You sir, fail to grasp the concept of momentum. Millions of devices out there already using it. It's a de-facto standard. You really think it's because FAT is so good and we just haven't come up with something better?
They are not stupid, nor dillusional. He knows what he is saying is complete bullshit, but you know what? It was still a 'smart' thing to say. Just because the slashdot community can see it for the crap it is, doesn't mean other people will. They are painting a rose-colored picture for themselves and trying to make the competition look like the bad one. It's always happened in any industry, and will continue to happen for as long as capitalism exists.
Look at any other marketing, and there is bullshit just seeping from it. Our demographic usually sees through it, ESPECIALLY in the technology sector. So, get over yourself. He wasn't saying that to you, or to us. He was saying it to our parents and our friends who don't know the history and the actual truth. The people who can't find an on switch. The person who wants one of 'those neat pocket phone thingies' and doesn't know a Zune from an iPhone. And when he goes to a store, maybe he remembers something 'some really smart man' was saying about which is better. The Windows one is better right? It works with my PC? Ok, I want that one!
It's how it's always been, how it always will be. You can't educate the entire market to see through the bullshit. Most people don't know the first thing about computers, don't want to know, and shouldn't have to know. Stop taking the crap Ballmer says as technical discussion, and when he talks, imagine he's like a commercial. It makes it much easier to handle, ya know?
If the liberals of this country made it possible for Islam to spread and then take over the USA, then watch all of their progress evaporate as women are disenfranchised, then kicked out of their jobs, abortion is banned, homosexuals are stoned, writers are jailed, directors shot, dancers raped, just like, well, every other country where Islam has taken over.
Wow.. You've been listening to wayyyyyy too much Hannity.
Let's look at the very first thing you said: If the liberals of this country made it possible for Islam to spread and then take over the USA...
So many things wrong with just that first part. First of all you are assuming that's the 'liberal agenda.' Which, it isn't. That's complete hyperbole. Last time I checked, I haven't heard of any liberal memos being passed around indicating a goal of spreading Islam, or any other religion for that matter. If anything, you could say that some liberals would prefer religion was a lesser topic. Somehow Hannity & Friends take that to mean they want Islamic Terrorists running the government. Learn to think rationally for yourself.
Second of all, the 'take over' bit implies that the USA can be taken over by a religion. This could only be true if you tie your religion (Christianity, I assume) directly to your government. If you define the USA as a Christian entity, then I suppose more Islamic government officials could be defined as 'taking over.' You are mixing religion and government, which is actually expressly seperated by our founders.
As for the rest of your drivel, you are defining a religion, Islam, by the worst of the acts performed by people claiming to follow Islam. That would be a lot like me say... defining Christianity as GodHatesFags.com.
Finally, your signature, 'I prefer to buy Made In USA.' Why not be a real man and refuse to buy anything at all from outside the US and see how far that gets you? Even if you did, what exactly do you think would happen if the US stopped trading or interacting with other nations completely? I'll tell you what would happen... no one would bother loaning us any more money, or trading us oil, etc, etc.
The fact is as technology increases we are becoming more and more a global people. We're no where near that yet, look at most of Africa... But still, that's the way it's always trended, and will continue to trend. And it's healthy to be introspective and realize that across the entire earth, the USA, especially the neo conservatives, are very much in the global minority.
What would stop a US company from selling cheap VPN tunnels to end users down under?
Not a damn thing. Which is one of the primary reasons why this whole thing is such a stupid pointless waste of time and money.
Saying it won't do anything is missing the point, and selling out your own beliefs. It's the inverse of 'If you have nothing to hide, being searched shouldn't bother you.
You are correct. The people who want to get through it will always be able to. But that does not in ANY way make it a pointless waste. I will explain...
There will be new laws. Now if you access any blocked content, you broke a law about circumventing government filters. Just because you can still do something even if it's illegal, doesn't mean it's ok for it to be illegal.
Secondly, it may be easy for YOU to get around the filters, but your average person doesn't have a clue. And since selling services to get around it will be illegal, they won't be able to buy it either. They'll have to find it underground, which implies they even know that an underground exists in the first place, or how to get there for that matter. They are effectively controlled. And that's a bad thing.
Saying it's pointless is really shortsighted. You fail to understand the full ramifications of an action like this. The fact you can easily get around it has absolutely nothing to do with the issue itself. At best, it's stupid thinking. At worst, it's pure selfishness. (As long as YOU can still access the internet, you don't care)
Given that pretty much anybody can get a license (including some idiots that should never be a passenger in a car, much less the driver), I'm not entirely certain that this is the best analogy.
Licensing isn't about stopping someone before they do something bad. It would be nice if it did, but there's no test that will reliably predict future behavior in every situation. It's about being able to control an activity. Licenses can be revoked when you screw up, thus hopefully creating a sense of responsibility because you don't want to have your license taken away. The very act of licensing something makes it something that can be monitored and taken away. That was the point I was trying to make. Well, I mean... that was my Devil's Advocate point, that if we licenses computer that would be a bad thing.
Computer to 'Some simple concept' analogies are stupid as hell. Get over your elitism. Most people don't understand the first thing about computers, and they don't have to. Just like most people use a TV, VCR, whatever, without any clue how it works, they just use it to play movies. Blinking 12:00.
