See, the point is that this is *not* a random bit of malware.
If you can write a good VM that does a good, fast job of flawlessly emulating the host computer, you can win a lot more admiration, money, and make cooler stuff by doing things other than writing malware.
It'd be like, oh, a star NFL player running around mugging people. Okay, granted, he might make a good mugger, but he'd still be stupid to be mugging in the first place.
But I don't think it logically follows that patents are always bad
But it need not, for patents to be a net disadvantage.
After all, the patent system was created to reduce trade secrecy and and encourage invention, and it certainly does that, however imperfectly.
I'm not sure about that.
At the research facility where I worked before the current one that I'm working at, important inventions that really provided an edge over the competition was always kept a trade secret? Why? Because everyone in the industry cross-licensed with each other, because otherwise nobody could actually build anything. Patenting something was just giving it to the competition. Patents were reserved for less useful things.
The net effect was to keep anyone new from entering the market. Patents don't have to all be perfect -- if there are two hundred patents held by incumbents waiting to attack anyone wanting to enter the market, most of the patents can be thrown out and the newcomer is still going to have a hard time entering the market.
Welcome to the real world, just like making disparaging remarks about people believing in a god is currently ok, welcome and even illustrates that you must be one of the intelligent enlightened in current society.
Ever made a comment about "Kool-Aid drinkers" or cult members otherwise?
That is how a lot of us feel about the Christian right. Except said Kool-Aid drinkers don't hurt anyone but themselves, but the Christian right is out pushing anti-gay marriage amendments, trying to have the adopted children of gay couples taken away from them, trying to keep people (including non-Christians) from having the option of seeking abortion, harassing gays, trying to censor media (I think many on here are familiar with Jack Thompson's antics), keeping condoms out of the effort to stop the spread of AIDS, pushing creationism over evolution, and so forth.
I think it's less of a social requirement and more of a backlash. Christianity is well-organized as a political power -- it has hierarchy (well, a number of hierarchies), funding systems, lobbyists, media, and so forth. It has an effective system for organizing voting blocs. As a result, it does a good job of pushing political influence. The problem is that the less-organized people that are getting increasingly irritated with Christianity don't have much of a rallying flag (well, there's the Flying Spaghetti Monster) or much of an organization to speak for them. So you see a groundswell of irritation at places like public forums, where anyone can express their feelings and things are rather more democratic. Slashdot, which is composed disproportionately of well-educated and well-to-do individuals, leans even more away from Christianity.
I'd say that expressing irritation about Christianity is not done to win social approval. If this sort of thing were the case, person on Slashdot would vocally love Apple, love Linux, love anime, love Babylon 5, love perl, etc. And while each group has its adherents, nobody seems to be simply doing the social equivalent of karma whoring in all categories. That indicates to me that it probably isn't being done to win social approval.
Blizzard wasn't banning people from the game because they were gay. So that law has nothing to do with this.
I do not think that you are correct. Consider the code:
All persons within the jurisdiction of this state are free and equal, and no matter what their sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, medical condition, marital status, or sexual orientation are entitled to the full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, privileges, or services in all business establishments of every kind whatsoever.
Whether or not the service is provided or not is not the issue -- I think that you are making an incorrect assumption here. It is whether or not "full and equal" service is provided.
It's hardly a far stretch to consider that banning a guild that states that it is LGBT-friendly is not exactly providing "full and equal" service.
On the other hand, transsexuals specifically are *not* covered by this. A straight transsexual *can*, as my understanding goes, be discriminated against.
13 If any man take a wife, and go in unto her, and hate her, 14 and give occasions of speech against her, and bring up an evil name upon her, and say, I took this woman, and when I came to her, I found her not a maid: 15 then shall the father of the damsel, and her mother, take and bring forth the tokens of the damsel's virginity unto the elders of the city in the gate: 16 and the damsel's father shall say unto the elders, I gave my daughter unto this man to wife, and he hateth her; 17 and, lo, he hath given occasions of speech against her, saying, I found not thy daughter a maid; and yet these are the tokens of my daughter's virginity. And they shall spread the cloth before the elders of the city. 18 And the elders of that city shall take that man and chastise him; 19 and they shall amerce him in a hundred shekels of silver, and give them unto the father of the damsel, because he hath brought up an evil name upon a virgin of Israel: and she shall be his wife; he may not put her away all his days. 20 But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel: 21 then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die; because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her father's house: so shalt thou put evil away from among you.
Deut. 22, 13-21
The Bible is clearly at *least* as much trouble as, say, Carmegeddon, which you can theoretically play and avoid any killing at all.
