"Now this morning, we will begin piloting these zombies, identified here, here, and here. Your mission is to stop the spread of this nonsensical idea that Foster's is Australian for beer."
Some of these titles are not exactly the clearest things in the world. Perhaps "Australia's New Pilot Project to Stop Zombies" would have been better?
Other than that gaffe, on the topic, it isn't the place of governments of democratic republics to engage in attacking malware on the citizenry's machines. It is the job of the citizenry and when government Internet connected resources are beseiged by this crap code then they should be taking up the issue with ISPs and notifying them and holding their abuse departments' feet to the fire on this. Otherwise they should leave the public at large to deal with this themselves. Next thing, they'll tell us what apps they consider malware. Oh wait, that whole DMCA and copying and decoding software nonsense...
Actually, we can build and loft transorbital weapons carrying vehicles at a rate that is truly staggering compared to China. Of couse, so could Japan for that matter. Ours though would carry some very well designed and very specialized nukes that would make any lunar base a thing of the past in short order. China can't militarize the moon. We could.
Never mind that doing so would be insane given the nearly quarter million mile distance away. An orbital vehicle with tungsten rods deorbited by rocket would be much more effective and need no advanced materials technology in comparison to any "railgun" or other electromagnetic weapon. These can be lofted for a small fraction of a moon mission so forgo one moon mission and buy a small fleet of satellites that can pound any known ground force into dust and smoke in the blink of an eye.
Going to the moon is ego polishing for China, irrespective of the communists who know how old and feeble they are getting and have only been playing for time against their shorter and more violent removal. They know China will become a multi-party democratic nation eventually, but that moon landing with always be a CHINESE event. Everyone who has ruled China back to the first emperor would find pride in it.
Pride is a powerful motivation and one the west seems to be forgetting in an orgy of nonsensical "the west is responsible for all evil" self-loathing. The Chinese don't loathe themselves or their nation or their people. Neither should we on the other side of the planet loathe ourselves. We've all done some amazing things in a short period of time and have a right to hold our heads up and continue driving forward. Us here in the west AND China in the east. If more people understood that the evil that men do does not make the men inherently evil and unworthy of continuance, we might already have lunar colonies. Instead we sit here on this limited ball of rock crying our beer about the past. We have a future to get on with and we shouldn't throw it away. China isn't.
A laser based device would be the easiest and best choice. We do have the ability to direct lasers with extreme precision and excellent accurate repeatability. However, you might want to clear away an entire wall of one room, do it over in silvered white paint, and forget about using a cone of space starting at the projector and going across the room spreading to the whole wall. Now you have a real good reason to get going on remodelling the basement to make a TV room.
What he doesn't seem to grasp is that some of us would rather remain true to the Unix ideals and philosophy than to chase mass market popularity.
You mean that small and wrong is better than larger and correct? Or that through pain one aquires knowledge? Or that Vi was sane and Windows Notepad insane? Or that Lynx is "teh 7337"? Or that X is not an insanity inducing system? Which ideals were we speaking about here?
I'm reminded of that exchange from Last of the Mohicans regarding the sooner French guns blow the British out of the colonies... As a Linux user, I gotta say, the sooner Microsoft utterly and completely stomps the Unix world into the ground, the better off we will all be. From the ashes perhaps some saner people will take up the rebuilding than the loons who insist that the sadomasochistic embrace of what were once regarded as weakness, stupidity, and vicious evil on the part of the Unix platform is good and proper. I did my days of twiddling bits in my head, I love some of the things about Linux but again, it is only not adopted more widely because it is one of the dumbest platforms ever conceived this side of OS/2.
I hope the problems are fixed. I won't hold my breath however.
Just when Usenetters thought they were safe from the unwashed hordes and had enough n00bs to deal with arguing over Yenc, Rar, and split files...
As others have mentioned the RIAA and MPAA will no doubt be looking more at these areas now. I suspect the OSS community will get the demand they need to really get behind things like Tor, Privoxy, etc. as well as a resurgence of Mixmaster and Nym anonymous mail/usenet. There will be the usual arguments here and there about encryption and anonymity being G-d's gift to mankind or a sign of sure skullduggery.
Great. Now I can listen to more useless arguing over JBN vs. Quicksilver again. Spammers finally finishing off Usenet as the really good old time posters leave due to that and n00bs for private boards and then Usenet will go down in flames for good. Pr0n will be no more on Usenet if it isn't spam because spammers post only commercial ad clips and pic and n00bs aren't brilliant enough or caring enough to post anything themselves. MP3s? Hah. They'll leave too. Old tv show trades posted openly? Thing of a long lost past.