Your analogy fails because leaving a gun out is gross negligence. It's a dangerous thing, and that's fairly obvious. A computer isn't. I suppose an argument could be made that computers are dangerous. It would be quite a stretch though. In that case there should be mandatory licensing to operate one, you know... like a car. But there isn't. So, either make the argument that computers are dangerous and should be controlled (and make sure you understand the actual ramifications of that argument), or stfu and realize that no, most people don't understand Computer Security or why it's important, and they never will.
And then, as an expert in the field, learn that you aren't smarter than mom and dad using their computer, you just have a specialized skill set. Most nerd kids like prolly half the slashdot crowd are or were.. started out with computers coming naturally to them. It's easy to assume then that it shoudl come naturally to everyone. And when you see it doesn't, your first reaction is that something is broken in them. After that nerd grows up a bit in the world, that person learns that no... they aren't idiots. We just have an aptitude for something that others don't. And that doesn't make them dumb. They probably have skills we don't. Say... socializing for example. So my guess is your (and all those who always come to slashdot posting the same song and dance) maturity level hasn't quite evolved yet.
And to not be elitist myself... I can admit I was once the same way. I grew out of it, as will you.:)
People should stop saying TCP forces packets to arrive. It doesn't, really. To a naive app developer it may appear that way, but the truth is the IP transport is unreliable. TCP packets may be dropped just like UDP packets. TCP just hides the resends and ACKs and all those goodies. If people understood the layering better instead of being fed half truths they'd be smarter. Not saying you are wrong and 'calling you out' or anything, but I think we should be concise in our language when describing how this stuff works.
It's very easy to suddenly whip out the discrimination card, but it's perfectly valid in this case to prefer older applicants who have more experience in the job. Obviously, if there is a preference for older applicants even if they don't have more experience, something is up, but it doesn't sound like that's the case. (The original poster wasn't entirely clear about this, I'll accept).
No, it's not acceptable to prefer older canidates. It's acceptable to prefer more EXPERIENCED canidates. Assuming age is proportional to experience or skill is exactly why it's called age discrimination. If you want a tangible argument about whether you should be able to ask or decide on age or not... then bring up something that actually has to do with age. Such as retirement or chances of dying before the project ends.
I'm not even a fan of hiring based on experience or not. A person can have a resume chock full of experience, but still be a moron. Are you smart? Can you adapt? Can you learn? Can you get the job done? That seems to me to be the only thing you need to know.
My disclaimer is that I'm 28 years old. I started working as a professional programmer around 18. Before that I grew up working on and playing with computers, it's my passion, and I'm good at it. Better than quite a few people with amazingly good looking resumes, because I love it.
Wow, this post is great. Easy pickings while I'm bored at work. You OSS Zealots make it too easy.
This isn't really quite as dilberty as the poster indicates. This is a symptom of a more general problem, which is that non-OSS software almost always sucks, because the economics dictate that it has to suck.
First of all, let me throw one big [citation needed] on there. Your whole argument starts with the fact closed source sucks because it's closed source, and open source doesn't because it isn't. You hint at something about economics, but that looks like hand waving to me. With an opening argument like this, the rest of your post is surely going to be just as fun...
If it was OSS, users could install it on their machines, try it out for a while, and decide whether it was any good or not.
Closed software does not automatically mean you cannot try before buying. Quite a few closed source applications have free trials or even free versions. And there are surely Open Source products that are not free. For example non-commercial clauses. I think you are making the mistake of confusing Open Source with free. Which actually makes you a fairly uneducated OSS Zealot to boot.
(Note that this still works fine for commercial OSS. E.g., people can try Ubuntu before deciding whether to deploy it widely in their organization and then pay Canonical for support.)
Again, you are mixing up OSS with free. One could imagine Windows having a free trial. You should think about if yer really talking about OSS or cost.
If it's not OSS, you don't typically have any way of knowing whether it's good or not. Sure, you could read reviews, talk to friends, etc. But that's sort of like deciding to buy a car without having a chance to test-drive it, just based on your buddy saying he has one and he likes it.
So wait a minute. More hand waving here. How exactly do you know if software is good or not by the virtue of it being OSS? There's the tired of argument of 'Well you can read the source code!' Yeah right. How did you decide FireFox was good? Did you read all the source code? And even if you are crazy enough to do that, who else is? No, you probably heard about it word of mouth, just like you would with closed source software. I think again what you meant is, 'If it's FREE you can try it without paying for it.' However, see above.
The worst piece of non-OSS software I ever owned was Adobe PageMaker 6.5, but the only way I found out how bad it was was by writing a book using it, and finding out after I'd gotten pretty far into the project that PageMaker was gradually starting to corrupt my files, and was also crashing often enough to cause me real problems. It would crash one day, and I'd lose my file. So then I'd open the file again to page 93, which I'd been working on, and it would crash again because page 93 was corrupted. So then I'd get the file back off of backup. But then I'd click to page 87, and it would crash again. So the backup was no use either, because it was corrupted on page 87. In this example, there's absolutely no way I could have tested the software sufficiently before buying it to find out that I was going to have these horrendous problems.
So how long should a free trial be? I think what you want, again.. is free software. You -never- want to pay for it. Maybe you'll make a donation later after you've used it a few years. Maybe. And as for the long sob story about losing your data, if it's closed or open source, could have the same bugs, and still lose your book. I don't see how this is, again, any sort of argument for OSS.
