freedom fighter, well, fights for freedom for themselves and others
If only life was that simple. Often there are many motives behind insurgents (desire for freedom, power, revenge, etc). We use the word 'freedom fighter' as a euphamism to describe an insurgent with good motives and 'terrorist' as a dyphamism for an insurgent with bad motives. For example, take the rebels in Chechnya a few years ago. They were fighting for the 'liberation' of Chechnya and caused a lot of collateral damage. The Russians swore that they were terrorists, but the US called them freedom fighters.
``It was also interesting to see that the Microsoft name was no where to be found.''
Perhaps they figured that saying it's from Microsoft is not a way to promote your product to their target audience.
How can this be! Are you really trying to suggest that people actually by Microsoft products because the products are worth something in-and-of themselves — apart the Microsoft brand name stuck on the cover? Surely you can't be serious.
. . . The self-righteousness, the arrogance, and the brutal insistence on lock-step conformity with their "our way or the highway," thinking...not to mention the juvenile name-calling and vilification . ..
Pot, meet kettle.
The thing is, I really feel that Stallman/Kuhn with the DRM fearmongering is a lot like how I saw George Bush on the one hand, and Sadaam Hussein and the threat of WMD on the other.
That might a decent analogy except that DRM is becoming a real thing while the WMDs were mostly just chimeras existing only in the mind of the American citizens. Both of them are used for fearmongering and DRM is still poorly understood by just about everyone.
Ask yourselves this though, guys...If Stallman is as powerful as you think he is...What are you so afraid of?
Stallman is not powerful, and don't think the FSF as is is really all that powerful either. The real power is in the Free Software community which predates Stallman and the FSF and will exists long after they are gone. The fact that Stallman and the FSF are viewed as the headpieces of the movement is more of a formality than anything else.
As for microsoft, I'm not a fan of them either, but my thoughts on them were formed before I even knew who the FSF or Stallman were and the two are pretty much orthoginal.
they're just asking for permission to republish the work
Then why to they need to "edit" my submissions (in addition to merely "reformating" them)? Also they're not just asking for permission to be able to mollest my works, but permission to give other people permission to do whatever they want with it to. I can only think of a few things that aren't covered by the License.
"but I posted the message only at MSDN!" or "they changed my content! all the keywords are now coloured!"
Not necissarily. IANAL, but I have taken some law and I'm pretty sure if they had a visible notice that submitted content would be hosted on Usenet and other microsoftie websites, that should suffice. As for format, your just being ridiculous. I don't think anyone could have a beef with some simple translation text to html. As long as there not changing the content of the post that would fall under common sense). And the EULA provides for much more than just that.
Likewise, forcing everyones' work into public domain will not remove rights either. Microsoft would be reasonable if the only required permission to republish the work on the site (that wouldn't have even required an EULA, it's just common sense) it when way beyond that extending to all Microsoft services and allowed them to do anything they wanted, at their leisure and without your say in the matter. Just about everything short of them actually owning it.
I don't see what's is unscrpulous about any of this. Someone is paying someone else to spend time standing in line to buy it. I could see that you might be complaining because some people are so filthy rich that they can pay someone else to go and do work for them, but that's a whole other story and blaming Sony for the division between the rich and the poor is ridiculous.
I'm not an expert on this, but most communcation people make is rather discrete and can not be caught on a video tape. That's why people are trained to be actors because if you just took regular people and had them act like they normally did, the audience would miss most of what is going on. Thus, I would be worried that if videos like this were done as a regular practice, there would probably be a fair amount of missinterpretation of what actually happens.
On top of that, even if they were used responsibly, they would still be a problem. For one think, if the policemen knew they were being watched, they would probably be more stressed and more uptight as they went about their work which, would be bad for the policemen and probably the people who they deal with.
Plus, people tend to over-react to mistakes made by public people. I don't mean to condone bad cops, but everyone makes mistakes sometimes (don't try to tell me you've never said somthing that you now regret) and we might end up trading the devil we know for the devil we don't. Remember, the really nasty guys will just find a way around your cameras.
