You should read a book or two. American media is extremely rightwardly biased, despite what you might hear from the right. It is in their best interest to preserve the status quo. This is easy when, together, they control the majority of content streaming into peoples' homes and have vast departments chartered to manipulate peoples' emotions. This is the very purpose of art, and though television programs are usually not considered fine art, their producers are very good at what they do.
I still pick people up on particularly glaring abuses of the word 'irony,' most of which, as it happens, people "started because it made [them] feel smart, contrary to all other evidence." Much like the word 'meme.'
You mean Daniel Dennett, Douglas Hofstadter, and Richard Dawkins? Memetics is a fine framework for modelling cultural evolution.
Dictionary.com is still missing a couple of valid uses, such as "irony of fate" and "situational irony".
Of course he isn't. He just jumped on the "misusing 'irony'" meme Reality Bites started because it made him feel smart, contrary to all other evidence.
Let's say there's a nice public park in your town. And let's say a company shows up one day, puts a wall around it, and charges admission to enter. This would not stand, even though it would only affect the portion of the public interested in using the park. For one thing, it's a limited resource. For another, it's a public good.
Do you see the analogy? The airwaves are a limited public good. Payola is bad because it unfairly excludes a portion of the public interested in promoting their music. Moreover, the public gets screwed because inferior songs might get played over superior songs.
This has nothing little to do with how many people like pop music. Radio stations cater to specific audiences, and always have. That's why there are classic rock stations, and talk radio, and so on. I'm certainly not railing against pop music, either. I can recognize that there are great pop songs out there. The Beatles certainly deserved a lot of airplay in their day. Should our culture have missed out because an inferior group went the payola route?
The so-called pilcrow is the "paragraph symbol." The section sign is either two S's, vertically offset, or just an S with a circle in the middle, depending on the typeface.
Fink is a weird version of apt-get with extensions. MacPorts is a port of BSD ports.
Both kind of suck. (Mind you, I like apt-get, but Fink's extensions suck). Gentoo releases/d (as of two months ago) a version of Portage for OS X. See http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/prefix/bo otstrap-macos.xml. Very nice. There are probably 300 or so ebuilds, and more add added all the time.
In fact, the GPL is really what takes away your freedom. It essentially says that if you want to create a derivative work, you must abide by certain restrictions. What this effectively does is grant certain rights to the recipients of derivative works in exchange for certain restrictions on freedom to create those derivative works. Not as sexy sounding as "preserving freedom", I suppose.
Phrasing the GPL's intent that way borders on bad faith. Your description is abstract to the point that it applies to every license, including the BSD and "All Rights Reserved" licenses.
The GPL's restrictions are responsibilities the licensee must comply with in order to ensure any sub-licensee's freedom to modify and distribute the licensed code. Public domain licenses are certainly more free in the sense that a licensee has more rights. However, among these is the right to limit any sub-licensee's rights.
Now, which sort of license will afford the most people the most meaningful rights? There is a very strong case that the GPL is more free in this sense. So which sense is the right one to use? I prefer the BSD sense, but I am sympathetic to this sense as well.
In any event, the idea that with freedom comes responsibility pre-dates Orwell by several centuries.
it matters because if you have good rep on slashdot, chances are you're not a complete mumpty.
You obviously haven't been reading slashdot very long. Not only is it full of morons, but getting 'Excellent' karma is easy. All you have to do is make 40 something posts that aren't modded down. Less if they get modded up. Slashdot should not be an indicator of general repute.
TeX's a weird thing. On the one hand, it's a very flexible way to format text. On the other, for most purposes, if you're using it correctly, it's inflexible to the point of transparency.
I had a friend who was writing her economics thesis. She wasn't happy with how it looked. So I suggested TeX. She wasn't interested until I showed her how my thesis turned out. (I was a mathematics major). I told her we could make her thesis look like mine in 20 minutes.
So I gave her a 20 minute introduction to LaTeX. Only the basics -- \documentclass[]{}, \begin{document} - \end{document}, \author{}, \title{}, \maketitle, \chapter{}, \section{}, \footnote{}, and a little bit about references. We copy pasted her thesis into a.tex file and I showed her how to use these commands as they were necessary in the text.
