Except that "Outlaw attitudes" tend to be frowned upon by employers.
Any more than wearing burqas or otherwise concealing your whole body? I doubt it. I think most businesses would embrace an "outlaw attitude" much more readily than the "I have something to hide" attitude.
I think the concept of crime is broader than laws. Slavery was once legal, but we still consider it a crime against humanity.
The last person on Earth could do something like cover the planet in toxic waste. While that might not be illegal to that person, subsequent lifeforms that come to settle on Earth (or humans that have been living of-earth and return) might consider it a crime.
There's also the scale of humanity to consider. If humankind went beyond the planet earth, would the last human on Earth be breaking laws of humanity, which continues elsewhere? Would our laws be instituted on a per-planet basis, or will we have moved to laws or codes of conducts that apply to our species, rather than geographical areas?
No, I don't think it has anything to do with SI units. It's more related to our language usage conventions, and how they shape our perception of things, and how the way we use things shapes our language about them. It's socio-cultural.
As for bits and bytes, they are (sort of) discrete units, but that's not how we usually think of them in day-to-day use. We think of them as a collective mass, as a unit of measurement, not "things" like paper dollars.
Even if SI units pre-dated dollars, I really doubt we'd say "MegaDollars.". And with years, there are other terms for collective amounts - such as century and millennium.
The age given is 3.8 to 4.28 billion years (why billion, not giga. Dunno.)
Because years are considered as discrete individual items, rather than a collective mass. In contrast, we don't usually consider, say, multiple Watts of electrical energy to be comprised of individual Watts, so we say "GigaWatts."
Also, see dollars - we also consider dollars to be individual units, so we say "billions of dollars" rather than "GigaDollars."
I really doubt that your Java JITs are going to be good enough to make things like 3D games perform as well as native on current smartphone processors.
Fanboi is a play on the phrase Skater Boi from some mousy singer that I forget.
Which is one of the reasons it's such a lame and stupid word. It was lame and stupid when pop-chick-singer (Pink?) used it for "Skater Bois", and it's lame now.
You aren't a fanboi. A fanboi is someone who follows someone or something without question and without financial compensation.
But that's not the way it is used around here, where anybody who enjoys using Apple products, or disagrees with the bashing of Apple is labeled a "fanboi."
I've never actually come across anybody who follows Apple without question, so why is the term used so widely? Such a person would actually be a very rare find - yet the term is used blatantly and indiscriminately.
Well, for you it may be less convenient. But for me, it is more convenient. I can just use my existing, highly-efficient backup system - rather than have to maintain a dual filing system for audio CDs, and devote more shelf-space to the task.
Also, the restoration process with my system is much more convenient than having to manually copy files from disparate storage units, or re-rip CDs.
But the real question with "I don't want to have to do that" is - why the hell aren't you doing it already? Are you telling me you don't already back up any of your files?
I do agree that photoshop is better than gimp. If I were a professional graphic artist, I would happily buy a mac for running photoshop. I'm not a graphic artist, and my needs are more than adequately met by gimp. Adobe's incentive is to make a profit by selling the best product to meet the graphic artist communities needs. I don't know the incentive behind the creation of gimp, perhaps it is to provide a similar product that will suit the needs of the rest of the world.
Well, that's why Adobe also sell Photoshop Elements for casual users, and there are tons of closed-source "shareware"* applications that do a better job than GIMP, but don't do as much as Photoshop, for a few tens of bucks instead of hundreds.
The odd thing is, why can't GIMP do better than the tiny independent software companies that do the "shareware" equivalent?
* Note: "Shareware" is in scare quotes because the concept had been somewhat eroded. Rather than "donate if you like it" it now tends to mean "cheap software that offers a functional demo version".
As others have said, generally a company hires a software developer to develop some software that will make the company's life easier - not so they can profit from the distribution of that software.
But that's not always appropriate. General-purpose tools being a good example. How useful would Photoshop, for example, be if it were written only to fulfill the needs of one particular company?
There's also the case to be made that software developed in-house for one specific company tends to be the most awful software of all. So, I think software in general is better off because some companies make their money from producing and distributing general-purpose software. It also provides F/OSS with some goals to strive for.
The open source baby killing project is not even in beta yet, and there are compatibility and dependency issues that will keep it out of the linux kernel for quite some time.
If you use a proper incremental backup system (for example, I use Retrospect Backup) you save even more disc space, and it makes restoring your whole library much easier than re-ripping CDs.
Audio CD are often only half-full (or less) - meaning many disc swaps to restore your library. An incremental system fills the entire disc to maximum capacity, so you waste no space.
You also lose any meta-data that you add to or modify in your files. A proper backup system maintains this meta-data, and the organization of your library.
Finally, a proper backup system can read from and write to multiple drives. For example, I have 5 DVD drives attached to my main workstation. So, I can restore (or backup) large chunks of data, without having to waste time swapping discs individually.
If Apple etc. come up with a way for me to have a backup that I can use with as many machines as I like without having to go online, even if all machines that contained the data before have died, and that I automatically receive upon buying the song, I agree that physical media are useless. But I seriously doubt that.