Ok, last I checked (and correct me if I'm wrong), amidst all the commandments against sex outside of marriage, with the same gender, with barnyard animals, whatever... I don't recall any Thou Shalt Not's about dildos.
Nor did the Bible say "thou shalt not say 'shit' or 'piss' on public television".
Most of the people I know who really know what they're doing would say that they do "computer stuff". People who say "I am a consultant focussing on enterprise-class blah blah... yadda yadda have a lower frequency of cluefulness".
Why would we deprive ourselves of one of the easiest things for a computer to do, and replace it with... what? Who counts your paper ballots?
Because if you don't send out your vote on a paper ballot, you have no way of verifying that the vote leaving the booth is the vote you intended.
Even if there is a backup ballot generated for use in a recount (and your vote goes out electronically), the paper ballot is only checked in the event of a recount.
Electronic voting systems are bad for the voter. The only people who benefit are (a) leaders who don't want to have a potentially contested victory and (b) whatever company has enough lobbyists to get them the lucrative contracts and
I don't even think that the machines should have a "paperless" option at all. It just means that the voter can't verify the primary method of sending out his vote.
The reason is because in the U.S. there are a large number of (a) idiots and (b) immigrants who unfailingly spoil paper ballots in mind-blowing numbers by overvoting, making ambiguous marks, and numerous other creative modes of spoilage.
Or the GOP just doesn't like having a President that's a lame duck because his win is within the margin of contestable votes.
I suspect that the real underlying goal (which nobody wants to admit to) is to have *binary* output coming out of the voting booth. It doesn't really matter whether it's A or B, just that it *can't* have any possibility of being counted as anything other than A or B.
From the voter's standpoint, this is a load of horseshit and doesn't matter to him. It doesn't do anything to increase the speed or accuracy of the election, and it feeds lots of money to people like Diebold.
The printout includes a brief listing of who was voted for in each election in plain text so the voter can verify, and there is a bar code on the back of the page which encodes all that information.
You're introducing essentially the same problem as before (the human cannot verify the vote actually being sent...unless that human understands bar codes).
If you absolutely have to have a printer in the process (aside from pork barrel politics to feed money like people to Diebold, I don't see the necessity), the printer should just print a dot by the candidate being voted for. The vote should never *ever* leave the voting booth, be it by electrons or paper, without being verifiable by the voter.
I've seen some visual artifacts -- Notepad in Win XP decides that it's off by a line -- when scrolling down. Happens occasionally. Didn't impress me very much.
I agree. I like LaTeX. But I'm going to be blunt here.
There is absolutely no way you are going to convince Average Joe to put in the time to learn LaTeX. Average Joe doesn't want to expend the effort to figure out how to stop Word from screwing with his capitalization -- he definitely is not going to break out a LaTeX manual.
LaTeX is great for CS types writing serious computer science papers. I've recently discovered DocBook and been using it for writing all my technical documentation -- it's easier to use, and much better than Word for extensive technical documentation. But honestly...you can't sell either to someone who is used to Word.
Darn, only responded to the second half of your post
Of course OOo is ten years behind. So is MS Office, which hardly has evolved at all during that time. Excel, Word and PowerPoint - they look and work more or less the same as they did ten, fifteen or almost twenty years ago.
Yeah. I read this one statement:
"The truth is though that Open Office.org is really designed to solve the problems that Microsoft focussed on 10 years ago when the model was an individual user working at their individual PC
Okay, so presumably Microsoft has solved problems related to multiple users working at multiple PCs.
Can multiple people simultaneously have open a Microsoft Office document, edit it, and have their changes automatically merged? Can they tie into a version-control system? No. It's something I've certainly wanted to do, and the most obvious needed feature for collaboration on a network (and something I can do just fine with text-based formats, like DocBook, HTML, and LaTeX), but Office can't do it.
I don't get it. What non-individual-user non-individual-computer problems has Microsoft solved since ten years ago?
In a world with hundreds of free Jabber servers, one free AIM server means dick.
Yes, but jabber.org goes down.
Also, just one day, someday, I'd like to be able to successfully transfer a file from gaim using *any* protocol to another user. I've tried and tried and never succeeded. I'm sure that somewhere, someone must have functioning file transfer, but I've never actually observed it with my own eyes. These days, I'm behind one of those damn NAT routers (though I have a SOCKS server running) and still can't manage it.
Are you sure about that? On my Fedora box, iptables comes up *before* network, and I can't imagine that Apple would do anything different.
Even if Apple managed to screw up on that, I don't believe that they'd be stupid enough to have their init process start up daemons before the firewall was running. So worst case you have nothing other than a non-responsive machine sitting there. Maybe you can get a ping or two back from it, but that's it.
