see, i was thinking "this is why people program and run linux: so they can re-invent stuff that happened twenty years ago". writing something and thinking it's new is more fun than doing the research to find an existing (often superior) solution from way back when.
Personally I still don't know how Paypal manages to avoid being classified as a bank by the government.
well, first off, the laws vary by state, so there's a lot of variability. generally, however, PayPal gets by banking regulations because they have a tight relationship with a real bank, who holds all the actual money. when you sign up for a PayPal account, PayPal goes off and creates an account specifically for you at this partner bank. i believe the account is still in PayPal's name, but it makes the accounting very clear, and has the benefit of automatically preserving things like FDIC insurance (just passed along, nothing special). PayPal is, in at least some places, regulated as a money transfer business (similar to Western Union).
In short: make your advertising better -- advertisers AND publishers -- or lose that which you supposedly value. Eyeballs.
look, these guys piss me off just as much, and i've certainly entertained thoughts of dismemberment, but to actually threaten to remove their eyes? that's harsh, man. harsh.
this is about the stupidest thing i've heard out of a business-oriented rag in a while:
Still, Mosman has one thing going for him: He can't do much worse than his predecessors.
that's not anything "going for him". first of all, sure he can. don't challenge the universe like that; it doesn't like it. it likes to prove you wrong. further, the fact that someone else did miserably doesn't make you any likely at all to do well. even worse, in a smallish niche market (3rd-party linux support), high-profile failures are a significant detriment. doing better than an unmitigated disaster does not make you successful.
i can't tell if your serious or not. if not, it's funny, but this is slashdot... if serious: your argument is, well, stupid. people are animals; our muscle tissue also had more dispersed fat content than many animals. it's therefore quite likely that humans taste good (no personal knowledge myself). has God done this so that we eat people? it this indication of his desire that we be cannibals? QED indeed. God (at least in Abrahamic religions' conception thereof) has charged us with stewardship of His creation. for a lot of Christians (myself included), vegetarianism is one way of meeting that responsibility.
i'm American; i've got a bunch of friends from England (yes, really England; i lived in London for a while). educated, professional types. i occasionally take heat for stupid Americans on the typical fronts: mainly, ignorance of the rest of the world. it's all good-natured, and they don't really mean it to apply to me. but when i want them to stop, it's easy enough: just ask one of the Brits to explain the difference between England, the UK, and Great Britain. start off just by asking them who issues their passport. it's a fun game. the British are, i think, the only people in the world more parochial than Americans. living in London was quite educational as to where certain aspects of our culture come from.
it's not just "not the fastest", but it's decidedly on the slow end. they put in so much in the way of optimization that the actual compilation takes forever. plus, since the architecture of the code's designed to support exactly that, it's much slower than it should be even with all the optimizations turned off. more damning, however, is the frequency with which various levels of optimization produce incorrect code in lots of cases. i totally understand the compilation speed vs. execution speed tradeoff, and could likely even forgive the fact that gcc takes this tradeoff out of the users hands (since non-optimized compilation is still slow) if the optimizations were reliably correct. compilers should not be generating incorrect code. there are other issues, perhaps more important ones (although ones that don't poke at me daily as much). the code's huge and unwieldy. probably my biggest philosophical concern is the gcc-specific extensions and abuse of the standards; it's not substantially different from Microsoft's abuse of web standards via their disproportionate market share, and strongly encourages the writing of non-portable code.
my distaste for gcc is not the product of my distaste for rms, although the inverse may be true to a degree; i'd certainly have a lot more tolerance for his arrogance if he had the chops to back it up. my comment about fanboyism was based on the parent who seemed to assume we all used rms's code much more than we do.