This is definitely going to backfire. Or if you're a committed tinfoil hat afficianado, then this is going to do exactly what it was designed to do: put the last nails into Usenet.
I'm not an elitist, being in favor of people using Windows if they be not techies just so they can have an Internet experience too, but Usenet is to the net what Lynx is to the web. It's old, clunky, and esoteric and not for n00bs, especially the ones who don't want to learn and want everything done for them and complain endlessly. However, for those who are willing to learn to dance across a keyboard and memorize ten dozen exotic things, it can be a wonderful way of sharing information to those looking for it. n00bs don't belong there. There's too many as it is.
Importantly, these same people also throw everything into G-d's hands at every opportunity with the same gusto that children blame everything on someone else. Free will is the cornerstone of good versus evil as without it there can not be judgement of anything. G-d at no time says that we should be self-deceptive and pretend we are still in Eden.
The entire point of that story is that humankind has free will, has responsibility to look after itself and not G-d, and that means opening our eyes. Neither should we turn our back on G-d and faith, but having hollow rote belief in the Bible which has been edited by very much proveably fallible men over the millenia up until recent centuries is not faith. It is an excuse to not take responsibility for ourselves and G-d doesn't provide for such excuses. Free will is the rule and for our action we will be judged. This terrible knowledge and that which it incites our conscience to before our will is exercised in action is the cornerstone of being intelligent creatures before Him.
With todays religious climate here in USA, science and technology has been put on the backburner.
1980 called. They'd like their anti-religious hysteria back.
No such thing is true. We continue to innovate and changes in the market and focus at various companies have nothing to do with any "religious climate".
Sheesh. The way some/.ers would have it, we have people running around the streets in 1620s Pilgrim outfits with pitchforks stabbing anyone who works in technology.
These sorts of links are for aggregation of existing backhauls for interexchange carriage as it were. Not for getting faster pr0n to your box. There's no need for anyone to mandate anything be done. It will happen in its time as it always has, those who move too quick or too late will suffer for it and those who move right on the money will make the money.
Originally, Nintendo was also going to market a disk drive (which was available for the Fanicom in Japan) so that people could use it as a home PC. As it turned out, the market accepted the Nintendo well enough that they eventually ditched the whole "home computer" idea.
Are you sure it didn't have to do with the fact that the Famicom disk drive was a piece of garbage which had the MTBF of a mid-80s Amtrak train stocked with a supply of bongs and grass?
I had it and it blew chunks. The Dirty Pair game I had on it worked maybe a small percentage of the time. Disk access was where it failed every time though.
What monumentally sucked about the NES versus Famicom was Gradius II never went to the NES but Gradius III did. I had to buy an imported Famicom to play Gradius II, one of my finest game playing moments. Gradius rocked.
Simply choose to upgrade to the newest kernel iteration on your distro. Reboot. Try using Tux Racer. Slooooow. Try using the webcam you had working. Hmmm... not working. Try issuing:
yum install kernel-module-nvidia-$(uname -r)
and lo and behold, it ain't availible yet.
Neither patches nor service packs on Windows require me to reinstall ANY drivers EVER.
It's a lie of monumental proportions that Linux is easy to install and use. Use to an end user means, works with their peripherals, doesn't require arcane command line or Vi knowledge, and doesn't force them to reinstall technical minutae every time there is an update.
I use it every day but I'm a long time techie. This is not for amatures and that's why Windows XP rocks the common end-user desktop and AOL rocks the amature plug in a phone line and go Internet users. This is why YEnc is a mystery to people all over the Usenet binary groups. This is why web mail is better known than POP3/SMTP for the average surfer. Easy, simple, somewhat intuitive, doesn't seem designed to fark with your sanity: Windows. Hard, complicated, totally counterintuitive, seems designed to inflict emotional distress: Unix.
C++ and Java rot the mind. Object orientation rots the mind. C, BASIC, and assembly unrot it.
Programming isn't about abstraction. Abstraction only enters the picture at the outset when you ask yourself, "what am I doing and how do I do it?" After that, it is simply a matter of telling the machine what to do and machines don't operate based on abstractions. They only add 001110 and 110110 if you tell them to. If you don't tell them so, they don't do it.