So SSH was on and accessible? Dumb move. Like saying "I dare you to steal my jewelry from my bedroom -- oh, and my house is unlocked with the windows open."
Umm, wrong. SSH is designed to be usable in an untrusted environment, and is so used on many machines. That was hardly a stupid or unrealistic choice on the guy's part.
Apple's advertising is tightly coupled to Apple's sales. Apple begins an ad blitz for the iPod that has essentially no content but plenty of playing off of hipness, Apple sells tons of the things.
So while I'm sure that there are people who went out and made a carefully reasoned decision to get the best product, it isn't much of a stretch to say that the bulk of iPod owners purchased the product because it had a hip image.
It's not as if the iPod is the only product for which this happens, or that Apple is particularly evil and sneaky. Just about all luxury companies are in the business of attaching image to their products. Porsche does the whole thing on a much grander scale.
I'm not saying that you, personally, were somehow suckered. But it's absurd to say that buzz-generating ad campaigns don't work.
And this is doubly true for technical stuff, where most consumers don't have a clue what any of the specs mean. People's heuristics for judging product quality have quirks, and those quirks have been heavily exploited. For example, people tend to feel that heavier products are higher quality. As a result, you can stuff a steel plate into the base of your product and people will perceive the thing as being higher quality.
Most people have no idea what Firewire or DRM or Vorbis or anything in that vein means. But they know that the iPod is shiny and more hip than a CD player. Hence, the iPod sells.
I'm sure that some consumers actually went out and ran a number of MP3 players through their paces. But to claim that the bulk of iPod sales isn't driven by a hip image is just silly. It's a luxury item with a fancy exterior.
If you aren't looking for network functionality, there's a filesystem called ext3cow that lets you roll back to older versions of the contents of the filesystem.
Slashdot Mirror
See, the point is that this is *not* a random bit of malware.
If you can write a good VM that does a good, fast job of flawlessly emulating the host computer, you can win a lot more admiration, money, and make cooler stuff by doing things other than writing malware.
It'd be like, oh, a star NFL player running around mugging people. Okay, granted, he might make a good mugger, but he'd still be stupid to be mugging in the first place.
But I don't think it logically follows that patents are always bad
But it need not, for patents to be a net disadvantage.
After all, the patent system was created to reduce trade secrecy and and encourage invention, and it certainly does that, however imperfectly.
I'm not sure about that.
At the research facility where I worked before the current one that I'm working at, important inventions that really provided an edge over the competition was always kept a trade secret? Why? Because everyone in the industry cross-licensed with each other, because otherwise nobody could actually build anything. Patenting something was just giving it to the competition. Patents were reserved for less useful things.
The net effect was to keep anyone new from entering the market. Patents don't have to all be perfect -- if there are two hundred patents held by incumbents waiting to attack anyone wanting to enter the market, most of the patents can be thrown out and the newcomer is still going to have a hard time entering the market.
Welcome to the real world, just like making disparaging remarks about people believing in a god is currently ok, welcome and even illustrates that you must be one of the intelligent enlightened in current society.
Ever made a comment about "Kool-Aid drinkers" or cult members otherwise?
That is how a lot of us feel about the Christian right. Except said Kool-Aid drinkers don't hurt anyone but themselves, but the Christian right is out pushing anti-gay marriage amendments, trying to have the adopted children of gay couples taken away from them, trying to keep people (including non-Christians) from having the option of seeking abortion, harassing gays, trying to censor media (I think many on here are familiar with Jack Thompson's antics), keeping condoms out of the effort to stop the spread of AIDS, pushing creationism over evolution, and so forth.
I think it's less of a social requirement and more of a backlash. Christianity is well-organized as a political power -- it has hierarchy (well, a number of hierarchies), funding systems, lobbyists, media, and so forth. It has an effective system for organizing voting blocs. As a result, it does a good job of pushing political influence. The problem is that the less-organized people that are getting increasingly irritated with Christianity don't have much of a rallying flag (well, there's the Flying Spaghetti Monster) or much of an organization to speak for them. So you see a groundswell of irritation at places like public forums, where anyone can express their feelings and things are rather more democratic. Slashdot, which is composed disproportionately of well-educated and well-to-do individuals, leans even more away from Christianity.
I'd say that expressing irritation about Christianity is not done to win social approval. If this sort of thing were the case, person on Slashdot would vocally love Apple, love Linux, love anime, love Babylon 5, love perl, etc. And while each group has its adherents, nobody seems to be simply doing the social equivalent of karma whoring in all categories. That indicates to me that it probably isn't being done to win social approval.