20 minutes later, she was a TeX convert. Two things really convinced her of TeX's power. The table of contents automatically changing to reflect document changes -- she saw how that, and mechanisms like that, would make her life much easier later. Also, the ease of changing formatting globally by changing the document class. And her thesis looked pretty, like a well done book. She said "Wow" a lot during this intro. Inflexible to the point of transparency.
I gave her a warning though. "If you let yourself, you'll start playing around with document classes, and end up wasting hours admiring your thesis." Extremely flexible.
The last few months I have been doing some research into the trolling phenomenon on slashdot.org. In order to do this as thoroughly as possible, I have written both normal and troll posts, 1st posts, etc., both logged in and anonymously, and I have found these rather shocking results:
More moderator points are being used to mod posts down than up. Furthermore, when modding a post up, every moderator seems to follow previous moderators in their choices, even when it's not a particularly interesting or clever post [slashdot.org]. There are a LOT more +5 posts than +3 or +4. Logged in people are modded down faster than anonymous cowards. Presumably these Nazi Moderators think it's more important to burn a user's existing karma, to silence that individual for the future, than to use the moderation system for what it's meant for : identifying "good" and "bad" posts (Notice how nearly all oppressive governments in the past and present do the same thing : marking individuals as bad and untrustworthy because they have conflicting opinions, instead of engaging in a public discussion about these opinions)
Once you have a karma of -4 or -5, your posts have a score of -1 by default. When this is the case, no-one bothers to mod you down anymore. This means a logged in user can keep on trolling as much as he (or she) likes, without risking a ban to post on slashdot. When trolling as an anonymous user, every post starts at score 0, and you will be modded down to -1 ON EVERY POST. When you are modded down a certain number of times in 24 hour, you cannot post anymore from your current IP for a day or so. So, for successful trolling, ALWAYS log in.
A lot of the modded down posts are actually quite clever, funny, etc., and they are only modded down because they are offtopic. Now, on a news site like slashdot, where the number of different topics of discussion can be counted on 1 hand, I must say I quite like the distraction these posts offer. But no, when the topic is yet another minor version change of the Linux kernel, they only expect ooohs and aaahs about this great feat of engineering. Look at the moderation done in this thread to see what I mean.
Digging deep into the history of slashdot, I found this poll, which clearly indicates the vast majority does NOT want the moderation we have here today. 'nuff said.
Feel free to use this information to your advantage. I thank you for your time.
It's a long story. Back in 1996, in the early days of Slashdot, people wore onions on their belt, as was the style at the time. In any event, it was at the start of Clinton's second term in office. Things were looking up. It was still a pre-9/11 world, and things were different then, as was the style at the time. Google had only recently started buying up San Francisco real estate. Michael Jordan stopped playing baseball. IBM stock was up. CowboyNeal posted a story about sharks, as was the style at the time. CmdrTaco did not approve and said so in a comment, saying he didn't know what Cowboy Neal thinking. Paraphrasing, he said: "Unless these sharks have lasers attached to their heads, this story doesn't belong here."
Security is as hard as the enemy wants it to be. This is the most important thing we can understand about security.
I don't mean to say that your comment wasn't insightful. It was. But as they raise the stakes, we have to too.
Then again, I don't want to sound like I'm on the DHS's side. They have a lot to learn, and it will be too late before their process of security by committee does.
No, they're trying to utilize their status as pseudo-sovereign nations to cash in. Very different. After all, as nations, they have the right to dictate how their spectrum is used.
Now it is shown that "intermediate frequency electrical fields" (whatever that means) can damage cancerous brain cells. Does this mean that a physiological effect (beneficial in this case) has been demonstrated, so that an adverse effect becomes more plausible?
Intermediate frequency electrical fields, huh. Sounds like light/radio to me. After all, changing electrical fields induce changing perpendicular magnetic fields.
Uh, how about charging people $129 for OS X point releases (roughly equivalent to Windows service packs)?