Along come all sorts of higher concepts that the more artsy and less nuts and bolts types can digest and all sorts of toolboxes of prewritten lower level code from the true code grunts who tell the computer to add 001110 and 110110 and suddenly it is all about that.
Well MSVS does embrace all that very nicely. It makes it rather easy for quick apps to be tossed out by the most artsy and least nuts-and-bolts types. Their minds were already rotten. They never wanted to think the way the machine does, they want the machine to work the way they think and who makes that happen?
The nuts-and-bolts grunts.
HTML coders who swear by a simple text editor and have foresworn WYSIWYG as wussy know what I mean. Who cares about the artsy if the actual code is wrong? Better to know the code down to the last thing and simply do it like you speak that language natively than deal with, "oooh, look at this neat-o set of text boxes with little buttons".
This trusting of the IDE and object nonsense and inane abstractions have drawn us away from the cellular level of the guts so now we don't know if the toolboxes are full of flawed tools and if so what the flaws are and where they are and oooh, look at this neat-o set of... blue screens.
Sometimes it is easier to have hardcopy at your side instead of flipping between windows to see what the Google results are and often your printer doesn't work for whatever reason or is nonexistant. A good book can also be curled up with at night before bed. Try doing that with a tower PC.
...I'm a foreign national working on an H1B. I mean, at the pay I get versus what all the pundits, reports, studies, and "in the know" people say I should be getting, I must be.
Hey, wake up, pay sucks everywhere. Even for those born here. Consequence of the extended hangover from that double bubble burst...
Yup, the same people doing just as well at their job as the League of Nations did at preventing World War II from coming about should definitely get more responsibilities and power. Definitely.
Obviously a lot of people don't remember the Osborne and Compaq "laptops" circa 1981. For those too lazy to Google, picture the average tower PC on your lap with a full sized keyboard and a five inch green phosphor composite monitor built in.
I grew up in a housing project on welfare (back before it became like it is today when it wasn't even a handout and you could only hope relatives better off than you treated you to a McDonald's basic cheeseburger once every few months and hotdogs with macaroni and cheese was eaten three times a week). I'm not remotely liberal. The only poor people who truly believe in the left are those who are permanently poor and broken. Those who get wealthy and still profess belief in it are part of the lie that liberalism is and has been since the words "liberal" and "liberalism" were stolen by the leftists from the old style liberals who were if anything more like the true conservatives of today.
The horesh*t about not everyone having the same opportunities falls flat and exposed as such when you consider that every year people come here from nations where poverty isn't defined as being able to afford digital cable, a projection screen TV, leather couches, and a $30K SUV while living on welfare and foodstamps (I used to install said cable for said people while they sat on said leather couches screaming at each other over who spent the money that should have gone towards the baby's diapers; drugs? working under the table and collecting? who am I to even ask?). It's defined as "will there be any food tomorrow?".
They come here, work hard, sacrifice mightily, just as they did every day just to live where they came from, and such pays off here where it didn't there. How is it that people come here from places where fortunate isn't a tax payer run apartment building but a scrap metal roof instead of one made of rotten scrap boards, and make it so much better?
Does anyone think that these largely non-white people are getting a break and aren't the victims of racism and bigotry? Does anyone think "the man" is going easy on them? That they have special opportunities that people here four generations or more don't?
They point up what American families need to do to be fruitful: stick together, work hard for the common good of the family, put off what you want right now for what you need later, and think of each other over your self. If people think this should be a world where individuals can think only of themselves and be as wealthy as they want all by themselves, they need to realize that's not generally the rule no matter what Hollywood seems like. Long term stable success is a lot of long hard work usually. If you're not up to the cost, don't step up. Stay in the project eating macaroni and cheese and sitting on your front porch staring at the beat up Camaro that you haven't got the money to get on the road. Or scamming the system while crying it doesn't pay you enough money to afford the newest X-Box game.
I may scramble from job to job to keep my income paying a mortgage and ten dozen other bills, but I'd rather be doing this for my family than letting them sit around without hope living at the mercy of others.
The difference is that violating the GPL makes the information less Free, whereas violating most other copyrights and/or licenses makes the information more free.
The ultimate point of all this nonsense about information wanting to be free is that no one wants to pay anything for anything so ANY license makes the information less free because a license automatically signifies it is in some way tied to someone who owns it more than anyone else. Truly free information has no owners. We used to call that public domain. The GPL and so on is just a way for the cheapskates in amature socialist garb to have their cake and eat it too, but eventually the dogma generates the karma that runs it over.