Because users usually can't evaluate the quality of non-OSS software very effectively, there is absolutely no incentive for non-OSS software houses to work on quality.
Wow. I'll have to remember that. As long as I keep my code closed, I can write crap and people will buy it. Oh
The LHC produces 15 Petabytes of data each year, analyzed at hundreds of centres around the world. Are you going to suggest (as some genius did below) that they copy the data to 15,000 x 1Tb drives, and then fedex it around the world?
Some math for 15,000 HDs shipped overnight: 15PB / 24hr == 182.04 GB/s == 1456.25 Gb/s
Versus transmitting it at 10 Gb/s: 10 Gb/sec == 1.25 GB/sec == 4.395 TB/hour == 37.59 PB/year == 15 PB / 145.6 days
So, by fedexing 15,000 drives you are getting better bandwidth by a factor of 146 or so. A difference of 'tomorrow' versus 'about 4 months.' Of course, it's probably much more expensive. But don't ever underestimate the bandwidth of shipping hard drives.
"Athiesm" only refers to disbelief in the Christian God - believe it or not, an Athiest can still be a very spiritual person.
Uhh, where do you get that, exactly? Have you looked up the word atheist in the dictionary? And it's spelled Atheist. Perhaps you were pointing that out by how you quoted your parent.
Perhaps you are confused with agnosticism. Atheists do not believe in any deity, Christian or otherwise. An agnostic believes it is unknown, undefined. Maybe even believes there's 'something' out there, but doesn't know what, and so rejects organized religion.
To claim Atheism is tied specifically to Christianity... is actually a bit offensive. Perhaps like saying Christianity is defined as simply denial of pagan beliefs.
The goal is figuring out who to blow up. You see, we don't know who our enemy is anymore. They don't wear uniforms, so everyone is a potential enemy. So we need to read their minds to identify whether to blow them up or not. That's the goal.
Times like these are when the red cross is most appreciated. They will likely soon be flying in C-130's full of porn and lol-cats jpegs. 'Round the clock flights will continue until the Georgian internet connections can be restored.
(additionally, the traceroutes could also fail because the routers and computers have been exploded by the russians with bombs from airplanes. this would be a worrying escalation of cyberwarfare).
IT folk as military targets... now that's something.
"Caucasian-pride-ridden state in the southern U.S."
-----So, Black Pride, Latino Pride, and Asian Pride are O.K., but Caucasian Pride is not?
I wonder why that was modded flamebait. It never has made sense to me, Black Pride and all that jazz. I thought we were supposed to be blind to race? Why is being proud of being a race, any race.. minority or majority.. a good thing?
Yes, because the TSA *adding* options to the security check-in process is exactly equivalent to slavery. Idiot.
I know this might be difficult for you, to think this deeply... but it wasn't a parallelism to slavery, it was a parallelism to being an Uncle Tom. Which is to say, you are selling out. You are bought and paid for. You are one of the sheep that we call citizens nowadays. You have accepted the illusion of security, which is what most of these posts are decrying. And you don't 'get it.' Which is not only personally sad, but infuriating. By not standing up for you liberties, by accepting increased illegal searches as needed and making sense, you are part of the problem. Government has no power we do not give them, and you ask 'What is the big deal?' when you give them yours. Well, that affects MY liberty, and so I have to say, resoundingly, and absolutely, Fuck You. You're one of those morons that government polls 'Do you mind increased wait times and invasive illegal searching for your protection?' You, and all your sheep friends say you don't mind, you prefer 'security' over your inalienable rights, and the rest of us suffer with the result. And now we're supposed to be happy they are 'giving' us something?
So no, I'm not comparing to slavery. I'm calling you a sellout of liberty. I'm calling you an Uncle Tom. I'm calling you a 'House N*gger.' And you are. And it's sad you don't see that. And it pisses me off beccause it affects -my- rights.
Not sure I see what's the big deal. You can still put your laptop on the conveyor belt like always, or you can now put it on the conveyor belt in a special bag. They are adding an option, not taking one away. AND its an OPTION for fuck's sake! Not mandatory.
So you people are bitching now because we have 2 options at the security line instead of one? How does that make any sense at all?
Let me guess: pointing out the stupidity of a slashdotter: -1 Troll.
Yessa Massa TSA, thank you sir. This lil citizen be sooo happy get dis opportunity to go threw Massa's security fastah!
Issa good citizen, yessir I is. No trouble here, sir, I be good for gov'met!
For example, if I was sued for downloading music, I should be sued at max for $5 per song, because you can usually find that song for $.99 somewhere online.
While I agree with the spirit of what you are saying, you really need to pay attention or educate yourself. They are not suing people for downloading music. They are suing people for uploading/distributing music.
It's important to make this distinction, because they are not stupid. They realize even a dumb person can deduce that downloading a song isn't a major crime. So they attack the uploaders, calling it distribution, and making people look like they cause major damage. And that makes 'sense' to your layman.
So, if you want to fight it, then understand the terms of the fight. You trying to shout that downloading a song shouldn't be a major crime is obvious to you, AND to them. But is completely ignorant of what and where the actual fight is. And the battleground of this fight is media distribution, not acquiring it.