I'm so sick of this troll. So what if they're point releases? One thing they aren't is "roughly equivalent to Windows service packs". Tiger provided features promised in Vista but still undelivered. OS X's kernel has slowly improved, often in sub-point updates. New API's are made available for developers.
Slashdot Mirror
You're funny. :-)
You should read a book or two. American media is extremely rightwardly biased, despite what you might hear from the right. It is in their best interest to preserve the status quo. This is easy when, together, they control the majority of content streaming into peoples' homes and have vast departments chartered to manipulate peoples' emotions. This is the very purpose of art, and though television programs are usually not considered fine art, their producers are very good at what they do.
Heh, "deliber".
I still pick people up on particularly glaring abuses of the word 'irony,' most of which, as it happens, people "started because it made [them] feel smart, contrary to all other evidence." Much like the word 'meme.'
You mean Daniel Dennett, Douglas Hofstadter, and Richard Dawkins? Memetics is a fine framework for modelling cultural evolution.
Dictionary.com is still missing a couple of valid uses, such as "irony of fate" and "situational irony".
Of course he isn't. He just jumped on the "misusing 'irony'" meme Reality Bites started because it made him feel smart, contrary to all other evidence.
Let's say there's a nice public park in your town. And let's say a company shows up one day, puts a wall around it, and charges admission to enter. This would not stand, even though it would only affect the portion of the public interested in using the park. For one thing, it's a limited resource. For another, it's a public good.
Do you see the analogy? The airwaves are a limited public good. Payola is bad because it unfairly excludes a portion of the public interested in promoting their music. Moreover, the public gets screwed because inferior songs might get played over superior songs.
This has nothing little to do with how many people like pop music. Radio stations cater to specific audiences, and always have. That's why there are classic rock stations, and talk radio, and so on. I'm certainly not railing against pop music, either. I can recognize that there are great pop songs out there. The Beatles certainly deserved a lot of airplay in their day. Should our culture have missed out because an inferior group went the payola route?
The so-called pilcrow is the "paragraph symbol." The section sign is either two S's, vertically offset, or just an S with a circle in the middle, depending on the typeface.
Fink is a weird version of apt-get with extensions. MacPorts is a port of BSD ports.
o otstrap-macos.xml. Very nice. There are probably 300 or so ebuilds, and more add added all the time.
Both kind of suck. (Mind you, I like apt-get, but Fink's extensions suck). Gentoo releases/d (as of two months ago) a version of Portage for OS X. See http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/prefix/b
The airwaves are a public good. Radio stations are given license to broadcast provided they benefit the public and follow certain rules.
You've discovered both Wikipedia and Zero-Wing! Welcome to the internet, n00b.
Money?
In fact, the GPL is really what takes away your freedom. It essentially says that if you want to create a derivative work, you must abide by certain restrictions. What this effectively does is grant certain rights to the recipients of derivative works in exchange for certain restrictions on freedom to create those derivative works. Not as sexy sounding as "preserving freedom", I suppose.
Phrasing the GPL's intent that way borders on bad faith. Your description is abstract to the point that it applies to every license, including the BSD and "All Rights Reserved" licenses.
The GPL's restrictions are responsibilities the licensee must comply with in order to ensure any sub-licensee's freedom to modify and distribute the licensed code. Public domain licenses are certainly more free in the sense that a licensee has more rights. However, among these is the right to limit any sub-licensee's rights.
Now, which sort of license will afford the most people the most meaningful rights? There is a very strong case that the GPL is more free in this sense. So which sense is the right one to use? I prefer the BSD sense, but I am sympathetic to this sense as well.
In any event, the idea that with freedom comes responsibility pre-dates Orwell by several centuries.
it matters because if you have good rep on slashdot, chances are you're not a complete mumpty.
You obviously haven't been reading slashdot very long. Not only is it full of morons, but getting 'Excellent' karma is easy. All you have to do is make 40 something posts that aren't modded down. Less if they get modded up. Slashdot should not be an indicator of general repute.