...Linux would not be a famous kernel...... without Linux being what it is, there would be no "Open Source" movement......there would be no such thing without him...
only serve to deify stallman by giving him credit for far more than he deserves. open source, both as a practice and an ethic, predated stallman's rise to prominence. you're conveniently dismissive of both the BSD line and the other MIT lab who's output is fundamental to most unix-derived systems. in addition to the code, the BSD/MIT license has been very significant in its broader effect, as well. i'd even assert that it's the foundation of, or at least the concise encapsulation of, the Open Source ethic, as much as stallman's is for Free Software.
of course he's been significant. but the original claim in this thread was based on use of his code, which is not what his significance is (and based on its quality, thank god for that).
as seldom as possible. i'm certainly no HURD user, and i've gotten over emacs years ago. thanks mostly to the larger GNU/FSF's seeming inability to write portable code, i'm bound to use gcc more often than i'd like (which would be never; it's slow, astoundingly large, and often incorrect). in 90 seconds of looking (about all this is worth), i wasn't able to find anything claiming to be a list of contributions from rms, but would chiefly find it useful as a list of components to consider replacing.
please don't assume we're all "GNU/linux" fanboys.
Under the US constitution power is divided between three branches of government. The central issue in this case is whether the power to conduct this kind of surveillence falls within the powers reserved to the executive branch. If that is the case then it doesn't matter what laws congress has passed, or what they appear to say. The only way to take this power away from the executive would be to ammend the constitution.
you fundamentally misunderstand both the nature of separation of powers in the US government and the nature of the constitution. separation of powers doesn't come down to "this is my territory, this is yours, and we can't interfere with each other" - quite the opposite. the separation of powers wasn't built into the constitution to ensure efficient operation of the governement, but (arguably quite to the contrary) to provide a system of checks and balances. both the judicial and legislative branches can and regularly do "interfere with" the executive branch - just like the judicial and executive muck with the legislative, and so on. regardless of whether wiretaps are in the executive's power generally speaking, the courts have ruled that such things require warrants. the legislative and judicial branches have provided means for the government to conduct spying on an "emergency" basis without getting a warrant ahead of time in a manner still deemed legal - the administration decided even that wasn't enough. the executive branch has violated the constitution as interpreted by any relevant precedent.
not enough others. setting up a phone line for production takes a certain amount of initial capital investment - even after the design and prototype construction - and keeping a line in production ties up that capital, thus incurring an opportunity cost. if a manufacturer doesn't feel reasonably confident that enough people will buy the phone to offset their expenses - and, most importantly, offset the opportunity cost of not producing some other device - they're not going to sell it.
me, i think the phone i want is even simpler: no screen, no more than a half-dozen buttons total, high-speed data capable, bluetooth, optionally usb, and a decent UI. no camera, games, or pda-like functionality (no screen!), no text messaging (no real keypad), no speakerphone. hell, i could do without a mic and earpiece. basically, i want the radio with minimum surround for control and connectivity. the device should be about the size of an iPod shuffle. i'd pay $200, maybe up to $300, for one of these that work on Verizon, right now. i'd likely even renew my contract for 2 years. i'll pair it with a bluetooth earpiece for normal phone use and my laptop to use as a modem, and i'll pre-program the buttons (i'm willing to compromise and accept something with a normal phone keypad, since i know that's a little bizarre for most folks, but 15 keys max).
but that's not going to happen. nokia or motorola or whoever could make plenty on it - the manufacturing costs should be significantly below other $200-300 phones - but not as much as using the same facilities to produce the whiz-bang phones that every teenager and fashonista drool over. it's the failure of the market system: i'm willing to pay the same premium - even more - as everyone else to get the product i want, but nobody's willing to manufacture it. while free markets aren't quite winner-take-all in theory, modern capitalism certainly tends in that direction in practice.
How you could be upset by the percentage of phones that fit your criteria is mind-boggling. You can find phones that do what you want. It's not like there's a limited phone-space, and with each new phone your choice goes down.
this is true in theory, but for a variety of market reasons, isn't quite so in practice. primarily, the issue is that manufacturing a phone line takes a certain amount of capital, regardless of how many units are produced. as companies pursue the mass market - the folks who want cameras, mp3 players, color hi-res displays &c - there's less support for the periphery. nokia's never going to actively produce 100 different phone models; the less popular ones are most likely to be cut when they want to introduce a new whiz-bang model. further, as the overall space contracts, the odds of someone like the parent poster being able to find an otherwise-modern (i.e. whiz-bang) phone simply abstaining from inclusion of a camera drop accordingly.
my own desires in a phone are off the edge case of an edge case, as it were, but i've given up on actually finding something that fits the bill.