Finally, I do think that individuals should be free to photograph/video the police as long as they don't get way and obstruct justice, but it's one think for the citizens to be monitoring then and another thing to set up another layer of bureaucracy to do it.
I'm hair-spliting and I'm just a noob at linguistics so ignore me if I'm wrong, but I think the phonetic alphabets are case sensitive:/S/ and/R/ should really be/s/ and/r/ (and no quotes are needed for phonemes written as such). I belive the capital letters are for something else.
As a young engineer I thought such things were complete crap too. However, regardless of how brilliant your spec/design is if it does not get "sold" to the client it is useless. If color schemes and logos make the sale more likely then please let management work on that. If you think they should not be telling you how to design or implement things then you should not presume to tell them how to "sell" something. Another way to look at it, business is a pretty Darwinian process. If color schemes, logos, slogans, etc. were complete crap they would not be used so heavily. Consider how packaging (Windows) triumphs over design (Linux) in many markets.
I don't think most experinced software developer see this as a 'useless' stage of development. Most would acknowledge that it is a necessity, but that doesn't mean that they enjoy it. It tends to require a number of skills that you don't learn as a computer scientist to figure out what it is you clients actually want. There is a pretty hefty language barrier between the the client and the programmer, most people don't know the jargon we use and so they try to describe it in plain words (which can be confusing) or even worse, pretend that they know the jargon but use the wrong words in the wrong places. So the programmer thinks his client is an idiot and the client thinks his programmer is a snob who can't understand his noble attempt at computer jargon.
So in short, it's necissary, but it's not easy and often there is a lot of time wasted because of miscommunication.
I'm pretty sure the OEM's aren't the ones interested in stopping their sales of XP. After all, selling XP doesn't make them any less money and will probably end up making them more because many of the buyers will want to ugrade to Vista once all their friends have it and to most people, upgrading means buying a new computer.
With encryption in general though, if you had a falling out with your employer and you encrypted his drive, then you would be guilty. Encrypting your own drive though is certainly legal and allowed.
So by extention, I would guess that if a third party (we'll call it Microsoft), encrypts my files on my computer so that I can't access them. Then the third party is breaking the rules? DRM is really just a nasty form of encryption.
Make it clear that it's not a matter of mistrust or IT trying to be control freaks.. it's simply a matter of accountability.
In my experience it's not even that. It's a matter of mis-communication. In almost all cases people screwing up data is completely non-malicious. Keeping sane permissions on stuff doesn't make it all better, but it can help sometimes.
Nevertheless, every situation is different and if this guy can get away with a trusting environment then more power too him. Trust is a powerful thing, if only it wasn't so fragile.
the chances of seeing a Java application whose GUI actually blends in the slightest with the OS upon which it runs are slim to none
FUDfest. Java 6 will have some desktop support. Apple had a Java implementations that blends with its desktop very well for years (I haven't seen this myself).
The GP was definitely exajerating, but I don't know about FUDfest. From my experience as a Linux user Java apps tend to have a fair number of usability problems. I'll pick on Eclipse 'cause I use it the most. First, the 'Preferences' should be under the 'Edit' menu, for some reason it migrated over to 'Window'? So, I wanted to figure out how to add a plugin. The 'Preferences' dialog is quite a pain as it is with a million things all over the place, after about 30 minutes of ploding around in there and just about making my brain implode I finally found it under 'Help'! Help is for Help files not software configuration. Maybe you Windows users have grown used to this kind of thing.
I can't speek for the GP, but I understand Flash. Flash is about giving control to the content producers at the expense of the consumers. I am a comsumer who likes control, ergo I don't like like flash.
I have noticed (to much LOLing this morning) that nearly every article on/. is tagged with "itsatrap"... what gives? Doesn't this kinda defeat the purpose of the tagging system in the first place? At the very least, it was highly amusing to see every article tagged with "itsatrap." Maybe we should lobby slashdot to legitimize it with an admiral ackbar icon.