There was that big stink about the pedophile that swirled his face. Apparently they went to huge lengths to capture the guy. But in those pictures, the young boys and girls? Not swirled, I assume. Did they try to track them down and rescue them? No... you hear nothing about that.
Punishing an 'evil pedophile' is much more satisfying than rescuing an abused child. We'd rather lash out with our faux moral outrage, though we forget about the guy as soon as we move on to the next news story. I suppose another part of it is they were taiwanese or whatever, so what the fuck do we care, amirite?
It's really a shame that the anti-violent game lobby has someone like JT as a de-facto spokesman.
Ultimately - even if you disagree - they have a reasonable position. i.e. it's generally bad for kids to play violent games. and all reasonable positions should be considered. Having someone who goes off at wild tangents, blames everything on games whether there's any evidence or not and pisses off the entire legal system is not really a good person to have on your side.
We'll have to agree to disagree that it's a reasonable position. I think it's unreasonable to make that jump that it's 'bad.' Further, even if I agreed, it's not up to the government to decide this, it's up to the parents and families and individuals. The Video Game Industry, afaik, has always been reasonably responsible in rating their games, and parents can decide if thier kids can play M-rated games or not. I really don't understand the basis for the 'anti' argument at all. Don't like it, don't play it, and don't let your kids play it.
Though I think sheltering your kids is far more harmful to their development than letting them play M-rated games, you don't see me insisting we pass laws saying you should let your kids play whatever games they want to. It's not my business to tell you how to raise your kids.
Yes! We need this. And we should post all their email addresses. And we should email them. Perhaps I'll go to the trouble of finding all the email addresses, or better... US Mail addresses.
Mitch Bainwol Recording Industry Association of America Victoria Bassetti EMI Recorded Music Jason Flom Virgin Records America Bill Hearn EMI Christian Music Group Deirdre McDonald SonyBMG Joe Galante SonyBMG Kevin Kelleher SonyBMG Rob Stringer SonyBMG Jeff Harleston Geffen Records Steve Bartels Island Records Lawrence Kenswil Universal Music Group Mel Lewinter Universal Music Group Zach Horowitz Universal Music Group Craig Kallman The Atlantic Group Tom Whalley Warner Bros Records Michael Fleisher Warner Music Group Kevin Liles Warner Music Group Bob Cavallo Buena Vista Music Glen Barros Concord Records Mike Curb Curb Records Michael Koch Koch Entertainment Tom Silverman Tommy Boy Entertainment Jose Behar Univision Alan Meltzer Wind Up Records
Paramount Pictures Corporation; Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc.; Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation; Universal City Studios LLLP; Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures; and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
OK, every once in a while I see these kinds of posts. I really don't know what to say. I've been using Linux for more then 10 years. I've installed it on pc's from 386's to modern multicore servers with 4x cpus. I've got an office full of workstations running Kubuntu that are used every day, some 24x7x365. In all these years, and the hundreds of pc's I've installed some version of Linux on, I have NEVER, EVER seen ANYTHING like what this and some other posts mention. I've seen the install crap out in the middle due to a bad cd burn. I've seen incompatible hardware. I've seen qwerks with some chipsets that required a custom boot parameter to work. But this wholesale failure I have never seen. Ever. Linux fan boy troll.
Any of the problems you mentioned are 'wholesale failure' to your average computer user. Bill Gates ain't fucking stupid. He could get Movie Maker to work if he spent more time on it. His point was that it crossed that threshold where it became not worth the effort anymore. The problems you've described with Linux are the same. Just because you're willing to work through them on Linux, and not willing to work through them on Windows doesn't make Linux better.
The ignorance of Windows vs. Linux people astounds me. Are you people 13 years old? You -AND- the morons who modded you up. Interesting my ass.
Why do so many people go on about this 'Duh, just go to court and win' crap? As said by everyone else here, even going to court, and winning, can be a greater personal cost than settling.
When you make 25k/year, and barely getting by, and this happens to you.. you are screwed either way.
You've obviously never been presented with legal threats by big corporation X. I have. It's not fun. Right and wrong don't matter anymore, it's about preserving your security.
Donate to the EFF, they help people in situations like this, where a person left alone will have to choose what is best for them and their family, regardless of altruistic right and wrong.
This argument is lame, and keeps coming up. Technology X that makes our lives easier will make us stupid. It's usually in my experience attributed to the internet, or new programming languages like C# or Java or what have you. And it's propogated by the same people who go on and on about 'Back in MY day, we had to walk uphill in the snow with punchcards.' If I had a dime for every time I heard the story of the guy who dropped his stack of punchcards and now they were all out of order... I'd be rich.
That doesn't make you leet or hardcore. Things being easier now doesn't make us less intelligent. I'm of the generation where I never had to learn assembly. I started with higher level languages and worked backwards. The great people still learn the necassary low level tech, even if they didn't start there. I can read and understand the basics of assembly. I probably couldn't write an ASM program, but I know what is happening with the compiler, and what constructs it compiles my code in to.
The same applies to any other thing, like Google. Just because we have Google doesn't mean people will be incapable of traditional research. The intelligent people will still know how. People need to get over themselves and this elitist attitude of 'back in my day ____, and so I'm smarter than this new generation.'
Slashdot Mirror
You sir, fail to grasp the concept of momentum. Millions of devices out there already using it. It's a de-facto standard. You really think it's because FAT is so good and we just haven't come up with something better?