Ummm... the animals are radioactive and their DNA has undergone considerable mutation. What exactly is contrary here to the common assumptions of radiological contamination?
uh, they're not dead? no extra eyes, no pink fur on the boars; no lasers coming out the eyes or super strength; neither giant nor tiny offspring. in fact, the offspring are pretty much normal. that is pretty surprising.
like most of the "problem words" people (mostly techies) get upset about, "opportunity" certainly can have meaning, and i'd argue that it strongly tends to. it's abused, certainly, but when i say "we have a limited opportunity to..." or the like, it conveys a lot of information: it's something that tends to be time sensitive, based on the current circumstances or environment, representing a significant potential gain. the fact that it's frequently misused to mean "thing i like" doesn't change the real meaning.
i believe you're just plain wrong, and that your problem comes from the assumption that language you don't understand is therefore devoid of meaning. "Human Resources"? what would you rather it be called? "staff help"? HR really is an informative description of what that organization does.
i remember working at Bell Labs when i realized there really is a difference between a "secretary" and an "executive assistant." of course, that's not to say that the term's not frequently misused by secretaries who just want to feel more important. but the fact that language can be abused doesn't mean it doesn't have meaning (why, exactly, do we call cable modems such when they neither modulate nor demodulate data?). yes, excessive use of euphemisms is a bad thing, but the terms still have meaning. if the CEO of Verizon ended up with a secretary rather than an executive assistant, things would go very, very poorly.
like any language, it can be abused and thus deprived of meaning. but don't make the typical techie mistake of assuming that language outside your field doesn't have meaning. just because they don't speak our language doesn't make MBAs dumb.
you've just illustrated exactly how most engineers just don't get what's going on here. to start:
...all they're doing is trying to convince each other and/or themselves how great they are or this option is or whatever.
um, yeah. and convincing people that some option is worthwhile isn't a useful goal? sure, it's not the only goal, and people (especially technical people) who can't effectively communicate on in other ways as well - like investigation, reporting information, and so on - are missing a vital part of communication, but convincing people of something is an entirely valid goal.
take, for example, your A and B examples. you've suggested that A is essentially a way to cover up perceived deficiencies in B. but it's not. they're saying very different things about the same topic. B is about cost, in both money and time. it's the way project managers think, or technical folks who rise above just pure implementation. but A is about why that cost is worth it. A conveys different information than B; in your example, A suggests that the players in the industry with the most future-looking plans are doing "whatever", and are likely worth following (presumably based on past performance). it also makes use of emotive words, something that frequently grates on engineers as "unanalytical" or some such. but for people - particularly people with a less analytical mindset, but really for any mentally healthy human - emotion conveys an encapsulated set of information. the information in A - the information conveyed by means of emotive lanugage - is the type of information that decision-makers use to decide what they'd like to do. B - the cost - comes later.
none of this is to say that it can't get out of control. sure, sometimes bad business folks want to use one mode of language to replace the other. and that's not good, because it obscures information. but just as frequently bad engineers want to use one mode to replace another, and that's just as bad; it just obscures different information.
Re:Assign rights to individuals rather than gadget
on
Sun's Open Source DRM
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
note that the statement you've emphasized simply says that there are certain rights which are inalienable, not that there exist no further rights which may be assigned. the government will recognize contracts in which one party gives up certain rights, such as the right to sue for certain claims, but not others, such as the right to freedom. there exist inalienable rights, but there may well exist others, as well. copyright is a prime example. and that's even before getting into the (always sticky) rights v. privileges discussion.
it's also perhaps worth noting that you're quoting a document which is not part of our (assuming you're an American; not all readers here are) government's body of law, as it (necessarily) predates said government.
your comment is insightful and well-reasoned. whoever moded you flamebait just has an axe to grind. that said, however, there are some flaws in the argument.