Funny, I've always found this to be a little extreme and Old Testament. I guess what I'm saying is I'd rather respond with open arms and understanding/forgiveness than a knife. Is it really that bad that Microsoft and Novell made this deal?
On the more serious note, this is actually from the New Testament, and the New Testament is extreme. Just read through the Sermon on the Mount. It states that if you even think lustful thoughts towards another person, it's just as bad as having commited adultery. The New Testament makes it painfully clear that we there are no 'basically good people', and we are hopeless without God's grace.
Also grace is not the acceptance of sin, so the whole maiming thing is not really out of place. However, your right hand doesn't actually cause you to sin and only 4 year olds try to get off with that excuse ("my hand make me do it"). The thing that must be killed is much deeper — our selfish will. Hence why Paul writes "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me".
I'm no fan of EULAs or any software licensing (not even the GPL)
FYI, The GPL is not a EULA, it doesn't apply to the end user at all. Only to redistribution of the software. If your at the stage where your redistributing software you can probably take the effort to contact the authors.
I'm not and expert, but I doubt there will be anything too screwy about the IPV6 implementation; however, the domain name isn't actually DNS appartently, but some Windows naming systems. I don't know what this windows names thing is about, but it seems like a bad case of NIH syndrome.
I wouldn't say that hacker no longer refers to a wizardly computer programmer, ever. As you said works can have multiple meanings, and in certain contexts, it's perfectly acceptable to use the word like that. At the moment, there's a problem because there's not really a good word to replace hacker (in the programmer sense) that retains all the connotations. Also, in other context, it has completly different meaning (as in 'css hack'), It may be that hacker is becoming a single morpheme word. All in all, it's a pretty butchered word.
And yes, you can fight what words mean (school teachers do it all the time). Sometimes it works, usually it doesn't, and it's often a waste of time.
This kind of retarded "we didn't see it, so it didn't exist" attitude sickens me. I don't think invading Iraq was a good idea, but people like you are just ridiculus. Sure thousands have died because of the war. War does that. Anyone who was thought otherwise must be smoking something. People did die under Saddam's reign, either from political abuse (like the kurds) or starvation because the governement stole the aid.
On top of that the now have some level of freedom. Things are still messy and I doubt there will be a proper election any time soon, but there is hope. After all didn't some old American politian say something like: "people willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both". Or is it cool to be pro-freedom like and everything until you actually have to kill someone over it. Remember, the American patriots who won you guys those wars agains the British had no desire to die for their country, they were planning to kill for it.
In certain situations this is useful and is already being used to an extent. But rabid use of it is generally bad. Remindes me of hammer factory factory
And this is why the wikipedia works. The world really needs more people like Jimmy. Any lesser person would have brought the thing to its knees with ridiculous politics. Separating a project from it's founder is akward even in the best of times. God Bless.
I agree, although what constitutes as rockent science or not in the computer field is rather fuzzy. Compling kernel stuffs is certainly beyond anything that a regular user should ever have to deal with. However; it wouldn't be much worse than a lot of stuff that power users end up doing on/to their Windows boxes.
In the end I don't think this is too much of an issue. All the distros that I know that target non-geeks (fedora and ubuntu) allow you to get along quite well without even knowing what a kernel is.
Of course, that's a false distinction; the source code itself is a description of an algorithm
Couldn't you say the same thing about the binaries? After all, it's just another lanugage. Or what about interpreted stuff like python code, or python byte code.
Slashdot Mirror
If only life was that simple. Often there are many motives behind insurgents (desire for freedom, power, revenge, etc). We use the word 'freedom fighter' as a euphamism to describe an insurgent with good motives and 'terrorist' as a dyphamism for an insurgent with bad motives. For example, take the rebels in Chechnya a few years ago. They were fighting for the 'liberation' of Chechnya and caused a lot of collateral damage. The Russians swore that they were terrorists, but the US called them freedom fighters.
How can this be! Are you really trying to suggest that people actually by Microsoft products because the products are worth something in-and-of themselves — apart the Microsoft brand name stuck on the cover? Surely you can't be serious.