Getting +5 Funny is a sure sign I didn't say anything funny. :-(
TeX's a weird thing. On the one hand, it's a very flexible way to format text. On the other, for most purposes, if you're using it correctly, it's inflexible to the point of transparency.
.tex file and I showed her how to use these commands as they were necessary in the text.
I had a friend who was writing her economics thesis. She wasn't happy with how it looked. So I suggested TeX. She wasn't interested until I showed her how my thesis turned out. (I was a mathematics major). I told her we could make her thesis look like mine in 20 minutes.
So I gave her a 20 minute introduction to LaTeX. Only the basics -- \documentclass[]{}, \begin{document} - \end{document}, \author{}, \title{}, \maketitle, \chapter{}, \section{}, \footnote{}, and a little bit about references. We copy pasted her thesis into a
20 minutes later, she was a TeX convert. Two things really convinced her of TeX's power. The table of contents automatically changing to reflect document changes -- she saw how that, and mechanisms like that, would make her life much easier later. Also, the ease of changing formatting globally by changing the document class. And her thesis looked pretty, like a well done book. She said "Wow" a lot during this intro. Inflexible to the point of transparency.
I gave her a warning though. "If you let yourself, you'll start playing around with document classes, and end up wasting hours admiring your thesis." Extremely flexible.
Logged in people are modded down faster than anonymous cowards. Presumably these Nazi Moderators think it's more important to burn a user's existing karma, to silence that individual for the future, than to use the moderation system for what it's meant for : identifying "good" and "bad" posts (Notice how nearly all oppressive governments in the past and present do the same thing : marking individuals as bad and untrustworthy because they have conflicting opinions, instead of engaging in a public discussion about these opinions)
Feel free to use this information to your advantage. I thank you for your time.
It's a long story. Back in 1996, in the early days of Slashdot, people wore onions on their belt, as was the style at the time. In any event, it was at the start of Clinton's second term in office. Things were looking up. It was still a pre-9/11 world, and things were different then, as was the style at the time. Google had only recently started buying up San Francisco real estate. Michael Jordan stopped playing baseball. IBM stock was up. CowboyNeal posted a story about sharks, as was the style at the time. CmdrTaco did not approve and said so in a comment, saying he didn't know what Cowboy Neal thinking. Paraphrasing, he said: "Unless these sharks have lasers attached to their heads, this story doesn't belong here."
In fact, the classic Unix design is very desktop unfriendly, which is why all kinds of user-friendly packages like automounter have been created.
Your point is pretty vacuous. The user-friendly packages already exist, and as OS X and Ubuntu (as a Linux example) show, can be used to great effect.
But you're right. Google won't produce a Linux desktop. They'll probably use a BSD variant, should they ever produce a desktop at all.
An hour is a pretty long time. Vim with Java could do it. It's not like the IDE is going to do your thinking for you.
No. Aliens use proprietary technology and Apple is the only terrestrial company to license it.
Security is as hard as the enemy wants it to be. This is the most important thing we can understand about security.
I don't mean to say that your comment wasn't insightful. It was. But as they raise the stakes, we have to too.
Then again, I don't want to sound like I'm on the DHS's side. They have a lot to learn, and it will be too late before their process of security by committee does.
No, they're trying to utilize their status as pseudo-sovereign nations to cash in. Very different. After all, as nations, they have the right to dictate how their spectrum is used.
I Rasengan your contempt for Naruto.
Now it is shown that "intermediate frequency electrical fields" (whatever that means) can damage cancerous brain cells. Does this mean that a physiological effect (beneficial in this case) has been demonstrated, so that an adverse effect becomes more plausible?
Intermediate frequency electrical fields, huh. Sounds like light/radio to me. After all, changing electrical fields induce changing perpendicular magnetic fields.
Great, as if cancer treatments weren't expensive enough already, now the phone company is getting involved?
Uh, how about charging people $129 for OS X point releases (roughly equivalent to Windows service packs)?
I'm so sick of this troll. So what if they're point releases? One thing they aren't is "roughly equivalent to Windows service packs". Tiger provided features promised in Vista but still undelivered. OS X's kernel has slowly improved, often in sub-point updates. New API's are made available for developers.