" (Natch)
Sure. No problem for me, or you.
Tell the average user that who just wants their laptop to recognize their wireless card which requires a niche patch to the kernel to fix, or worse yet someone foolish enough at the end user side to be convinced to run Linux and needs software that they rely on that DOESN'T require a BS in CIS to install when their computer inevitably shits itself.
Want to know why "the year of the Linux desktop" hasn't happened and won't in the foreseeable future? Read. Your. Comment. AGAIN.
Anything Apple won't publish is essentially banned.
Time to buy a Ricoh.
At least they don't monkey with the compression to the level it actually distorts the image.
You mean like old 3.5" floppy disks!
The BEST solutions are usually the simplest!
Stone tablet and chisel... Bam! Good for a few thousand years depending on erosion conditions.
Copy and pasta!!!
Actually, I'll save people wanting to kill me, see my above post to the first AC :)
Heh, actually I have a variety of platforms including a few embedded devices, SO the additional tools I use, including the shell, compilers and utilities varies from server to server depending on their job or task. The only thing that immediately springs to mind as really being universal across all of my devices is the kernel itself!
Though there may be one or two other utilities or programs that might be common to all of them.... I'm not about to put forth the exertion to check ;)
As an admin of a small cluster, I can name one, and ONLY one, open source tool that I use in ALL my servers.
Linux.
So long as they let me fight on their side, it's all good!
Mine was run over and smashed to a pulp by a GMC Sierra 1500 and it still (kinda) worked. When I plugged it in it was recognized as an iPhone in recovery mode!
Thank you! You saved me from the reply :)
You'll want it for an ARM-based tablet.
No. No I won't.
Not when other OS's that were designed to be tablet OS's are available in lieu of MS's rushed bastard child that's going to attempt to be relevant in a market that has shown again and again a full desktop OS has no place in.
I'm not "prepared" for a disaster in the truest sense of the word. "Prepared" alludes to the fact that some conscious and extra effort has been taken in order to have something to "fall back" on when you are hit with the unexpected.
I think the better word for me is simply "ready".
I grew up in a rural area and was often out in the woods or field without proper tools or away from modern conveniences so I began to develop what I later learned is called an "Every Day Carry" and just made having a wide and flexible variety of tools and supplies constantly ready and always available.
Right now on my person I have an iPhone 4, a 3" lockback pocket knife, small bags, a spare key in my wallet, my wallet, chapstick (shut up lol!), 50 feet of paracord, and a very compact belt sheath holding a leatherman, a 16gb usb flashdrive, a 700 lumen LED flashlight with spare battery and a small waterproof bison tube with needle, thread and firesteel...
I cannot be found without these items so long as I'm clothed. While my car and home is better equipped, if I was suddenly thrust into the middle of nowhere or into a disaster situation, I'm already carrying 99% of what I need to make it indefinitely assuming ANY resources are available (ie-game, trees, water) using what I'm already carrying and survival skills that were learned growing up.
Everything else extra is just frosting on the cake of survival.
Seriously? At what point should we even bother taking the photograph? Why don't they just cut to the chase and have it draw in whatever the heck we want? I have nothing against retouching photo's, but you still have to work with an original... When the original is hacked to shreds in order to reflect who/whatever the software chooses at the source is there even a point to taking the photo?
Sorry, just my stick in the mud moment of the year. I'm all better now.
Granted, you can "fly" much longer than in more traditional jetpacks, but it seems a bit like bragging about a car that can go 600 miles on a single tank but is permanently tethered to the gas station.
Kind of like a the infamous Hummer...
Try a netbook.
If this is sarcasm, I hope you become visually limited some day soon. Not everyone has perfect vision and us "old farts" find it easier to read when the letters are bigger than the tip of a ballpoint.
Um... click the green "+"... Mac OS >= 10.6 uses that as the "make the window as large as possible" button. Click it again to go back to your previous window size.
I would prefer the lack of white space... My first take on V. 3.0 was "Wow... looks good... but too much wasted space."
I'm not a fan of cluttered up sites, but slashdot has long been able to present practically hideous amounts of information and news in a way that doesn't FEEL cluttered and was also easy to ready without wearing out your scroll wheel in 2 articles. There was a freakishly effective balance struck.
Not so much with the new design... but, again it IS new and unfamiliar to all us sticks in the mud, I'll give it a whirl and see how it flies.
Ummm... Why was your 8th grade son watching the Dave Chappel show? He isn't exactly in the target age group.
There is no way I'd let my kids watch that show and MOST of cable television. Its not a question of appropriateness so much as kids are rarely (if ever) mature enough as pre-teens to handle an adult oriented show.
On the flip side, They can be exposed to it in a situation where it isn't spoon fed to them as mindless entertainment and the problem you seem to have had doesn't present itself, but then There is a pretty solid pre-existing set of lessons about appropriate behavior, even in school laid down there.