They are not stupid, nor dillusional. He knows what he is saying is complete bullshit, but you know what? It was still a 'smart' thing to say. Just because the slashdot community can see it for the crap it is, doesn't mean other people will. They are painting a rose-colored picture for themselves and trying to make the competition look like the bad one. It's always happened in any industry, and will continue to happen for as long as capitalism exists.
Look at any other marketing, and there is bullshit just seeping from it. Our demographic usually sees through it, ESPECIALLY in the technology sector. So, get over yourself. He wasn't saying that to you, or to us. He was saying it to our parents and our friends who don't know the history and the actual truth. The people who can't find an on switch. The person who wants one of 'those neat pocket phone thingies' and doesn't know a Zune from an iPhone. And when he goes to a store, maybe he remembers something 'some really smart man' was saying about which is better. The Windows one is better right? It works with my PC? Ok, I want that one!
It's how it's always been, how it always will be. You can't educate the entire market to see through the bullshit. Most people don't know the first thing about computers, don't want to know, and shouldn't have to know. Stop taking the crap Ballmer says as technical discussion, and when he talks, imagine he's like a commercial. It makes it much easier to handle, ya know?
If the liberals of this country made it possible for Islam to spread and then take over the USA, then watch all of their progress evaporate as women are disenfranchised, then kicked out of their jobs, abortion is banned, homosexuals are stoned, writers are jailed, directors shot, dancers raped, just like, well, every other country where Islam has taken over.
Wow.. You've been listening to wayyyyyy too much Hannity.
Let's look at the very first thing you said: If the liberals of this country made it possible for Islam to spread and then take over the USA...
So many things wrong with just that first part. First of all you are assuming that's the 'liberal agenda.' Which, it isn't. That's complete hyperbole. Last time I checked, I haven't heard of any liberal memos being passed around indicating a goal of spreading Islam, or any other religion for that matter. If anything, you could say that some liberals would prefer religion was a lesser topic. Somehow Hannity & Friends take that to mean they want Islamic Terrorists running the government. Learn to think rationally for yourself.
Second of all, the 'take over' bit implies that the USA can be taken over by a religion. This could only be true if you tie your religion (Christianity, I assume) directly to your government. If you define the USA as a Christian entity, then I suppose more Islamic government officials could be defined as 'taking over.' You are mixing religion and government, which is actually expressly seperated by our founders.
As for the rest of your drivel, you are defining a religion, Islam, by the worst of the acts performed by people claiming to follow Islam. That would be a lot like me say... defining Christianity as GodHatesFags.com.
Finally, your signature, 'I prefer to buy Made In USA.' Why not be a real man and refuse to buy anything at all from outside the US and see how far that gets you? Even if you did, what exactly do you think would happen if the US stopped trading or interacting with other nations completely? I'll tell you what would happen... no one would bother loaning us any more money, or trading us oil, etc, etc.
The fact is as technology increases we are becoming more and more a global people. We're no where near that yet, look at most of Africa... But still, that's the way it's always trended, and will continue to trend. And it's healthy to be introspective and realize that across the entire earth, the USA, especially the neo conservatives, are very much in the global minority.
What would stop a US company from selling cheap VPN tunnels to end users down under?
Not a damn thing. Which is one of the primary reasons why this whole thing is such a stupid pointless waste of time and money.
Saying it won't do anything is missing the point, and selling out your own beliefs. It's the inverse of 'If you have nothing to hide, being searched shouldn't bother you.
You are correct. The people who want to get through it will always be able to. But that does not in ANY way make it a pointless waste. I will explain...
There will be new laws. Now if you access any blocked content, you broke a law about circumventing government filters. Just because you can still do something even if it's illegal, doesn't mean it's ok for it to be illegal.
Secondly, it may be easy for YOU to get around the filters, but your average person doesn't have a clue. And since selling services to get around it will be illegal, they won't be able to buy it either. They'll have to find it underground, which implies they even know that an underground exists in the first place, or how to get there for that matter. They are effectively controlled. And that's a bad thing.
Saying it's pointless is really shortsighted. You fail to understand the full ramifications of an action like this. The fact you can easily get around it has absolutely nothing to do with the issue itself. At best, it's stupid thinking. At worst, it's pure selfishness. (As long as YOU can still access the internet, you don't care)
Given that pretty much anybody can get a license (including some idiots that should never be a passenger in a car, much less the driver), I'm not entirely certain that this is the best analogy.
Licensing isn't about stopping someone before they do something bad. It would be nice if it did, but there's no test that will reliably predict future behavior in every situation. It's about being able to control an activity. Licenses can be revoked when you screw up, thus hopefully creating a sense of responsibility because you don't want to have your license taken away. The very act of licensing something makes it something that can be monitored and taken away. That was the point I was trying to make. Well, I mean... that was my Devil's Advocate point, that if we licenses computer that would be a bad thing.
Computer to 'Some simple concept' analogies are stupid as hell. Get over your elitism. Most people don't understand the first thing about computers, and they don't have to. Just like most people use a TV, VCR, whatever, without any clue how it works, they just use it to play movies. Blinking 12:00.