Calling anything free with a license is just self-deception and there because those using it want to have the power of Intellectual Property OWNERSHIP and still look cool because they are LETTING people not pay money. It's not free as long as someone has to LET me use it.
Flamebait is designed to arouse angry response contrary to the jist of the bait. WotC would have to have rabid lovers here for that to be. True geeks are TSR adherents who remember the glory days of AD&D when Gygax was the name of renown. Before the hardcover books came out when staple bound pamphlets gave the guidelines and rules and most of the game was made up by mad DMs and loony players having fun and being creative before it got the M:tG treatment and was made more formularized than it ever should have been. Heck, that process began during the period of Gygax's waning and exit.
I share the parent's attitude: WotC wouldn't know what to do with a truly creative franchise if it bit them on the behind.
Applesoft BASIC. Hi-res graphics and DOS routines. How did they work? Apple wouldn't say and you had to pay APDA $300+ to join and get their developer kits and more than that to get the kits which actually partially answered your questions.
Or you could reverse engineer everything by listing the code to a printer and spending a weekend with a case of Coke going over every little bit of it and then improving on it. I think ProntoDOS went along these lines and I don't recall Apple being any happier with Beagle Bros. than they were with anyone else who sold popular software for their platform that didn't bend over for Apple's greedy attitude.
Screw paying Apple a dime to develop anything on their products. What's the point beyond filing Jobs' not inconsiderable wallet? Nothing. And iPod owners should keep that in mind. Buy what you want, not what Apple blesses from on high.
From TFA - "You cannot regulate code without going through the First Amendment-type balancing tests we have for any other type of speech," says Cindy Cohn, a lawyer at the Electronic Freedom Foundation in San Francisco. "Code is speech."
0110101010101001011101010101101010?
010111100011101010, 0101101101111011010110011...
Speech to whom?
Slashdot Mirror
"Sorry about the dimensions of your new organ. We couldn't get the printer off 'Landscape mode'".
"On the other hand, all the women here love the size of it."
I'm waiting for SALT II...
"Now this morning, we will begin piloting these zombies, identified here, here, and here. Your mission is to stop the spread of this nonsensical idea that Foster's is Australian for beer."
Some of these titles are not exactly the clearest things in the world. Perhaps "Australia's New Pilot Project to Stop Zombies" would have been better?
Other than that gaffe, on the topic, it isn't the place of governments of democratic republics to engage in attacking malware on the citizenry's machines. It is the job of the citizenry and when government Internet connected resources are beseiged by this crap code then they should be taking up the issue with ISPs and notifying them and holding their abuse departments' feet to the fire on this. Otherwise they should leave the public at large to deal with this themselves. Next thing, they'll tell us what apps they consider malware. Oh wait, that whole DMCA and copying and decoding software nonsense...
Actually, we can build and loft transorbital weapons carrying vehicles at a rate that is truly staggering compared to China. Of couse, so could Japan for that matter. Ours though would carry some very well designed and very specialized nukes that would make any lunar base a thing of the past in short order. China can't militarize the moon. We could.
Never mind that doing so would be insane given the nearly quarter million mile distance away. An orbital vehicle with tungsten rods deorbited by rocket would be much more effective and need no advanced materials technology in comparison to any "railgun" or other electromagnetic weapon. These can be lofted for a small fraction of a moon mission so forgo one moon mission and buy a small fleet of satellites that can pound any known ground force into dust and smoke in the blink of an eye.
Going to the moon is ego polishing for China, irrespective of the communists who know how old and feeble they are getting and have only been playing for time against their shorter and more violent removal. They know China will become a multi-party democratic nation eventually, but that moon landing with always be a CHINESE event. Everyone who has ruled China back to the first emperor would find pride in it.
Pride is a powerful motivation and one the west seems to be forgetting in an orgy of nonsensical "the west is responsible for all evil" self-loathing. The Chinese don't loathe themselves or their nation or their people. Neither should we on the other side of the planet loathe ourselves. We've all done some amazing things in a short period of time and have a right to hold our heads up and continue driving forward. Us here in the west AND China in the east. If more people understood that the evil that men do does not make the men inherently evil and unworthy of continuance, we might already have lunar colonies. Instead we sit here on this limited ball of rock crying our beer about the past. We have a future to get on with and we shouldn't throw it away. China isn't.
