This is a horrendously complex topic, and as IANAL and have only a hobby interest in UK law, I don't even want to guess upon anecdotes that are presented to me (especially moronic ones about killing child molesters). There are two conflicting cases in UK law; at least as far as I know, which are Nedrick and Woolin.
Essentially, there is a level of forethought required to the UK Law offence of Murder (IIRC, the outcome of the defendants actions must be roughly on the level of a "virtual certainty"). I am in no way qualified to discuss US Law, but murder here pretty much requires the defendant to intend the death of the victim. I define murder as it is defined in UK Law (I can think of no useful alternative which would actually confuse the matter less), which is something well described on Wikipedia.
Because a life sentence for murder is actually a very reasonable deterrent. Remember that almost all murder is done in a premeditated manner (otherwise it would be manslaughter (I'm in the UK)). There are some crimes where you are right, and it is not productive to attach a lengthy jail term as a deterrent (drug use, theft/robbery/burglary etc) but with murder is not one of them.
Murder is the most serious crime, and if you neither attach a jail sentence (to deter) nor a therapy/rehab course (which is pointless because murder, as you said, has a tiny recidivism rate) you aren't actually attaching any judicial response, and murder ceases to be criminal behaviour.
I understand your frustration at the seemingly fruitless punishment for murder (and you are correct; it serves no purpose for the betterment of the convicted), but having a long jail sentence for murder actually does serve society: by deterring murder.
Peer to peer is not synonymous with unreliable. In fact, mesh networking could very well be more reliable than relying on a central network, especially when you consider that a big centralised network is a big centralised target for the enemy in a miltary context.
Even at the lowered rate that OEM's get Windows, surely the profit from crapware cannot be greater than the cost of Windows? Even if the cost of Windows was only £60 (I'm in the UK), then crapware consisting of free trials of Norton 360, AOL and whatever else has to create ~£60 for the OEM. I can't really fathom that; how can crapware create that much profit?
Succinctness is not the same as not saying anything. The fact that I didn't spell everything out like a moron does not mean that I did not make any points.
Because linux users, as a general rule, have a strong aversion to paying for a commercial product. They're used to free software, and free software, service models excepted, is a very poor model for a company to earn with.
This is nonsensical crap. Everyone pays for hardware. Tom Tom is a hardware company.
This word is not a flashcard for any political situation you dislike. The fact that you are writing law means that the situation, by definition cannot be anarchic, and I think you know that.
I very rarely have a problem with it, except on extremely long instances of Firefox (upwards of a month, with upwards of 40 tabs). Then, it becomes slow and uses a lot of cpu for loading webpages. I also notice that the cache sometimes keeps very, very, very old pages in memory (looking through/dev/mem). Perhaps I will look at changing the variable for the caching, to see what effect it has.
Why? You have all that hardware, why not use it? I mean unless it starts to intefere with your real work, and there is no evidence that it is doing that, then you are fine.
Perhaps because he bought the hardware with something else in mind (graphics/video) andd objects to it being used by a web browser? Even I occasionally have cause to object to Firefox's use of resources, and I really am overpowered (this is a high end machine that I use, basically, for emacs)
The Rule of Economy is fine when applied sensibly (for example, GNOME do the right thing writing many end user applications in python). However, Firefox is currently at the level where it's computational burden is increasing almost as fast as Moore's Law.
Also, I don't think it's news that Michael Stonebraker (a great name, by the way), co-founder and CEO of a company that (surprise!) happens to develop column store database software, thinks that column store databases are going to be the Next Big Thing. Right or wrong, his opinion can't exactly be considered unbiased...
This is no logic. His biases don't really matter; if what he says makes sense, and you agree with it, then he's right (IYO). This is like saying to Einstein; "Well, you would say E=MC^2!", "You've been researching it!".
For what it's worth Twitter's real identity was figured out quite a while ago (you can check out the archives for posts that provide such information, if you wish to). I for one (as well as most Slashdot posters, I imagine) couldn't care less about what he does or who he is in real life, but it's interesting to note that Twitter has never worked at the enterprise level, has never programmed anything, and by his own admission hasn't used a MS product since the 90's. Yet he seems content to comment on all sorts of things he's never done and doesn't know anything about, often under the guise of being knowledgeable in the field. In my mind that is far worse than posting AC.
Interesting comment, but it'd be far more helpful if you'd actually linked to this referenced discussion. Because, without doing that, what you said is as much unsubstantiated crap as you allege twitter to be.
... exactly. I'm glad we are in agreement. Open source does **not** instantly guarantee security.
No, and no one notable ever said it did.
Raymond never said that simply releasing source code resulted in quality. In fact, if you were to actually read his book (advisable, if you want to discuss Open Source) you'd see that, in fact, at no point does he ever even imply that simply releasing source code will result in quality code (in fact, he rather succinctly addresses the point you raise in his "epilog").