Your analogy fails because leaving a gun out is gross negligence. It's a dangerous thing, and that's fairly obvious. A computer isn't. I suppose an argument could be made that computers are dangerous. It would be quite a stretch though. In that case there should be mandatory licensing to operate one, you know... like a car. But there isn't. So, either make the argument that computers are dangerous and should be controlled (and make sure you understand the actual ramifications of that argument), or stfu and realize that no, most people don't understand Computer Security or why it's important, and they never will.
And then, as an expert in the field, learn that you aren't smarter than mom and dad using their computer, you just have a specialized skill set. Most nerd kids like prolly half the slashdot crowd are or were.. started out with computers coming naturally to them. It's easy to assume then that it shoudl come naturally to everyone. And when you see it doesn't, your first reaction is that something is broken in them. After that nerd grows up a bit in the world, that person learns that no... they aren't idiots. We just have an aptitude for something that others don't. And that doesn't make them dumb. They probably have skills we don't. Say... socializing for example. So my guess is your (and all those who always come to slashdot posting the same song and dance) maturity level hasn't quite evolved yet.
And to not be elitist myself... I can admit I was once the same way. I grew out of it, as will you. :)
People should stop saying TCP forces packets to arrive. It doesn't, really. To a naive app developer it may appear that way, but the truth is the IP transport is unreliable. TCP packets may be dropped just like UDP packets. TCP just hides the resends and ACKs and all those goodies. If people understood the layering better instead of being fed half truths they'd be smarter. Not saying you are wrong and 'calling you out' or anything, but I think we should be concise in our language when describing how this stuff works.
It's very easy to suddenly whip out the discrimination card, but it's perfectly valid in this case to prefer older applicants who have more experience in the job. Obviously, if there is a preference for older applicants even if they don't have more experience, something is up, but it doesn't sound like that's the case. (The original poster wasn't entirely clear about this, I'll accept).
No, it's not acceptable to prefer older canidates. It's acceptable to prefer more EXPERIENCED canidates. Assuming age is proportional to experience or skill is exactly why it's called age discrimination. If you want a tangible argument about whether you should be able to ask or decide on age or not... then bring up something that actually has to do with age. Such as retirement or chances of dying before the project ends.
I'm not even a fan of hiring based on experience or not. A person can have a resume chock full of experience, but still be a moron. Are you smart? Can you adapt? Can you learn? Can you get the job done? That seems to me to be the only thing you need to know.
My disclaimer is that I'm 28 years old. I started working as a professional programmer around 18. Before that I grew up working on and playing with computers, it's my passion, and I'm good at it. Better than quite a few people with amazingly good looking resumes, because I love it.
This isn't really quite as dilberty as the poster indicates. This is a symptom of a more general problem, which is that non-OSS software almost always sucks, because the economics dictate that it has to suck.
First of all, let me throw one big [citation needed] on there. Your whole argument starts with the fact closed source sucks because it's closed source, and open source doesn't because it isn't. You hint at something about economics, but that looks like hand waving to me. With an opening argument like this, the rest of your post is surely going to be just as fun...
If it was OSS, users could install it on their machines, try it out for a while, and decide whether it was any good or not.
Closed software does not automatically mean you cannot try before buying. Quite a few closed source applications have free trials or even free versions. And there are surely Open Source products that are not free. For example non-commercial clauses. I think you are making the mistake of confusing Open Source with free. Which actually makes you a fairly uneducated OSS Zealot to boot.
(Note that this still works fine for commercial OSS. E.g., people can try Ubuntu before deciding whether to deploy it widely in their organization and then pay Canonical for support.)
Again, you are mixing up OSS with free. One could imagine Windows having a free trial. You should think about if yer really talking about OSS or cost.
If it's not OSS, you don't typically have any way of knowing whether it's good or not. Sure, you could read reviews, talk to friends, etc. But that's sort of like deciding to buy a car without having a chance to test-drive it, just based on your buddy saying he has one and he likes it.
So wait a minute. More hand waving here. How exactly do you know if software is good or not by the virtue of it being OSS? There's the tired of argument of 'Well you can read the source code!' Yeah right. How did you decide FireFox was good? Did you read all the source code? And even if you are crazy enough to do that, who else is? No, you probably heard about it word of mouth, just like you would with closed source software. I think again what you meant is, 'If it's FREE you can try it without paying for it.' However, see above.
The worst piece of non-OSS software I ever owned was Adobe PageMaker 6.5, but the only way I found out how bad it was was by writing a book using it, and finding out after I'd gotten pretty far into the project that PageMaker was gradually starting to corrupt my files, and was also crashing often enough to cause me real problems. It would crash one day, and I'd lose my file. So then I'd open the file again to page 93, which I'd been working on, and it would crash again because page 93 was corrupted. So then I'd get the file back off of backup. But then I'd click to page 87, and it would crash again. So the backup was no use either, because it was corrupted on page 87. In this example, there's absolutely no way I could have tested the software sufficiently before buying it to find out that I was going to have these horrendous problems.
So how long should a free trial be? I think what you want, again.. is free software. You -never- want to pay for it. Maybe you'll make a donation later after you've used it a few years. Maybe. And as for the long sob story about losing your data, if it's closed or open source, could have the same bugs, and still lose your book. I don't see how this is, again, any sort of argument for OSS.
Because users usually can't evaluate the quality of non-OSS software very effectively, there is absolutely no incentive for non-OSS software houses to work on quality.