A laser based device would be the easiest and best choice. We do have the ability to direct lasers with extreme precision and excellent accurate repeatability. However, you might want to clear away an entire wall of one room, do it over in silvered white paint, and forget about using a cone of space starting at the projector and going across the room spreading to the whole wall. Now you have a real good reason to get going on remodelling the basement to make a TV room.
What he doesn't seem to grasp is that some of us would rather remain true to the Unix ideals and philosophy than to chase mass market popularity.
You mean that small and wrong is better than larger and correct? Or that through pain one aquires knowledge? Or that Vi was sane and Windows Notepad insane? Or that Lynx is "teh 7337"? Or that X is not an insanity inducing system? Which ideals were we speaking about here?
I'm reminded of that exchange from Last of the Mohicans regarding the sooner French guns blow the British out of the colonies... As a Linux user, I gotta say, the sooner Microsoft utterly and completely stomps the Unix world into the ground, the better off we will all be. From the ashes perhaps some saner people will take up the rebuilding than the loons who insist that the sadomasochistic embrace of what were once regarded as weakness, stupidity, and vicious evil on the part of the Unix platform is good and proper. I did my days of twiddling bits in my head, I love some of the things about Linux but again, it is only not adopted more widely because it is one of the dumbest platforms ever conceived this side of OS/2.
I hope the problems are fixed. I won't hold my breath however.
Just when Usenetters thought they were safe from the unwashed hordes and had enough n00bs to deal with arguing over Yenc, Rar, and split files...
As others have mentioned the RIAA and MPAA will no doubt be looking more at these areas now. I suspect the OSS community will get the demand they need to really get behind things like Tor, Privoxy, etc. as well as a resurgence of Mixmaster and Nym anonymous mail/usenet. There will be the usual arguments here and there about encryption and anonymity being G-d's gift to mankind or a sign of sure skullduggery.
Great. Now I can listen to more useless arguing over JBN vs. Quicksilver again. Spammers finally finishing off Usenet as the really good old time posters leave due to that and n00bs for private boards and then Usenet will go down in flames for good. Pr0n will be no more on Usenet if it isn't spam because spammers post only commercial ad clips and pic and n00bs aren't brilliant enough or caring enough to post anything themselves. MP3s? Hah. They'll leave too. Old tv show trades posted openly? Thing of a long lost past.
This is definitely going to backfire. Or if you're a committed tinfoil hat afficianado, then this is going to do exactly what it was designed to do: put the last nails into Usenet.
I'm not an elitist, being in favor of people using Windows if they be not techies just so they can have an Internet experience too, but Usenet is to the net what Lynx is to the web. It's old, clunky, and esoteric and not for n00bs, especially the ones who don't want to learn and want everything done for them and complain endlessly. However, for those who are willing to learn to dance across a keyboard and memorize ten dozen exotic things, it can be a wonderful way of sharing information to those looking for it. n00bs don't belong there. There's too many as it is.
Importantly, these same people also throw everything into G-d's hands at every opportunity with the same gusto that children blame everything on someone else. Free will is the cornerstone of good versus evil as without it there can not be judgement of anything. G-d at no time says that we should be self-deceptive and pretend we are still in Eden.
The entire point of that story is that humankind has free will, has responsibility to look after itself and not G-d, and that means opening our eyes. Neither should we turn our back on G-d and faith, but having hollow rote belief in the Bible which has been edited by very much proveably fallible men over the millenia up until recent centuries is not faith. It is an excuse to not take responsibility for ourselves and G-d doesn't provide for such excuses. Free will is the rule and for our action we will be judged. This terrible knowledge and that which it incites our conscience to before our will is exercised in action is the cornerstone of being intelligent creatures before Him.
With todays religious climate here in USA, science and technology has been put on the backburner.
/.ers would have it, we have people running around the streets in 1620s Pilgrim outfits with pitchforks stabbing anyone who works in technology.
1980 called. They'd like their anti-religious hysteria back.
No such thing is true. We continue to innovate and changes in the market and focus at various companies have nothing to do with any "religious climate".
Sheesh. The way some
These sorts of links are for aggregation of existing backhauls for interexchange carriage as it were. Not for getting faster pr0n to your box. There's no need for anyone to mandate anything be done. It will happen in its time as it always has, those who move too quick or too late will suffer for it and those who move right on the money will make the money.