That already exists. It's called "buy your songs from Amazon or the iTunes Store, and burn them to disc." iTunes actually prompts you to do this when you make a purchase.
It's already a more efficient system, because compressed files (whether lossy or lossless) take up less space on disc. So, you can either reduce your storage space, or you can make two backups for redundancy, which take up the same (or less) space than the single backup you get with audio CD.
It would be even more likely if the big companies weren't worried about lawsuits over potential patent violations resulting from the implementation of Ogg/Vorbis.
Well, I'm ten years older than you, and I always found CDs to be dinky, with poor-quality artwork, compared to the vinyl albums with their beautiful, large-format artwork.
But I got over that pretty quickly, and now realize that the obsession with physical packaging is nothing more than nostalgic bullshit. I care about the music, not the packaging it comes in. It also seems almost criminally wasteful to buy music for the packaging. It's not very environmentally sustainable.
Just what is the purpose of all that packaging, to show off how much stuff you have on your shelf? I think as you get older, you will probably realize that you already have too much stuff, and that "nice sleeve/case" is just more crap laying around, cluttering your life.
So, where do you expect the statistics on arrests by government officials to come from? And they actually have better reporting of crime than in the US, so I think the vested interest in reporting lower crime is bunk. Especially as the UK government likes to over report crime, for political reasons - i.e, creating a moral panic.
Legalizing guns reduces crime because it raises the stakes when committing a crime. The person you are attacking is more likely to be armed. Robbing an unarmed victim is one thing, robbing grandma when she might pull an uzi from her purse is another matter entirely.
So, where's the evidence of that? The USA has very high rates of violent crime with guns. Those with stricter gun-control laws, and fewer guns in the hands of the people, tend to have lower violent crime rates.
The theory that more guns causes less crime doesn't seem to hold up in the face of evidence.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that "Outlaw attitudes" tend to be frowned upon by employers.
Any more than wearing burqas or otherwise concealing your whole body? I doubt it. I think most businesses would embrace an "outlaw attitude" much more readily than the "I have something to hide" attitude.
I think the concept of crime is broader than laws. Slavery was once legal, but we still consider it a crime against humanity.
The last person on Earth could do something like cover the planet in toxic waste. While that might not be illegal to that person, subsequent lifeforms that come to settle on Earth (or humans that have been living of-earth and return) might consider it a crime.
There's also the scale of humanity to consider. If humankind went beyond the planet earth, would the last human on Earth be breaking laws of humanity, which continues elsewhere? Would our laws be instituted on a per-planet basis, or will we have moved to laws or codes of conducts that apply to our species, rather than geographical areas?
No, I don't think it has anything to do with SI units. It's more related to our language usage conventions, and how they shape our perception of things, and how the way we use things shapes our language about them. It's socio-cultural.
As for bits and bytes, they are (sort of) discrete units, but that's not how we usually think of them in day-to-day use. We think of them as a collective mass, as a unit of measurement, not "things" like paper dollars.
Even if SI units pre-dated dollars, I really doubt we'd say "MegaDollars.". And with years, there are other terms for collective amounts - such as century and millennium.
For real? Maybe this is an American problem, but all of those groups have pretty poor records as far as efficiency goes.
Say what? They kick ass compared to private businesses, which can hardly find their own asses, let alone kick others.
But the Assembly of Experts are no more truly democratic than the president of Iran is
How is it different to "electoral college" votes in the US, which decide the Supreme Leader?
They decided to overbake because they got greedy, and then they got caught with their pants down.
Holy mixed metaphors, Batman!
because most people never ask questions like that.
Uhhh, what? It's the typical media question when they don't have anything serious to ask. It's a total cliché.
YOU WIN due to CHEAPER BEER.
Cheaper beer is not good enough. It must be Free Beer to be worthwhile. Well, that's what the FSF has been telling me.
Today I can order my grocery's online
Order your grocery's what online? Do your groceries need accessories, or something?
The age given is 3.8 to 4.28 billion years (why billion, not giga. Dunno.)
Because years are considered as discrete individual items, rather than a collective mass. In contrast, we don't usually consider, say, multiple Watts of electrical energy to be comprised of individual Watts, so we say "GigaWatts."
Also, see dollars - we also consider dollars to be individual units, so we say "billions of dollars" rather than "GigaDollars."
I really doubt that your Java JITs are going to be good enough to make things like 3D games perform as well as native on current smartphone processors.
Lots of phones come with 2.5 mm jacks, including other phones from HTC. It's a pretty standard kind of connector.
That's not very useful, because a 3.5mm jack is the standard for headphones (or 1/4" for studio headphones).
News to me too. I download FOSS ones.
That's why my ringtone is Richard Stallman singing The Free Software Song.
Fanboi is a play on the phrase Skater Boi from some mousy singer that I forget.
Which is one of the reasons it's such a lame and stupid word. It was lame and stupid when pop-chick-singer (Pink?) used it for "Skater Bois", and it's lame now.
