You can't have winners in life when there are no losers.
You really, really need to learn some economic theory. To put it bluntly and briefly: one party does not have to lose in order for another to win. Go read Adam Smith.
I don't know what it's like in the US; but here in the UK the newspapers comment and leading articles far outclasses that of the web.
The Times, in particular has comment and leading articles with the kind of firm backing in fact and insight that I have yet to find on web. Typically, comment on the web is done either by some part timer or arm chair blogger who lack the connections or the background knowledge to make the kind of argument that I value. On political topics, bloggers often tend to be highly partisan (reading blogs related to american presidential candidates really hammers this home; one candidate is the bees knees and voting for anyone else will make the sky fall.
Guest columns are an even better example; people have to be honest and upfront and put their plans and opinion across straight in print. While every party leader has their own youtube account, it's typically filled with the kind of PR heavy "look at what a nice guy I am" crap, which I don't rate.
Furthermore, there is a far higher degree of background research done by newspapers (and old media in general - they have the budget that citizen journalists don't), so while they don't always get the scoop on whatever scandal is going like some blogger do (or, more often, claim to have done) histories of persons and issues are very, very good. A good example is the recent case of data loss of the UK government; a strong research team gave the situation a backing of context that many new-media outlets (slashdot included here) failed to give.
There are issues. Coverage of tech issues is routinely poor from old-media. And I mean shocking. Coverage is poor, understanding of general issues is poor, and there is far too much focus on big names who actually have little to do with tech in general. Larger companies are far, far too often given too large an input in articles.
I do welcome this resurgence of citizen journalism. New media has much to add to the reporting of news. However, until the new-media generates establishments that can offer alternatives to Broadsheet Newspapers, there are going to be a number of kinds of journalism on which new-media cannot compete with the old.
I'm always baffled when people expect some kind of "right to privacy". This "Right to Privacy" would be redundant anyway; if someone is rifling through your personal property, it's a breach of personal ownership, and if you want to stop people talking about you, you're trying to interfere with freedom of speech.
As far as I can tell, there is no "Right to Privacy" in the Magna Carta, The US Constitution or the Bill of Rights (4th amendment is. I don't really get where this comes from, can someone explain?
That has been a career of 45 years which is far older than most individual who read Slashdot. My 4H project when I was 13 or 14 was building a ham transmitter and modulator. That was back in the 50's.
I'm just hoping I will enjoy my career as much as you have obviously enjoyed yours.
This is excellent logic, but I think much of the reasoning behind wifi encryption is that people who do connect to your wifi are essentially getting to fire a load of packets around the internet with your name on them.
Which could be worrying or not, depending on their interests. The number of people connecting to open access points to use kazaa to download the latest movie blockbuster would worry me if I was in an apartment building or something.
To make it even more obvious for you, I have highlighted interesting emails in green (ones that I want to read) and the spam gmail let through in red. There's a number of phishing attempts in there (Microsoft and Ebay emails are spoofed). There's spam that should very obviously have been junked by any decent Bayesian filter ("National Lottery", "Winner" and cjk characters should be a dead giveaway). Many of these are the classic Nigerian scams that are easily blocked (I do it myself on my own damn mailserver).
This is not a sudden rash. I routinely receive this level of spam to this inbox every single day.
I don't know how significant a criticism this is anymore. Rockbox seems to include ogg vorbis decoding in real time, and without any massive cost to battery life (in fact, I've recently read of Rockbox actually surpassing some original firmwares).
A) WMA does have better audio quality than MP3, by a factor of 1.5 to 2 times. And this is a good thing as all decoding chips in portable music players all have WMA support, unless it is crippled like the iPod. So you can throw your songs in WMA at 64 or 128 and have almost twice the fidelity of an MP3, especially when you add in better variable bit rate support, etc.
WMA only performs well at extremely low bit rates (we're talking sub 128kb/s here), and by that time, you've already thrown away all chance of a good quality reproduction of the cd. Performance of WMA at higher bitrates is poor in comparision with lame or vorbis (as soon as you pass 128kb/s, WMA turns to shit). Additionally, I don't know what you're referring to by "better variable bitrate support"; can you name a player, hardware or software, that is unable to play lame vbr?
Ogg Vorbis, however, is truly the best option, since 1) it has the best technical performance of any of them
I think the problem with Ogg Vorbis is that the technical performance on stereo music is not improved enough over LAME to make it worth using on a technical basis.
At the transparency levels of both (lame -V 2 --vbr new & oggenc -q 5), ogg vorbis ends up only being about a quarter smaller (I test on a cd copy of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture). This is a good technical feat, but it is far cheaper to make hard drives a a third bigger than it would be to displace mp3.
Am I the only one who's tired of the PC being cast as the boring office-machine while OSX is fun?
Am I the only tired of the PC being cast as a Windows machine? There are a whole host of operating systems that run on IBM PC's. In fact, OSX is one of the one operating systems that does not.
If you mean Windows, say "Windows".