I'm still waiting for an alternative system to come into existance going on seven years after people started saying that Napster would give birth to one based on viral marketting and internet sales. Guess what? It hasn't happened.
see, there's the thing. it has - it's just a question of for whom.
artists make most of their money on things other than album sales; in most cases, generally shows. albums, in many ways (although typically not to the consumer, at least not explicitly) are just a means to get folks to come out to the shows. and modern digital piracy is an effective replacement for album sales in that market. it exactly is sticking it to "the man". sure, the artist misses out on their cut too, that's true; but their exposure increases dramatically, in a way that's likely to offset their lost revenue for the album.
now, that's not the whole story, of course. the record cartel does still front cash to artists, and take risks on unknowns. they front production costs, publicity, &c. i'd love to see a replacement for that... and i think it's actually not far away. while the record companies are still fronting that cash, however, stealing music is wrong. the correct response to abusive cartels, as you've noted, is to stop dealing with their product. there's more than enough great music out there that isn't signed with RIAA labels. go get some. and go to a show.
(the specific economics are different for movies and the MPAA; my comments are music-industry centric. still, the basic theory holds.)
while it's still early to know for sure (and may always be so), the universe is not generally understood to be infinite by physicists or cosmologists; rather, as einstein described it, the universe is most likely "finite yet boundless", in much the same way the 2-d surface of a balloon is finite - having a definite area of measurable size - yet boundless - having no edges nor limit to the distance you can travel in a given direction.
in the end, einstein was right to only be sure about one thing being infinite.
ah, sad reinforcement for the idea that nobody ever remembers George. not nearly as political as John, nor as charismatic as John or Paul, he was almost certainly the most talented and creative, musically, in the group. poor George. we miss you.
Woz was always the real talent and soul behind the band. Jobs just had the business smarts to get the deal, and better hair, so he got to be the front man.
wtf? that's the most astounding unintentionally arrogant thing i've heard in weeks. if i had the opportunity to sit through one of Prof. Einstein's lectures, i'm not complaining if he goes over 20 minutes. regardless of whether there's a "demonstration" or any other form of entertainment. same with lots of other people. there's a lot of information in the world, and i don't know most of it. other people, collectively, know a hell of a lot more than i do. my time is valuable. but it's not the world's scarcest resource. particularly when i attend a class, or conference, or even in most work meetings, i'm there to learn. some things take more than 20 minutes to do that.
Slashdot Mirror
see, i was thinking "this is why people program and run linux: so they can re-invent stuff that happened twenty years ago". writing something and thinking it's new is more fun than doing the research to find an existing (often superior) solution from way back when.
Eighty Megabytes And Continually Swapping?
Firefox is my operating system; linux is its device drivers?
Future, meet the past. Past, the future.
doing better than an unmitigated disaster does not make you successful.
Welcome to Slashdot.
i can't tell if your serious or not. if not, it's funny, but this is slashdot...
if serious: your argument is, well, stupid. people are animals; our muscle tissue also had more dispersed fat content than many animals. it's therefore quite likely that humans taste good (no personal knowledge myself). has God done this so that we eat people? it this indication of his desire that we be cannibals? QED indeed.
God (at least in Abrahamic religions' conception thereof) has charged us with stewardship of His creation. for a lot of Christians (myself included), vegetarianism is one way of meeting that responsibility.
i'm American; i've got a bunch of friends from England (yes, really England; i lived in London for a while). educated, professional types. i occasionally take heat for stupid Americans on the typical fronts: mainly, ignorance of the rest of the world. it's all good-natured, and they don't really mean it to apply to me. but when i want them to stop, it's easy enough: just ask one of the Brits to explain the difference between England, the UK, and Great Britain. start off just by asking them who issues their passport. it's a fun game.
the British are, i think, the only people in the world more parochial than Americans. living in London was quite educational as to where certain aspects of our culture come from.