Thank you. A good post or chunk of text makes you look at the world differently. This did that.
So?
Blizzard wasn't banning people from the game because they were gay. So that law has nothing to do with this.
I do not think that you are correct. Consider the code:
All persons within the jurisdiction of this state are free and equal, and no matter what their sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, medical condition, marital status, or sexual orientation are entitled to the full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, privileges, or services in all business establishments of every kind whatsoever.
Whether or not the service is provided or not is not the issue -- I think that you are making an incorrect assumption here. It is whether or not "full and equal" service is provided.
It's hardly a far stretch to consider that banning a guild that states that it is LGBT-friendly is not exactly providing "full and equal" service.
On the other hand, transsexuals specifically are *not* covered by this. A straight transsexual *can*, as my understanding goes, be discriminated against.
13 If any man take a wife, and go in unto her, and hate her,
14 and give occasions of speech against her, and bring up an evil name upon her, and say, I took this woman, and when I came to her, I found her not a maid:
15 then shall the father of the damsel, and her mother, take and bring forth the tokens of the damsel's virginity unto the elders of the city in the gate:
16 and the damsel's father shall say unto the elders, I gave my daughter unto this man to wife, and he hateth her;
17 and, lo, he hath given occasions of speech against her, saying, I found not thy daughter a maid; and yet these are the tokens of my daughter's virginity. And they shall spread the cloth before the elders of the city.
18 And the elders of that city shall take that man and chastise him;
19 and they shall amerce him in a hundred shekels of silver, and give them unto the father of the damsel, because he hath brought up an evil name upon a virgin of Israel: and she shall be his wife; he may not put her away all his days.
20 But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel:
21 then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die; because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her father's house: so shalt thou put evil away from among you.
Deut. 22, 13-21
The Bible is clearly at *least* as much trouble as, say, Carmegeddon, which you can theoretically play and avoid any killing at all.
Ok, last I checked (and correct me if I'm wrong), amidst all the commandments against sex outside of marriage, with the same gender, with barnyard animals, whatever... I don't recall any Thou Shalt Not's about dildos.
Nor did the Bible say "thou shalt not say 'shit' or 'piss' on public television".
Most of the people I know who really know what they're doing would say that they do "computer stuff". People who say "I am a consultant focussing on enterprise-class blah blah ... yadda yadda have a lower frequency of cluefulness".
Why would we deprive ourselves of one of the easiest things for a computer to do, and replace it with... what? Who counts your paper ballots?
Because if you don't send out your vote on a paper ballot, you have no way of verifying that the vote leaving the booth is the vote you intended.
Even if there is a backup ballot generated for use in a recount (and your vote goes out electronically), the paper ballot is only checked in the event of a recount.
Electronic voting systems are bad for the voter. The only people who benefit are (a) leaders who don't want to have a potentially contested victory and (b) whatever company has enough lobbyists to get them the lucrative contracts and
I don't even think that the machines should have a "paperless" option at all. It just means that the voter can't verify the primary method of sending out his vote.
The reason is because in the U.S. there are a large number of (a) idiots and (b) immigrants who unfailingly spoil paper ballots in mind-blowing numbers by overvoting, making ambiguous marks, and numerous other creative modes of spoilage.
Or the GOP just doesn't like having a President that's a lame duck because his win is within the margin of contestable votes.
I suspect that the real underlying goal (which nobody wants to admit to) is to have *binary* output coming out of the voting booth. It doesn't really matter whether it's A or B, just that it *can't* have any possibility of being counted as anything other than A or B.
From the voter's standpoint, this is a load of horseshit and doesn't matter to him. It doesn't do anything to increase the speed or accuracy of the election, and it feeds lots of money to people like Diebold.
The printout includes a brief listing of who was voted for in each election in plain text so the voter can verify, and there is a bar code on the back of the page which encodes all that information.
You're introducing essentially the same problem as before (the human cannot verify the vote actually being sent...unless that human understands bar codes).
If you absolutely have to have a printer in the process (aside from pork barrel politics to feed money like people to Diebold, I don't see the necessity), the printer should just print a dot by the candidate being voted for. The vote should never *ever* leave the voting booth, be it by electrons or paper, without being verifiable by the voter.
I've noticed a significant rise in anti-macosx articles recently. To the point where I'm beginning to believe that it is staged.
So either (a) there is a secret conspiracy out to overthrow Apple or (b) Slashdot likes controversial articles that generate a large comment count.
I've seen some visual artifacts -- Notepad in Win XP decides that it's off by a line -- when scrolling down. Happens occasionally. Didn't impress me very much.