Wow. I'll have to remember that. As long as I keep my code closed, I can write crap and people will buy it. Oh
The LHC produces 15 Petabytes of data each year, analyzed at hundreds of centres around the world. Are you going to suggest (as some genius did below) that they copy the data to 15,000 x 1Tb drives, and then fedex it around the world?
Some math for 15,000 HDs shipped overnight:
15PB / 24hr == 182.04 GB/s == 1456.25 Gb/s
Versus transmitting it at 10 Gb/s:
10 Gb/sec == 1.25 GB/sec == 4.395 TB/hour == 37.59 PB/year == 15 PB / 145.6 days
So, by fedexing 15,000 drives you are getting better bandwidth by a factor of 146 or so. A difference of 'tomorrow' versus 'about 4 months.' Of course, it's probably much more expensive. But don't ever underestimate the bandwidth of shipping hard drives.
"Athiesm" only refers to disbelief in the Christian God - believe it or not, an Athiest can still be a very spiritual person.
Uhh, where do you get that, exactly? Have you looked up the word atheist in the dictionary? And it's spelled Atheist. Perhaps you were pointing that out by how you quoted your parent.
Perhaps you are confused with agnosticism. Atheists do not believe in any deity, Christian or otherwise. An agnostic believes it is unknown, undefined. Maybe even believes there's 'something' out there, but doesn't know what, and so rejects organized religion.
To claim Atheism is tied specifically to Christianity... is actually a bit offensive. Perhaps like saying Christianity is defined as simply denial of pagan beliefs.
The goal is figuring out who to blow up. You see, we don't know who our enemy is anymore. They don't wear uniforms, so everyone is a potential enemy. So we need to read their minds to identify whether to blow them up or not. That's the goal.
Times like these are when the red cross is most appreciated. They will likely soon be flying in C-130's full of porn and lol-cats jpegs. 'Round the clock flights will continue until the Georgian internet connections can be restored.
(additionally, the traceroutes could also fail because the routers and computers have been exploded by the russians with bombs from airplanes. this would be a worrying escalation of cyberwarfare).
IT folk as military targets... now that's something.
"Caucasian-pride-ridden state in the southern U.S."
-----So, Black Pride, Latino Pride, and Asian Pride are O.K., but Caucasian Pride is not?
I wonder why that was modded flamebait. It never has made sense to me, Black Pride and all that jazz. I thought we were supposed to be blind to race? Why is being proud of being a race, any race.. minority or majority.. a good thing?
Yes, because the TSA *adding* options to the security check-in process is exactly equivalent to slavery. Idiot.
I know this might be difficult for you, to think this deeply... but it wasn't a parallelism to slavery, it was a parallelism to being an Uncle Tom. Which is to say, you are selling out. You are bought and paid for. You are one of the sheep that we call citizens nowadays. You have accepted the illusion of security, which is what most of these posts are decrying. And you don't 'get it.' Which is not only personally sad, but infuriating. By not standing up for you liberties, by accepting increased illegal searches as needed and making sense, you are part of the problem. Government has no power we do not give them, and you ask 'What is the big deal?' when you give them yours. Well, that affects MY liberty, and so I have to say, resoundingly, and absolutely, Fuck You. You're one of those morons that government polls 'Do you mind increased wait times and invasive illegal searching for your protection?' You, and all your sheep friends say you don't mind, you prefer 'security' over your inalienable rights, and the rest of us suffer with the result. And now we're supposed to be happy they are 'giving' us something?
So no, I'm not comparing to slavery. I'm calling you a sellout of liberty. I'm calling you an Uncle Tom. I'm calling you a 'House N*gger.' And you are. And it's sad you don't see that. And it pisses me off beccause it affects -my- rights.
Not sure I see what's the big deal. You can still put your laptop on the conveyor belt like always, or you can now put it on the conveyor belt in a special bag. They are adding an option, not taking one away. AND its an OPTION for fuck's sake! Not mandatory.
So you people are bitching now because we have 2 options at the security line instead of one? How does that make any sense at all?
Let me guess: pointing out the stupidity of a slashdotter: -1 Troll.
Yessa Massa TSA, thank you sir. This lil citizen be sooo happy get dis opportunity to go threw Massa's security fastah!
Issa good citizen, yessir I is. No trouble here, sir, I be good for gov'met!
For example, if I was sued for downloading music, I should be sued at max for $5 per song, because you can usually find that song for $.99 somewhere online.
While I agree with the spirit of what you are saying, you really need to pay attention or educate yourself. They are not suing people for downloading music. They are suing people for uploading/distributing music. It's important to make this distinction, because they are not stupid. They realize even a dumb person can deduce that downloading a song isn't a major crime. So they attack the uploaders, calling it distribution, and making people look like they cause major damage. And that makes 'sense' to your layman. So, if you want to fight it, then understand the terms of the fight. You trying to shout that downloading a song shouldn't be a major crime is obvious to you, AND to them. But is completely ignorant of what and where the actual fight is. And the battleground of this fight is media distribution, not acquiring it.
There was that big stink about the pedophile that swirled his face. Apparently they went to huge lengths to capture the guy. But in those pictures, the young boys and girls? Not swirled, I assume. Did they try to track them down and rescue them? No... you hear nothing about that.
Punishing an 'evil pedophile' is much more satisfying than rescuing an abused child. We'd rather lash out with our faux moral outrage, though we forget about the guy as soon as we move on to the next news story. I suppose another part of it is they were taiwanese or whatever, so what the fuck do we care, amirite?