it's not just "not the fastest", but it's decidedly on the slow end. they put in so much in the way of optimization that the actual compilation takes forever. plus, since the architecture of the code's designed to support exactly that, it's much slower than it should be even with all the optimizations turned off. more damning, however, is the frequency with which various levels of optimization produce incorrect code in lots of cases. i totally understand the compilation speed vs. execution speed tradeoff, and could likely even forgive the fact that gcc takes this tradeoff out of the users hands (since non-optimized compilation is still slow) if the optimizations were reliably correct. compilers should not be generating incorrect code.
there are other issues, perhaps more important ones (although ones that don't poke at me daily as much). the code's huge and unwieldy. probably my biggest philosophical concern is the gcc-specific extensions and abuse of the standards; it's not substantially different from Microsoft's abuse of web standards via their disproportionate market share, and strongly encourages the writing of non-portable code.
my distaste for gcc is not the product of my distaste for rms, although the inverse may be true to a degree; i'd certainly have a lot more tolerance for his arrogance if he had the chops to back it up. my comment about fanboyism was based on the parent who seemed to assume we all used rms's code much more than we do.
of course he's been significant. but the original claim in this thread was based on use of his code, which is not what his significance is (and based on its quality, thank god for that).
as seldom as possible. i'm certainly no HURD user, and i've gotten over emacs years ago. thanks mostly to the larger GNU/FSF's seeming inability to write portable code, i'm bound to use gcc more often than i'd like (which would be never; it's slow, astoundingly large, and often incorrect). in 90 seconds of looking (about all this is worth), i wasn't able to find anything claiming to be a list of contributions from rms, but would chiefly find it useful as a list of components to consider replacing.
please don't assume we're all "GNU/linux" fanboys.
me, i think the phone i want is even simpler: no screen, no more than a half-dozen buttons total, high-speed data capable, bluetooth, optionally usb, and a decent UI. no camera, games, or pda-like functionality (no screen!), no text messaging (no real keypad), no speakerphone. hell, i could do without a mic and earpiece. basically, i want the radio with minimum surround for control and connectivity. the device should be about the size of an iPod shuffle. i'd pay $200, maybe up to $300, for one of these that work on Verizon, right now. i'd likely even renew my contract for 2 years. i'll pair it with a bluetooth earpiece for normal phone use and my laptop to use as a modem, and i'll pre-program the buttons (i'm willing to compromise and accept something with a normal phone keypad, since i know that's a little bizarre for most folks, but 15 keys max).
but that's not going to happen. nokia or motorola or whoever could make plenty on it - the manufacturing costs should be significantly below other $200-300 phones - but not as much as using the same facilities to produce the whiz-bang phones that every teenager and fashonista drool over. it's the failure of the market system: i'm willing to pay the same premium - even more - as everyone else to get the product i want, but nobody's willing to manufacture it. while free markets aren't quite winner-take-all in theory, modern capitalism certainly tends in that direction in practice.
my own desires in a phone are off the edge case of an edge case, as it were, but i've given up on actually finding something that fits the bill.
like most of the "problem words" people (mostly techies) get upset about, "opportunity" certainly can have meaning, and i'd argue that it strongly tends to. it's abused, certainly, but when i say "we have a limited opportunity to..." or the like, it conveys a lot of information: it's something that tends to be time sensitive, based on the current circumstances or environment, representing a significant potential gain.
the fact that it's frequently misused to mean "thing i like" doesn't change the real meaning.
i believe you're just plain wrong, and that your problem comes from the assumption that language you don't understand is therefore devoid of meaning.