Instead, the entire book in devoted to covering the merits of the "bazaar" method of development. And seeing as Raymond is probably the strongest figure involved in the term and its related ideology, I think that's pretty much definitive.
Fact check time! 32-bit processors can directly address up to 4 GB of memory. This is a limitation of the processor architecture, and has nothing to do with the OS.
Fact check time! 32-bit processors can directly address up to 64 GB of memory. This feature was implemented by Intel in 1995, and yet people still do not seem to be aware of it.
The defensiveness was unneeded. Government calling the election is a real problem. It's a gerrymandering way for parties to keep themselves in. It was a big factor in why Blair got re-elected, and I'm sure Brown will try and use it in a similar way very soon.
A better solution to the American problem is taking steps to force parties not to campaign unduly in advance. That would be a lot easier than taking on our much abused system.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a horrendously complex topic, and as IANAL and have only a hobby interest in UK law, I don't even want to guess upon anecdotes that are presented to me (especially moronic ones about killing child molesters). There are two conflicting cases in UK law; at least as far as I know, which are Nedrick and Woolin.
Essentially, there is a level of forethought required to the UK Law offence of Murder (IIRC, the outcome of the defendants actions must be roughly on the level of a "virtual certainty"). I am in no way qualified to discuss US Law, but murder here pretty much requires the defendant to intend the death of the victim. I define murder as it is defined in UK Law (I can think of no useful alternative which would actually confuse the matter less), which is something well described on Wikipedia.
Because a life sentence for murder is actually a very reasonable deterrent. Remember that almost all murder is done in a premeditated manner (otherwise it would be manslaughter (I'm in the UK)). There are some crimes where you are right, and it is not productive to attach a lengthy jail term as a deterrent (drug use, theft/robbery/burglary etc) but with murder is not one of them.
Murder is the most serious crime, and if you neither attach a jail sentence (to deter) nor a therapy/rehab course (which is pointless because murder, as you said, has a tiny recidivism rate) you aren't actually attaching any judicial response, and murder ceases to be criminal behaviour.
I understand your frustration at the seemingly fruitless punishment for murder (and you are correct; it serves no purpose for the betterment of the convicted), but having a long jail sentence for murder actually does serve society: by deterring murder.
Peer to peer is not synonymous with unreliable. In fact, mesh networking could very well be more reliable than relying on a central network, especially when you consider that a big centralised network is a big centralised target for the enemy in a miltary context.
Ubuntu has a 6 month release cycle; the book will be out of date in 6 months (as a best case).
A replacement drive is much less than 200 bucks, and the warranty doesn't buy you you lost data back. Spend the 200 bucks on backing up instead.
GTK is theme-able. There is no reason for GIMP to rewrite that stuff.
Even at the lowered rate that OEM's get Windows, surely the profit from crapware cannot be greater than the cost of Windows? Even if the cost of Windows was only £60 (I'm in the UK), then crapware consisting of free trials of Norton 360, AOL and whatever else has to create ~£60 for the OEM. I can't really fathom that; how can crapware create that much profit?
QT won't cost anything, because Tom Tom is (apparently) Free Software anyway.
These two statements are both illogical, and the first one wasn't even the argument put forward by your parent.
I very rarely have a problem with it, except on extremely long instances of Firefox (upwards of a month, with upwards of 40 tabs). Then, it becomes slow and uses a lot of cpu for loading webpages. I also notice that the cache sometimes keeps very, very, very old pages in memory (looking through /dev/mem). Perhaps I will look at changing the variable for the caching, to see what effect it has.
The Rule of Economy is fine when applied sensibly (for example, GNOME do the right thing writing many end user applications in python). However, Firefox is currently at the level where it's computational burden is increasing almost as fast as Moore's Law.
One day you will regret posting that.
This may be surprising to you: China is a lot bigger and poorer than Sweden, but it still only gets one vote.
So, like you accuse him of doing, you are actually just making accusations without presenting any factual basis.
Raymond never said that simply releasing source code resulted in quality. In fact, if you were to actually read his book (advisable, if you want to discuss Open Source) you'd see that, in fact, at no point does he ever even imply that simply releasing source code will result in quality code (in fact, he rather succinctly addresses the point you raise in his "epilog").
Instead, the entire book in devoted to covering the merits of the "bazaar" method of development. And seeing as Raymond is probably the strongest figure involved in the term and its related ideology, I think that's pretty much definitive.
Apologies. I replied as soon as I noticed your comment, but in the intervening hour, you'd already been lambasted about this twice. Sorry. :)
A better solution to the American problem is taking steps to force parties not to campaign unduly in advance. That would be a lot easier than taking on our much abused system.