I wonder what kind of Internet my daughter will have when she grows up.
Don't worry, it'll still have porn on it.
When his daughter gets into the internet porn business, we'll have come full circle. I look forward to watching her first video.
It's really a shame that the anti-violent game lobby has someone like JT as a de-facto spokesman. Ultimately - even if you disagree - they have a reasonable position. i.e. it's generally bad for kids to play violent games. and all reasonable positions should be considered. Having someone who goes off at wild tangents, blames everything on games whether there's any evidence or not and pisses off the entire legal system is not really a good person to have on your side.
We'll have to agree to disagree that it's a reasonable position. I think it's unreasonable to make that jump that it's 'bad.' Further, even if I agreed, it's not up to the government to decide this, it's up to the parents and families and individuals. The Video Game Industry, afaik, has always been reasonably responsible in rating their games, and parents can decide if thier kids can play M-rated games or not. I really don't understand the basis for the 'anti' argument at all. Don't like it, don't play it, and don't let your kids play it.
Though I think sheltering your kids is far more harmful to their development than letting them play M-rated games, you don't see me insisting we pass laws saying you should let your kids play whatever games they want to. It's not my business to tell you how to raise your kids.
Yes! We need this. And we should post all their email addresses. And we should email them. Perhaps I'll go to the trouble of finding all the email addresses, or better... US Mail addresses.
RIAA Board of Directors: http://www.riaa.com/aboutus.php?content_selector=who_we_are_board
Mitch Bainwol Recording Industry Association of America
Victoria Bassetti EMI Recorded Music
Jason Flom Virgin Records America
Bill Hearn EMI Christian Music Group
Deirdre McDonald SonyBMG
Joe Galante SonyBMG
Kevin Kelleher SonyBMG
Rob Stringer SonyBMG
Jeff Harleston Geffen Records
Steve Bartels Island Records
Lawrence Kenswil Universal Music Group
Mel Lewinter Universal Music Group
Zach Horowitz Universal Music Group
Craig Kallman The Atlantic Group
Tom Whalley Warner Bros Records
Michael Fleisher Warner Music Group
Kevin Liles Warner Music Group
Bob Cavallo Buena Vista Music
Glen Barros Concord Records
Mike Curb Curb Records
Michael Koch Koch Entertainment
Tom Silverman Tommy Boy Entertainment
Jose Behar Univision
Alan Meltzer Wind Up Records
MPAA Members: http://www.mpaa.org/AboutUsMembers.asp
Paramount Pictures Corporation;
Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc.;
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation;
Universal City Studios LLLP;
Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures; and
Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
I've been using Linux for more then 10 years. I've installed it on pc's from 386's to modern multicore servers with 4x cpus. I've got an office full of workstations running Kubuntu that are used every day, some 24x7x365. In all these years, and the hundreds of pc's I've installed some version of Linux on, I have NEVER, EVER seen ANYTHING like what this and some other posts mention. I've seen the install crap out in the middle due to a bad cd burn. I've seen incompatible hardware. I've seen qwerks with some chipsets that required a custom boot parameter to work. But this wholesale failure I have never seen. Ever. Linux fan boy troll.
Any of the problems you mentioned are 'wholesale failure' to your average computer user. Bill Gates ain't fucking stupid. He could get Movie Maker to work if he spent more time on it. His point was that it crossed that threshold where it became not worth the effort anymore. The problems you've described with Linux are the same. Just because you're willing to work through them on Linux, and not willing to work through them on Windows doesn't make Linux better.
The ignorance of Windows vs. Linux people astounds me. Are you people 13 years old? You -AND- the morons who modded you up. Interesting my ass.
/. is way to mature on this topic.
I'd set to work simulating the perfect pair of breasts on a trampoline.
Why do so many people go on about this 'Duh, just go to court and win' crap? As said by everyone else here, even going to court, and winning, can be a greater personal cost than settling.
When you make 25k/year, and barely getting by, and this happens to you.. you are screwed either way.
You've obviously never been presented with legal threats by big corporation X. I have. It's not fun. Right and wrong don't matter anymore, it's about preserving your security.
Donate to the EFF, they help people in situations like this, where a person left alone will have to choose what is best for them and their family, regardless of altruistic right and wrong.
This argument is lame, and keeps coming up. Technology X that makes our lives easier will make us stupid. It's usually in my experience attributed to the internet, or new programming languages like C# or Java or what have you. And it's propogated by the same people who go on and on about 'Back in MY day, we had to walk uphill in the snow with punchcards.' If I had a dime for every time I heard the story of the guy who dropped his stack of punchcards and now they were all out of order... I'd be rich.
That doesn't make you leet or hardcore. Things being easier now doesn't make us less intelligent. I'm of the generation where I never had to learn assembly. I started with higher level languages and worked backwards. The great people still learn the necassary low level tech, even if they didn't start there. I can read and understand the basics of assembly. I probably couldn't write an ASM program, but I know what is happening with the compiler, and what constructs it compiles my code in to.
The same applies to any other thing, like Google. Just because we have Google doesn't mean people will be incapable of traditional research. The intelligent people will still know how. People need to get over themselves and this elitist attitude of 'back in my day ____, and so I'm smarter than this new generation.'