Pot, meet kettle.
That might a decent analogy except that DRM is becoming a real thing while the WMDs were mostly just chimeras existing only in the mind of the American citizens. Both of them are used for fearmongering and DRM is still poorly understood by just about everyone.
Stallman is not powerful, and don't think the FSF as is is really all that powerful either. The real power is in the Free Software community which predates Stallman and the FSF and will exists long after they are gone. The fact that Stallman and the FSF are viewed as the headpieces of the movement is more of a formality than anything else.
As for microsoft, I'm not a fan of them either, but my thoughts on them were formed before I even knew who the FSF or Stallman were and the two are pretty much orthoginal.
Then why to they need to "edit" my submissions (in addition to merely "reformating" them)? Also they're not just asking for permission to be able to mollest my works, but permission to give other people permission to do whatever they want with it to. I can only think of a few things that aren't covered by the License.
Not necissarily. IANAL, but I have taken some law and I'm pretty sure if they had a visible notice that submitted content would be hosted on Usenet and other microsoftie websites, that should suffice. As for format, your just being ridiculous. I don't think anyone could have a beef with some simple translation text to html. As long as there not changing the content of the post that would fall under common sense). And the EULA provides for much more than just that.
Likewise, forcing everyones' work into public domain will not remove rights either. Microsoft would be reasonable if the only required permission to republish the work on the site (that wouldn't have even required an EULA, it's just common sense) it when way beyond that extending to all Microsoft services and allowed them to do anything they wanted, at their leisure and without your say in the matter. Just about everything short of them actually owning it.
I'm not an expert on this, but most communcation people make is rather discrete and can not be caught on a video tape. That's why people are trained to be actors because if you just took regular people and had them act like they normally did, the audience would miss most of what is going on. Thus, I would be worried that if videos like this were done as a regular practice, there would probably be a fair amount of missinterpretation of what actually happens.
On top of that, even if they were used responsibly, they would still be a problem. For one think, if the policemen knew they were being watched, they would probably be more stressed and more uptight as they went about their work which, would be bad for the policemen and probably the people who they deal with.
Plus, people tend to over-react to mistakes made by public people. I don't mean to condone bad cops, but everyone makes mistakes sometimes (don't try to tell me you've never said somthing that you now regret) and we might end up trading the devil we know for the devil we don't. Remember, the really nasty guys will just find a way around your cameras.
Finally, I do think that individuals should be free to photograph/video the police as long as they don't get way and obstruct justice, but it's one think for the citizens to be monitoring then and another thing to set up another layer of bureaucracy to do it.
I'm hair-spliting and I'm just a noob at linguistics so ignore me if I'm wrong, but I think the phonetic alphabets are case sensitive: /S/ and /R/ should really be /s/ and /r/ (and no quotes are needed for phonemes written as such). I belive the capital letters are for something else.
I don't think most experinced software developer see this as a 'useless' stage of development. Most would acknowledge that it is a necessity, but that doesn't mean that they enjoy it. It tends to require a number of skills that you don't learn as a computer scientist to figure out what it is you clients actually want. There is a pretty hefty language barrier between the the client and the programmer, most people don't know the jargon we use and so they try to describe it in plain words (which can be confusing) or even worse, pretend that they know the jargon but use the wrong words in the wrong places. So the programmer thinks his client is an idiot and the client thinks his programmer is a snob who can't understand his noble attempt at computer jargon.
So in short, it's necissary, but it's not easy and often there is a lot of time wasted because of miscommunication.
I'm pretty sure the OEM's aren't the ones interested in stopping their sales of XP. After all, selling XP doesn't make them any less money and will probably end up making them more because many of the buyers will want to ugrade to Vista once all their friends have it and to most people, upgrading means buying a new computer.
So by extention, I would guess that if a third party (we'll call it Microsoft), encrypts my files on my computer so that I can't access them. Then the third party is breaking the rules? DRM is really just a nasty form of encryption.
In my experience it's not even that. It's a matter of mis-communication. In almost all cases people screwing up data is completely non-malicious. Keeping sane permissions on stuff doesn't make it all better, but it can help sometimes.