"Human Resources"? what would you rather it be called? "staff help"? HR really is an informative description of what that organization does.
i remember working at Bell Labs when i realized there really is a difference between a "secretary" and an "executive assistant." of course, that's not to say that the term's not frequently misused by secretaries who just want to feel more important. but the fact that language can be abused doesn't mean it doesn't have meaning (why, exactly, do we call cable modems such when they neither modulate nor demodulate data?). yes, excessive use of euphemisms is a bad thing, but the terms still have meaning. if the CEO of Verizon ended up with a secretary rather than an executive assistant, things would go very, very poorly.
like any language, it can be abused and thus deprived of meaning. but don't make the typical techie mistake of assuming that language outside your field doesn't have meaning. just because they don't speak our language doesn't make MBAs dumb.
take, for example, your A and B examples. you've suggested that A is essentially a way to cover up perceived deficiencies in B. but it's not. they're saying very different things about the same topic. B is about cost, in both money and time. it's the way project managers think, or technical folks who rise above just pure implementation. but A is about why that cost is worth it. A conveys different information than B; in your example, A suggests that the players in the industry with the most future-looking plans are doing "whatever", and are likely worth following (presumably based on past performance). it also makes use of emotive words, something that frequently grates on engineers as "unanalytical" or some such. but for people - particularly people with a less analytical mindset, but really for any mentally healthy human - emotion conveys an encapsulated set of information. the information in A - the information conveyed by means of emotive lanugage - is the type of information that decision-makers use to decide what they'd like to do. B - the cost - comes later.
none of this is to say that it can't get out of control. sure, sometimes bad business folks want to use one mode of language to replace the other. and that's not good, because it obscures information. but just as frequently bad engineers want to use one mode to replace another, and that's just as bad; it just obscures different information.
note that the statement you've emphasized simply says that there are certain rights which are inalienable, not that there exist no further rights which may be assigned. the government will recognize contracts in which one party gives up certain rights, such as the right to sue for certain claims, but not others, such as the right to freedom. there exist inalienable rights, but there may well exist others, as well. copyright is a prime example. and that's even before getting into the (always sticky) rights v. privileges discussion.
it's also perhaps worth noting that you're quoting a document which is not part of our (assuming you're an American; not all readers here are) government's body of law, as it (necessarily) predates said government.
artists make most of their money on things other than album sales; in most cases, generally shows. albums, in many ways (although typically not to the consumer, at least not explicitly) are just a means to get folks to come out to the shows. and modern digital piracy is an effective replacement for album sales in that market. it exactly is sticking it to "the man". sure, the artist misses out on their cut too, that's true; but their exposure increases dramatically, in a way that's likely to offset their lost revenue for the album.
now, that's not the whole story, of course. the record cartel does still front cash to artists, and take risks on unknowns. they front production costs, publicity, &c. i'd love to see a replacement for that... and i think it's actually not far away. while the record companies are still fronting that cash, however, stealing music is wrong. the correct response to abusive cartels, as you've noted, is to stop dealing with their product. there's more than enough great music out there that isn't signed with RIAA labels. go get some. and go to a show.
(the specific economics are different for movies and the MPAA; my comments are music-industry centric. still, the basic theory holds.)
while it's still early to know for sure (and may always be so), the universe is not generally understood to be infinite by physicists or cosmologists; rather, as einstein described it, the universe is most likely "finite yet boundless", in much the same way the 2-d surface of a balloon is finite - having a definite area of measurable size - yet boundless - having no edges nor limit to the distance you can travel in a given direction.
in the end, einstein was right to only be sure about one thing being infinite.
ah, sad reinforcement for the idea that nobody ever remembers George. not nearly as political as John, nor as charismatic as John or Paul, he was almost certainly the most talented and creative, musically, in the group. poor George. we miss you.
Woz was always the real talent and soul behind the band. Jobs just had the business smarts to get the deal, and better hair, so he got to be the front man.
wtf? that's the most astounding unintentionally arrogant thing i've heard in weeks. if i had the opportunity to sit through one of Prof. Einstein's lectures, i'm not complaining if he goes over 20 minutes. regardless of whether there's a "demonstration" or any other form of entertainment. same with lots of other people. there's a lot of information in the world, and i don't know most of it. other people, collectively, know a hell of a lot more than i do.
my time is valuable. but it's not the world's scarcest resource. particularly when i attend a class, or conference, or even in most work meetings, i'm there to learn. some things take more than 20 minutes to do that.