The TV isn't a baby sitter.
You might have got me there because I left out the "I suspect" part of that post.
I have no direct "hands on" experience with the south, but it's discouraging to hear what I do about it so consistently...
I should get down there just to see if all I hear is true or not.
....
Wow... I am almost speechless over your comment.
Almost.
I understand that you are trying to play devils advocate and all of that, which buys you some leniency, but everything you wrote after "Maybe they aren't trying to fool anyone" proved more and more with each passing word that you really don't get it. At all.
Of course it's not actually "restoring" the reality of the south in the mid 1880's as almost no one is actively suppressing the reality that nigger was used commonly back then as a way of describing an African slave.
It didn't have any shock value then because there wasn't over 100 years of hatred and cultural stigma behind the word then. It was a crude "slang" term for a piece of property, like calling a bluetooth headset a "bluetooth" or an iPod Touch an "iTouch". People thought nothing of it because it was more of way of describing something and less an insult.
I know you were giving an example, but 100 years from now "thee, thine and thy" will NOT be considered shocking and slanderous because they never were associated with something abhorrent to begin with. Even if I played along with that train of thought, then Shakespeare's plays should STILL be preformed with the original words even though they were never meant to be a shock because to change them wouldn't preserve the spirit of the play!
This is in stark contrast to Mark Twain's work because the entire STORY was meant to be shocking and carry a message. Granted, HOW the shock was delivered has changed over the years, back when it was written, to feature a black man as one of the main characters was unheard of! It was the equivalent of yelling your dreaded "n" word in a crowded mall today. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was designed to get attention and share a message and it does even today. Culture may have changed the angle of which the message is delivered but the message itself is the same and has just as much impact.
You talk about preserving the story... or preserving the "spirit" of the work... Pulling the word "nigger" out of the story would do nothing but distort it because unlike hurling it as an insult, the spirit of the story was to show that Jim was considered unimportant. When I read the story many years ago, I found I didn't even blink at the occurrence of the word "nigger" after the second or third time because it's not there for shock value and isn't in the context to be... so it isn't shocking! It becomes his name and influences, even encourages, you to look down upon one of the only decent people in the entire story with true virtues. It was there to constantly remind you of Jim's RACE, that he was black. Just as Mark Twain intended.
So just how can you spend time on the actual story when the actual story has been destroyed by the removal of those "offensive terms"?
The word isn't the problem. It's the meaning, the force, behind it and in the story, that negative undertone is NEEDED in order for it's message to be CORRECT.
How can you object to censorship when you are so ready to justify it? When Mark Twain wrote Huck Finn, nigger WASN'T the most vile word in English language, but it was, even then, mildly distasteful. The only reason left to find "nigger" or "injun" so distracting is that the word carries too much weight with the READER. To me, it's no more or less distracting to see "nigger" as it is to see "shit" or "damn".
Discussing the book without using "offensive" terms is easy... DON'T use them. Call Nigger Jim, JIM! He had a "real" name, use it!'' As for the "think of the child-runs angle, is it really that hard to help kids understand that not using certain words is simply being polite? It's like teaching them not to swear.
Letting yourself be distracted by the meaning behind a specific word is a very poor excuse to shit upon ANY story and the meaning behind it, especially so when it's such an important work. It'd be like censoring 1984 these days.
I'm done. I do apologize if I got a little overboard, but you could chalk it up to playing ANTI-devils advocate.
Cheers!
THIS! OMFG THIS.
Thank you! Finally someone else who understands it the MEANING behind the word(s) NOT the words themselves!
You sir, win some internets.
There is no way a school is going to make children read a book with the word nigger in it.
There was a time I'd call "BS" on that statement, heck my entire class including myself was assigned the adventures of Huck Finn when I was in high school and we read it, discussed it and completed the assignment without issue or complaint.
Now...
It's gotten so sad.
People have gotten so used to seeing something reduxed out in order to bury their heads in the sand from something uncomfortable that they think the "lesser" evil is to simply blank it out...
There "lesser" of the evils is to leave the book ALONE. This isn't even a slippery slope argument, absolutely NO good has come from or CAN come of censorship.
The sheer attempt to make everything "safe" for a small (very?) group of individuals by using censorship damages the REST of us (read; society, culture, history) far more than what a few words could EVER do to a few people who have been convinced they don't want to see something objectionable.
Ah, the old "think of the child-rums" situation.
The problem with your logic is that the kid will continue to use the word even if they know what it means! Yes, they are seeking a reaction, but if there are CONSTANT and CONSISTENT consequences for using ""bad"" words, then they will not.
Being a parent is a lot of work. Relying on censorship to protect your offspawn is lazy parenting at best and BAD parenting at worst.