I agree. I like LaTeX. But I'm going to be blunt here.
There is absolutely no way you are going to convince Average Joe to put in the time to learn LaTeX. Average Joe doesn't want to expend the effort to figure out how to stop Word from screwing with his capitalization -- he definitely is not going to break out a LaTeX manual.
LaTeX is great for CS types writing serious computer science papers. I've recently discovered DocBook and been using it for writing all my technical documentation -- it's easier to use, and much better than Word for extensive technical documentation. But honestly...you can't sell either to someone who is used to Word.
Darn, only responded to the second half of your post
Of course OOo is ten years behind. So is MS Office, which hardly has evolved at all during that time. Excel, Word and PowerPoint - they look and work more or less the same as they did ten, fifteen or almost twenty years ago.
Yeah. I read this one statement:
"The truth is though that Open Office.org is really designed to solve the problems that Microsoft focussed on 10 years ago when the model was an individual user working at their individual PC
Okay, so presumably Microsoft has solved problems related to multiple users working at multiple PCs.
Can multiple people simultaneously have open a Microsoft Office document, edit it, and have their changes automatically merged? Can they tie into a version-control system? No. It's something I've certainly wanted to do, and the most obvious needed feature for collaboration on a network (and something I can do just fine with text-based formats, like DocBook, HTML, and LaTeX), but Office can't do it.
I don't get it. What non-individual-user non-individual-computer problems has Microsoft solved since ten years ago?
A Rich Neighbor Named Xerox
"When Steve Jobs recruited Microsoft to be the first third party applications software developer for the Macintosh..."
OTR is great. Multi-protocol, easy-to-use, widely-supported end-to-end encryption. If you aren't using it under gaim, you should be.
For Fedora users, you want the gaim-otr package, available in Fedora Extras.
In a world with hundreds of free Jabber servers, one free AIM server means dick.
Yes, but jabber.org goes down.
Also, just one day, someday, I'd like to be able to successfully transfer a file from gaim using *any* protocol to another user. I've tried and tried and never succeeded. I'm sure that somewhere, someone must have functioning file transfer, but I've never actually observed it with my own eyes. These days, I'm behind one of those damn NAT routers (though I have a SOCKS server running) and still can't manage it.
Handing out shell accounts on a desktop os?
Yes, I expect a general purpose Unix box to have reasonable local security, regardless of whether or not it has a GUI running or not.
Are you sure about that? On my Fedora box, iptables comes up *before* network, and I can't imagine that Apple would do anything different.
Even if Apple managed to screw up on that, I don't believe that they'd be stupid enough to have their init process start up daemons before the firewall was running. So worst case you have nothing other than a non-responsive machine sitting there. Maybe you can get a ping or two back from it, but that's it.
So SSH was on and accessible? Dumb move. Like saying "I dare you to steal my jewelry from my bedroom -- oh, and my house is unlocked with the windows open."
Umm, wrong. SSH is designed to be usable in an untrusted environment, and is so used on many machines. That was hardly a stupid or unrealistic choice on the guy's part.
Except when they're not...
Apple's advertising is tightly coupled to Apple's sales. Apple begins an ad blitz for the iPod that has essentially no content but plenty of playing off of hipness, Apple sells tons of the things.
So while I'm sure that there are people who went out and made a carefully reasoned decision to get the best product, it isn't much of a stretch to say that the bulk of iPod owners purchased the product because it had a hip image.
It's not as if the iPod is the only product for which this happens, or that Apple is particularly evil and sneaky. Just about all luxury companies are in the business of attaching image to their products. Porsche does the whole thing on a much grander scale.
I'm not saying that you, personally, were somehow suckered. But it's absurd to say that buzz-generating ad campaigns don't work.
And this is doubly true for technical stuff, where most consumers don't have a clue what any of the specs mean. People's heuristics for judging product quality have quirks, and those quirks have been heavily exploited. For example, people tend to feel that heavier products are higher quality. As a result, you can stuff a steel plate into the base of your product and people will perceive the thing as being higher quality.
Most people have no idea what Firewire or DRM or Vorbis or anything in that vein means. But they know that the iPod is shiny and more hip than a CD player. Hence, the iPod sells.
I'm sure that some consumers actually went out and ran a number of MP3 players through their paces. But to claim that the bulk of iPod sales isn't driven by a hip image is just silly. It's a luxury item with a fancy exterior.
Apparently, it is also now okay to use the word, "fact" to mean "opinion."
You omitted an "I think" in that sentence.
If you aren't looking for network functionality, there's a filesystem called ext3cow that lets you roll back to older versions of the contents of the filesystem.