Nevertheless, every situation is different and if this guy can get away with a trusting environment then more power too him. Trust is a powerful thing, if only it wasn't so fragile.
The GP was definitely exajerating, but I don't know about FUDfest. From my experience as a Linux user Java apps tend to have a fair number of usability problems. I'll pick on Eclipse 'cause I use it the most. First, the 'Preferences' should be under the 'Edit' menu, for some reason it migrated over to 'Window'? So, I wanted to figure out how to add a plugin. The 'Preferences' dialog is quite a pain as it is with a million things all over the place, after about 30 minutes of ploding around in there and just about making my brain implode I finally found it under 'Help'! Help is for Help files not software configuration. Maybe you Windows users have grown used to this kind of thing.
I can't speek for the GP, but I understand Flash. Flash is about giving control to the content producers at the expense of the consumers. I am a comsumer who likes control, ergo I don't like like flash.
On the more serious note, this is actually from the New Testament, and the New Testament is extreme. Just read through the Sermon on the Mount. It states that if you even think lustful thoughts towards another person, it's just as bad as having commited adultery. The New Testament makes it painfully clear that we there are no 'basically good people', and we are hopeless without God's grace.
Also grace is not the acceptance of sin, so the whole maiming thing is not really out of place. However, your right hand doesn't actually cause you to sin and only 4 year olds try to get off with that excuse ("my hand make me do it"). The thing that must be killed is much deeper — our selfish will. Hence why Paul writes "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me".
Except that it would be a support nightmare. Almost as bad as trying to get a website to work in IE.
FYI, The GPL is not a EULA, it doesn't apply to the end user at all. Only to redistribution of the software. If your at the stage where your redistributing software you can probably take the effort to contact the authors.
I'm not and expert, but I doubt there will be anything too screwy about the IPV6 implementation; however, the domain name isn't actually DNS appartently, but some Windows naming systems. I don't know what this windows names thing is about, but it seems like a bad case of NIH syndrome.
I wouldn't say that hacker no longer refers to a wizardly computer programmer, ever. As you said works can have multiple meanings, and in certain contexts, it's perfectly acceptable to use the word like that. At the moment, there's a problem because there's not really a good word to replace hacker (in the programmer sense) that retains all the connotations. Also, in other context, it has completly different meaning (as in 'css hack'), It may be that hacker is becoming a single morpheme word. All in all, it's a pretty butchered word.
And yes, you can fight what words mean (school teachers do it all the time). Sometimes it works, usually it doesn't, and it's often a waste of time.
This kind of retarded "we didn't see it, so it didn't exist" attitude sickens me. I don't think invading Iraq was a good idea, but people like you are just ridiculus. Sure thousands have died because of the war. War does that. Anyone who was thought otherwise must be smoking something. People did die under Saddam's reign, either from political abuse (like the kurds) or starvation because the governement stole the aid.
On top of that the now have some level of freedom. Things are still messy and I doubt there will be a proper election any time soon, but there is hope. After all didn't some old American politian say something like: "people willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both". Or is it cool to be pro-freedom like and everything until you actually have to kill someone over it. Remember, the American patriots who won you guys those wars agains the British had no desire to die for their country, they were planning to kill for it.
In certain situations this is useful and is already being used to an extent. But rabid use of it is generally bad. Remindes me of hammer factory factory
And this is why the wikipedia works. The world really needs more people like Jimmy. Any lesser person would have brought the thing to its knees with ridiculous politics. Separating a project from it's founder is akward even in the best of times. God Bless.
I agree, although what constitutes as rockent science or not in the computer field is rather fuzzy. Compling kernel stuffs is certainly beyond anything that a regular user should ever have to deal with. However; it wouldn't be much worse than a lot of stuff that power users end up doing on/to their Windows boxes.
In the end I don't think this is too much of an issue. All the distros that I know that target non-geeks (fedora and ubuntu) allow you to get along quite well without even knowing what a kernel is.