Re:Not what tor was intended for!
on
Spying On Tor
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· Score: 1
It is standard practice to deny breaking the law, even when one does so. Not that I am able to tell either way, but I still casually disbelieve you.
Excuse me if I take exception to someone supporting an unethical position. Bittorrent is by a long, long way the most common abuse of the tor network. It's bad to do it, and it's also bad to advocate it.
Re:Not what tor was intended for!
on
Spying On Tor
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· Score: 2, Insightful
*Sure, TOR aint big fans of people chewing up BW with p2p, but better that than being sued right?
No, not "better that than be sued". You're just making tor more difficult to use for what it really is for; information censured for political reason. Tor really does help chinese nationals (at least, those that are aware of it and able to use it), you're just ramming nodes with your idiotic hollywood film traffic.
The PC industry plateaued in the 1970s (miniframes and hobby computers), 1980s (death of 8-bit computers), 1990s (death of 8088 based PCs and 68000 series Macs), and we'll soon happen again, likely marked as the end of the Intel age. This is normal as technology doesn't develop in nice, easy to manage chunks. Moore's law just says that transistors will double every 18 months, not that everyone will have a use for all of them.
I can't tell if you are confused about the defintion of plateau, or the definition of PC. Perhaps both.
You didn't understand my post. "heat of extreme emotion" murders largely have a "provocation" defence in the UK, meaning that they are in fact manslaughter.
As opposed to the murderer, who killed his cheating wife in a fit of rage. How likely is he to commit the crime, or any crime for that matter, again?
It is totally pointless and irrelevant to pull hypothetical situations out of your arsehole. In my jurisdiction (The United Kingdom), that is not even murder, so you're not only peddling a logical fallacy (argument by analogy) and devaluing domestic violence, but you are also failing in your actual intent; which is to illustrate a situation.
How are we judging the length of a sentence? Is a long sentence to take revenge upon the criminal for having harmed society? Or is it to to give the criminal sufficient time to rehabilitate, and hopefully live out the remainder of his life as a reasonably productive citizen? Is the length of a sentence also proportional to the likelihood of recommission?
When I said "sentence" I was actually referring to a custodial sentence. My position is that sentences should never be for vengeance, and must be purely aimed at creating the best possible outcome for the victim, the defendant, and society at large. Custodial sentences often fulfil the victims desire for revenge but rarely result in any kind of change in the defendants behaviour, meaning the defendant probably re-offends and the punishment was a waste of time for everyone involved. Drug users do not benefit from custodial sentences; custodial sentencing for drug users does not tackle the addiction (currently in the UK, i believe we offer some limited drug treatment, but it's shit). Burglars do not benefit from custodial sentences; they ought to be learning something to help them secure employment in society (we ought to be running educational courses in prisons).
I think your overall confusion with my post is that you have not considered that there could be (and, to some degree, are) useful alternatives to gaol. There is a lot of crime that is committed because the defendant is unemployed due to lack of skills or because the defendant has some kind of substance dependency. Gaol doesn't fix either of these issues (nor many others), hence people leaving gaol still have the same problems they entered with, and re-offend.
As for most other systems: once they get out of jail, it's still so hard for them to be treated like: "they've served their time". I figure, if they're clean after 3 years, their criminal record should be hidden for purposes of jobs and almost everything else except relevant law enforcement stuff.
I entirely agree. If a person has served his sentence, making it unduly hard for him to get paying work simply frustrates rehabilitation. Here in the UK, there is little question in my mind that we do not take rehabilitation anywhere near seriously enough. There seems to be an acquire culture of justice meaning revenge, rather than the improvement of society. Justice should repair both parties of conflict, because they are both broken.
The evidence being that I consider it to be very reasonable through my own analysis? I never intended to suggest that I had access to some secret empirical data on the subject; simply that I believe that a life sentence for murder acts as a reasonable deterrent (I am unable to think of any better deterrent, and I take umbrage at capital punishment).
If it does not seem reasonable to you that, in the case of a person failing to contain any moral aversion to the intention killing of his peers, that that person would be deterred by a lengthy jail sentence: please state your argument. Statistical analysis is hardly going to present governance with an optimum sentence length/type for murder, so please do not ask for it.
Understand that I don't want to discuss US Law with anyone. Frankly, I could hardly care less about US Law; I don't follow it and therefore I have a very low level of insight into it.
There was, therefore, little point in defining the American approach to homicide to me. They are different, and this is moral discussion. At least, I intended to start a moral discussion, and I only have interest in following and responding to a moral discussion; wrangling is of no benefit. Consider my word of "Murder" to mean "First degree murder".
Slashdot Mirror
Well, from my reading of his post, he was saying that, but he was also resigning himself to its perceived truth.
Yeah, I never learnt anything from wikipedia either. Computers are useless!
I don't know what it's like in the US; but here in the UK the newspapers comment and leading articles far outclasses that of the web.
The Times, in particular has comment and leading articles with the kind of firm backing in fact and insight that I have yet to find on web. Typically, comment on the web is done either by some part timer or arm chair blogger who lack the connections or the background knowledge to make the kind of argument that I value. On political topics, bloggers often tend to be highly partisan (reading blogs related to american presidential candidates really hammers this home; one candidate is the bees knees and voting for anyone else will make the sky fall.