Oops, my bad. Gradius III went to the SNES. Sorry. (insert rolling eyes emoticon here)
Originally, Nintendo was also going to market a disk drive (which was available for the Fanicom in Japan) so that people could use it as a home PC. As it turned out, the market accepted the Nintendo well enough that they eventually ditched the whole "home computer" idea.
Are you sure it didn't have to do with the fact that the Famicom disk drive was a piece of garbage which had the MTBF of a mid-80s Amtrak train stocked with a supply of bongs and grass?
I had it and it blew chunks. The Dirty Pair game I had on it worked maybe a small percentage of the time. Disk access was where it failed every time though.
What monumentally sucked about the NES versus Famicom was Gradius II never went to the NES but Gradius III did. I had to buy an imported Famicom to play Gradius II, one of my finest game playing moments. Gradius rocked.
Simply choose to upgrade to the newest kernel iteration on your distro. Reboot. Try using Tux Racer. Slooooow. Try using the webcam you had working. Hmmm... not working. Try issuing:
yum install kernel-module-nvidia-$(uname -r)
and lo and behold, it ain't availible yet.
Neither patches nor service packs on Windows require me to reinstall ANY drivers EVER.
It's a lie of monumental proportions that Linux is easy to install and use. Use to an end user means, works with their peripherals, doesn't require arcane command line or Vi knowledge, and doesn't force them to reinstall technical minutae every time there is an update.
I use it every day but I'm a long time techie. This is not for amatures and that's why Windows XP rocks the common end-user desktop and AOL rocks the amature plug in a phone line and go Internet users. This is why YEnc is a mystery to people all over the Usenet binary groups. This is why web mail is better known than POP3/SMTP for the average surfer. Easy, simple, somewhat intuitive, doesn't seem designed to fark with your sanity: Windows. Hard, complicated, totally counterintuitive, seems designed to inflict emotional distress: Unix.
C++ and Java rot the mind. Object orientation rots the mind. C, BASIC, and assembly unrot it.
Programming isn't about abstraction. Abstraction only enters the picture at the outset when you ask yourself, "what am I doing and how do I do it?" After that, it is simply a matter of telling the machine what to do and machines don't operate based on abstractions. They only add 001110 and 110110 if you tell them to. If you don't tell them so, they don't do it.
Along come all sorts of higher concepts that the more artsy and less nuts and bolts types can digest and all sorts of toolboxes of prewritten lower level code from the true code grunts who tell the computer to add 001110 and 110110 and suddenly it is all about that.
Well MSVS does embrace all that very nicely. It makes it rather easy for quick apps to be tossed out by the most artsy and least nuts-and-bolts types. Their minds were already rotten. They never wanted to think the way the machine does, they want the machine to work the way they think and who makes that happen?
The nuts-and-bolts grunts.
HTML coders who swear by a simple text editor and have foresworn WYSIWYG as wussy know what I mean. Who cares about the artsy if the actual code is wrong? Better to know the code down to the last thing and simply do it like you speak that language natively than deal with, "oooh, look at this neat-o set of text boxes with little buttons".
This trusting of the IDE and object nonsense and inane abstractions have drawn us away from the cellular level of the guts so now we don't know if the toolboxes are full of flawed tools and if so what the flaws are and where they are and oooh, look at this neat-o set of... blue screens.
Sometimes it is easier to have hardcopy at your side instead of flipping between windows to see what the Google results are and often your printer doesn't work for whatever reason or is nonexistant. A good book can also be curled up with at night before bed. Try doing that with a tower PC.
If we're going to talk about Linux as a desktop OS which happens so frequently on /. then this review has "not a desktop distro" written all over it.
...I'm a foreign national working on an H1B. I mean, at the pay I get versus what all the pundits, reports, studies, and "in the know" people say I should be getting, I must be.
Hey, wake up, pay sucks everywhere. Even for those born here. Consequence of the extended hangover from that double bubble burst...
Yup, the same people doing just as well at their job as the League of Nations did at preventing World War II from coming about should definitely get more responsibilities and power. Definitely.
Obviously a lot of people don't remember the Osborne and Compaq "laptops" circa 1981. For those too lazy to Google, picture the average tower PC on your lap with a full sized keyboard and a five inch green phosphor composite monitor built in.
I grew up in a housing project on welfare (back before it became like it is today when it wasn't even a handout and you could only hope relatives better off than you treated you to a McDonald's basic cheeseburger once every few months and hotdogs with macaroni and cheese was eaten three times a week). I'm not remotely liberal. The only poor people who truly believe in the left are those who are permanently poor and broken. Those who get wealthy and still profess belief in it are part of the lie that liberalism is and has been since the words "liberal" and "liberalism" were stolen by the leftists from the old style liberals who were if anything more like the true conservatives of today.