You aren't a fanboi. A fanboi is someone who follows someone or something without question and without financial compensation.
But that's not the way it is used around here, where anybody who enjoys using Apple products, or disagrees with the bashing of Apple is labeled a "fanboi."
I've never actually come across anybody who follows Apple without question, so why is the term used so widely? Such a person would actually be a very rare find - yet the term is used blatantly and indiscriminately.
Well, for you it may be less convenient. But for me, it is more convenient. I can just use my existing, highly-efficient backup system - rather than have to maintain a dual filing system for audio CDs, and devote more shelf-space to the task.
Also, the restoration process with my system is much more convenient than having to manually copy files from disparate storage units, or re-rip CDs.
But the real question with "I don't want to have to do that" is - why the hell aren't you doing it already? Are you telling me you don't already back up any of your files?
I do agree that photoshop is better than gimp. If I were a professional graphic artist, I would happily buy a mac for running photoshop. I'm not a graphic artist, and my needs are more than adequately met by gimp. Adobe's incentive is to make a profit by selling the best product to meet the graphic artist communities needs. I don't know the incentive behind the creation of gimp, perhaps it is to provide a similar product that will suit the needs of the rest of the world.
Well, that's why Adobe also sell Photoshop Elements for casual users, and there are tons of closed-source "shareware"* applications that do a better job than GIMP, but don't do as much as Photoshop, for a few tens of bucks instead of hundreds.
The odd thing is, why can't GIMP do better than the tiny independent software companies that do the "shareware" equivalent?
* Note: "Shareware" is in scare quotes because the concept had been somewhat eroded. Rather than "donate if you like it" it now tends to mean "cheap software that offers a functional demo version".
As others have said, generally a company hires a software developer to develop some software that will make the company's life easier - not so they can profit from the distribution of that software.
But that's not always appropriate. General-purpose tools being a good example. How useful would Photoshop, for example, be if it were written only to fulfill the needs of one particular company?
There's also the case to be made that software developed in-house for one specific company tends to be the most awful software of all. So, I think software in general is better off because some companies make their money from producing and distributing general-purpose software. It also provides F/OSS with some goals to strive for.
The open source baby killing project is not even in beta yet, and there are compatibility and dependency issues that will keep it out of the linux kernel for quite some time.
We could always pitchfork the project.
I thought I'd add a P.S:
If you use a proper incremental backup system (for example, I use Retrospect Backup) you save even more disc space, and it makes restoring your whole library much easier than re-ripping CDs.
Audio CD are often only half-full (or less) - meaning many disc swaps to restore your library. An incremental system fills the entire disc to maximum capacity, so you waste no space.
You also lose any meta-data that you add to or modify in your files. A proper backup system maintains this meta-data, and the organization of your library.
Finally, a proper backup system can read from and write to multiple drives. For example, I have 5 DVD drives attached to my main workstation. So, I can restore (or backup) large chunks of data, without having to waste time swapping discs individually.
If Apple etc. come up with a way for me to have a backup that I can use with as many machines as I like without having to go online, even if all machines that contained the data before have died, and that I automatically receive upon buying the song, I agree that physical media are useless. But I seriously doubt that.
That already exists. It's called "buy your songs from Amazon or the iTunes Store, and burn them to disc." iTunes actually prompts you to do this when you make a purchase.
It's already a more efficient system, because compressed files (whether lossy or lossless) take up less space on disc. So, you can either reduce your storage space, or you can make two backups for redundancy, which take up the same (or less) space than the single backup you get with audio CD.
It would be even more likely if the big companies weren't worried about lawsuits over potential patent violations resulting from the implementation of Ogg/Vorbis.
Well, I'm ten years older than you, and I always found CDs to be dinky, with poor-quality artwork, compared to the vinyl albums with their beautiful, large-format artwork.
But I got over that pretty quickly, and now realize that the obsession with physical packaging is nothing more than nostalgic bullshit. I care about the music, not the packaging it comes in. It also seems almost criminally wasteful to buy music for the packaging. It's not very environmentally sustainable.
Just what is the purpose of all that packaging, to show off how much stuff you have on your shelf? I think as you get older, you will probably realize that you already have too much stuff, and that "nice sleeve/case" is just more crap laying around, cluttering your life.
So, where do you expect the statistics on arrests by government officials to come from? And they actually have better reporting of crime than in the US, so I think the vested interest in reporting lower crime is bunk. Especially as the UK government likes to over report crime, for political reasons - i.e, creating a moral panic.
Legalizing guns reduces crime because it raises the stakes when committing a crime. The person you are attacking is more likely to be armed. Robbing an unarmed victim is one thing, robbing grandma when she might pull an uzi from her purse is another matter entirely.
So, where's the evidence of that? The USA has very high rates of violent crime with guns. Those with stricter gun-control laws, and fewer guns in the hands of the people, tend to have lower violent crime rates.
The theory that more guns causes less crime doesn't seem to hold up in the face of evidence.