Guest columns are an even better example; people have to be honest and upfront and put their plans and opinion across straight in print. While every party leader has their own youtube account, it's typically filled with the kind of PR heavy "look at what a nice guy I am" crap, which I don't rate.
Furthermore, there is a far higher degree of background research done by newspapers (and old media in general - they have the budget that citizen journalists don't), so while they don't always get the scoop on whatever scandal is going like some blogger do (or, more often, claim to have done) histories of persons and issues are very, very good. A good example is the recent case of data loss of the UK government; a strong research team gave the situation a backing of context that many new-media outlets (slashdot included here) failed to give.
There are issues. Coverage of tech issues is routinely poor from old-media. And I mean shocking. Coverage is poor, understanding of general issues is poor, and there is far too much focus on big names who actually have little to do with tech in general. Larger companies are far, far too often given too large an input in articles.
I do welcome this resurgence of citizen journalism. New media has much to add to the reporting of news. However, until the new-media generates establishments that can offer alternatives to Broadsheet Newspapers, there are going to be a number of kinds of journalism on which new-media cannot compete with the old.
Seeing as he plans to remain chairman of the board, that seems doubtful
I'm always baffled when people expect some kind of "right to privacy". This "Right to Privacy" would be redundant anyway; if someone is rifling through your personal property, it's a breach of personal ownership, and if you want to stop people talking about you, you're trying to interfere with freedom of speech.
As far as I can tell, there is no "Right to Privacy" in the Magna Carta, The US Constitution or the Bill of Rights (4th amendment is. I don't really get where this comes from, can someone explain?
GP is probably mistaking his initialisms.
Except that I don't think that has worked in court yet, at least in the UK, and probably not in the US either.
This is excellent logic, but I think much of the reasoning behind wifi encryption is that people who do connect to your wifi are essentially getting to fire a load of packets around the internet with your name on them.
Which could be worrying or not, depending on their interests. The number of people connecting to open access points to use kazaa to download the latest movie blockbuster would worry me if I was in an apartment building or something.
Here it is.
To make it even more obvious for you, I have highlighted interesting emails in green (ones that I want to read) and the spam gmail let through in red. There's a number of phishing attempts in there (Microsoft and Ebay emails are spoofed). There's spam that should very obviously have been junked by any decent Bayesian filter ("National Lottery", "Winner" and cjk characters should be a dead giveaway). Many of these are the classic Nigerian scams that are easily blocked (I do it myself on my own damn mailserver).
This is not a sudden rash. I routinely receive this level of spam to this inbox every single day.
I don't know how significant a criticism this is anymore. Rockbox seems to include ogg vorbis decoding in real time, and without any massive cost to battery life (in fact, I've recently read of Rockbox actually surpassing some original firmwares).
At the transparency levels of both (lame -V 2 --vbr new & oggenc -q 5), ogg vorbis ends up only being about a quarter smaller (I test on a cd copy of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture). This is a good technical feat, but it is far cheaper to make hard drives a a third bigger than it would be to displace mp3.
If you mean Windows, say "Windows".
It is standard practice to deny breaking the law, even when one does so. Not that I am able to tell either way, but I still casually disbelieve you.
Excuse me if I take exception to someone supporting an unethical position. Bittorrent is by a long, long way the most common abuse of the tor network. It's bad to do it, and it's also bad to advocate it.
Rebooting once your mailbox has been wiped is not a good way of undeleting.
You didn't understand my post. "heat of extreme emotion" murders largely have a "provocation" defence in the UK, meaning that they are in fact manslaughter.
I think your overall confusion with my post is that you have not considered that there could be (and, to some degree, are) useful alternatives to gaol. There is a lot of crime that is committed because the defendant is unemployed due to lack of skills or because the defendant has some kind of substance dependency. Gaol doesn't fix either of these issues (nor many others), hence people leaving gaol still have the same problems they entered with, and re-offend.
The evidence being that I consider it to be very reasonable through my own analysis? I never intended to suggest that I had access to some secret empirical data on the subject; simply that I believe that a life sentence for murder acts as a reasonable deterrent (I am unable to think of any better deterrent, and I take umbrage at capital punishment).
If it does not seem reasonable to you that, in the case of a person failing to contain any moral aversion to the intention killing of his peers, that that person would be deterred by a lengthy jail sentence: please state your argument. Statistical analysis is hardly going to present governance with an optimum sentence length/type for murder, so please do not ask for it.
Understand that I don't want to discuss US Law with anyone. Frankly, I could hardly care less about US Law; I don't follow it and therefore I have a very low level of insight into it. There was, therefore, little point in defining the American approach to homicide to me. They are different, and this is moral discussion. At least, I intended to start a moral discussion, and I only have interest in following and responding to a moral discussion; wrangling is of no benefit. Consider my word of "Murder" to mean "First degree murder".