The horesh*t about not everyone having the same opportunities falls flat and exposed as such when you consider that every year people come here from nations where poverty isn't defined as being able to afford digital cable, a projection screen TV, leather couches, and a $30K SUV while living on welfare and foodstamps (I used to install said cable for said people while they sat on said leather couches screaming at each other over who spent the money that should have gone towards the baby's diapers; drugs? working under the table and collecting? who am I to even ask?). It's defined as "will there be any food tomorrow?".
They come here, work hard, sacrifice mightily, just as they did every day just to live where they came from, and such pays off here where it didn't there. How is it that people come here from places where fortunate isn't a tax payer run apartment building but a scrap metal roof instead of one made of rotten scrap boards, and make it so much better?
Does anyone think that these largely non-white people are getting a break and aren't the victims of racism and bigotry? Does anyone think "the man" is going easy on them? That they have special opportunities that people here four generations or more don't?
They point up what American families need to do to be fruitful: stick together, work hard for the common good of the family, put off what you want right now for what you need later, and think of each other over your self. If people think this should be a world where individuals can think only of themselves and be as wealthy as they want all by themselves, they need to realize that's not generally the rule no matter what Hollywood seems like. Long term stable success is a lot of long hard work usually. If you're not up to the cost, don't step up. Stay in the project eating macaroni and cheese and sitting on your front porch staring at the beat up Camaro that you haven't got the money to get on the road. Or scamming the system while crying it doesn't pay you enough money to afford the newest X-Box game.
I may scramble from job to job to keep my income paying a mortgage and ten dozen other bills, but I'd rather be doing this for my family than letting them sit around without hope living at the mercy of others.
The difference is that violating the GPL makes the information less Free, whereas violating most other copyrights and/or licenses makes the information more free.
The ultimate point of all this nonsense about information wanting to be free is that no one wants to pay anything for anything so ANY license makes the information less free because a license automatically signifies it is in some way tied to someone who owns it more than anyone else. Truly free information has no owners. We used to call that public domain. The GPL and so on is just a way for the cheapskates in amature socialist garb to have their cake and eat it too, but eventually the dogma generates the karma that runs it over.
Calling anything free with a license is just self-deception and there because those using it want to have the power of Intellectual Property OWNERSHIP and still look cool because they are LETTING people not pay money. It's not free as long as someone has to LET me use it.
Flamebait is designed to arouse angry response contrary to the jist of the bait. WotC would have to have rabid lovers here for that to be. True geeks are TSR adherents who remember the glory days of AD&D when Gygax was the name of renown. Before the hardcover books came out when staple bound pamphlets gave the guidelines and rules and most of the game was made up by mad DMs and loony players having fun and being creative before it got the M:tG treatment and was made more formularized than it ever should have been. Heck, that process began during the period of Gygax's waning and exit. I share the parent's attitude: WotC wouldn't know what to do with a truly creative franchise if it bit them on the behind.
Yes, how true. More governments being involved always means more freedom.
Yeah, that was the idea of the League of Nations in the minds of people shortly to be plowed under by the Axis powers...
Applesoft BASIC. Hi-res graphics and DOS routines. How did they work? Apple wouldn't say and you had to pay APDA $300+ to join and get their developer kits and more than that to get the kits which actually partially answered your questions.
Or you could reverse engineer everything by listing the code to a printer and spending a weekend with a case of Coke going over every little bit of it and then improving on it. I think ProntoDOS went along these lines and I don't recall Apple being any happier with Beagle Bros. than they were with anyone else who sold popular software for their platform that didn't bend over for Apple's greedy attitude.
Screw paying Apple a dime to develop anything on their products. What's the point beyond filing Jobs' not inconsiderable wallet? Nothing. And iPod owners should keep that in mind. Buy what you want, not what Apple blesses from on high.
From TFA - "You cannot regulate code without going through the First Amendment-type balancing tests we have for any other type of speech," says Cindy Cohn, a lawyer at the Electronic Freedom Foundation in San Francisco. "Code is speech."
0110101010101001011101010101101010? 010111100011101010, 0101101101111011010110011... Speech to whom?
...write the encyclopedias that they then use to study with?
Me neither.
Easy as that.