the so-called "problem" really is a delusion of outsiders.
the slashdot excerpt demonstrates these delusions quite well:
"Most blogs are created by someone you don't know, often about something you don't care about, but that hasn't stopped 'blogging' from becoming a remarkably ubiquitous phenomenon."
Wrong. if you specify an individual, and present them with every blog on the planet, the person probably won't care about the majority of the blogs. but crucially, if you specify any given blog, the chances are extremely high that at least SOMEBODY will be interested in it. You can say "nobody cares" ad nauseum. it's arguable whether or not anybody cares, but the point is, the bloggers don't care whether anybody cares.
"There are even blogs about blogs such as The Blog Herald. It looks like everyone wants their fifteen minutes of fame online."
Who says anybody wants fame? not a SINGLE ONE of the great popular blogs i know ever had any pretensions about fame or attention or the spotlight. some blogs become big, others stay small. bloggers will blog, regardless.
humans like to communicate and to form communities with likeminded individuals. the only problems are these: how does one find the weblogs that will and loggers who will appeal to them? and secondly, when will the sensational detractors and knee-jerk "Nobody Cares What You Think!" peanut gallery get over it?
i've read blogs from all over the world. the internet has closed so many gaps of TIME and SPACE between people, i've absorbed peoples thoughts and ideas that previously i never would have had any contact with (or at least it would have been very difficult or limited). i'm speaking more generally about the internet as a whole, but the potential for human interaction and exchange is unprecedented in human history. weblogs are just the latest form that the planetary social cyberweb has taken.
somebody who posts random thoughts or pictures of their cat is doing the most passively expressive thing possible: they're not dictating anything to anybody, they're not demanding anything, they're just making their own existence manifest in cyberspace. (maybe someone will care, great, maybe the person just likes doing it, great, maybe nobody will care--ANY HARM DONE? no). on the other hand, the chorus of snobbery is pretty noxious in contrast. projecting that somebody is demanding attention or assuming "Everybody Cares About Me!" is just a means for putting-on a bunch of reactionary nonsense.
of course, nobody will BE CONCERNED with dropping the family's mobile computer down the stairs, when mobile laptops are as inexpensive and as durable as a cigar box, or a frozen pizza, or a regular paper notebook. (in other words, a PADD device from star trek TNG that bounces like a superball.)
and these devices are RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER, folks. get in line!
not really. i thought it was about some guy who was embroiled in a legal battle with a robotic DHCP router droid for thinking he owned his own IP address and for cyberwaltzing around the network like he owned the place.
my own network is enforced by RDRD's.
and it's really not a laughing matter, believe me.
slavery was a business. did you know that? have you heard of it? it was a major cashcow, too.
i don't think you've noticed this either: many, or even most, people who have jobs still can't afford to donate to political campaigns.
have you ever heard of child-labor? the so-called free market necessitates such things, from the perspective of THE BOTTOM LINE, the profit/greed motive.
maybe you're about to say "Everyone is Free to be Rich." unfortunately, "being rich" by definition means a CONCENTRATION of wealth, which by definition means other people aren't rich.
have you ever heard of colonialism? mercantilism? the subjugation of entire countries had "business", money, and resources as its goal.
have you heard of christopher columbus? his crews murdered many people for gold. they came to the so-called New World for money and resources. that's business.
and i'm sure you also haven't realized this: some of the most tyrannical regimes in modern history had "free markets." they even hunted down and imprisoned or executed communists (communists are people who oppose capitalism and say a lot of nasty things about "free markets). hitler and mussolini both gave entirely free reign to big business. (in your view, the bigger the business, the freer the people, right?)
you're telling me that when i denigrate those enterprises, i'm denigrating freedom?
if freedom only comes from business, then what did the "heros" you're talking about sacrifice to protect my freedom to live? you make no sense.
the idea that "freedom" only exists because of the free market is one of the most absurd things i've heard in recent times. maybe you were joking, maybe this doesn't need a response, but i can't say i'm very optimistic these days.
"Next time a Hitler storms the continent and you come screaming for help, don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out of the White House."
there was an attack on pearl harbor. US entered world war II.
did anybody come "screaming"? no. but it makes a good story for chest-thumping and for hanging around the neck of any european who criticizes the US.
to rephrase that: did anybody come "screaming"? yes. many jews were turned away and barred from immigration, and by the time of pearl harbor, poland, france, UK, china, egypt, indochina, were all already invaded/at-war at best or defeated/occupied at worst. US joined the war after it, itself, was attacked. not before. (there was merely some oil-market jockeying before that point.)
truman admired stalin, too.
those are the facts, jack.
i wonder if the truth will bring my mod-karma down even lower.
oooooooooooooh, too bad at home i have nothing but dial-up access with my ibook, and i'm on broadband here at work with a windows machine, and THE OPERA WEBSITE WON'T LET ME DOWNLOAD THE MAC/OSX INSTALLER FROM A WINDOWS MACHINE TO STICK ON A FLASHDRIVE AND HAPPILY BRING HOME.
FOSS seems to baffle and confuse a lot of people. the article is either very confused, or has major ulterior motives, or money-driven paranoia. OSS isn't a household term. never before in human history has there been an entity or domain where a product/good could be MASS-PRODUCED without investment (digital reproduction) and distributed the world over, free of charge. (that i can think of.) software + internet = completely new kind of non-economy. you don't need a printing press, or a factory, or a warehouse, to GET GOOD THINGS TO PEOPLE.
now, getting onto your post, i haven't seen anybody profess that FOSS is always superior over closed-source alternatives, or that nobody has a right to complain about it when an app has problems.
what people are saying is this: it's free. you just can't have the same kind of expectation about being coddled or about commitment to you as a "customer", getting your ass kissed, getting "service". because you're not paying. it's like complaining about staff/service shortage while eating at a volunteer-run charity dinner. the "business model" vocabulary has obviously failed us; everyone can and should have standards and expectations about the quality of a piece of software, but TFA and some commentators have just been blurring the issues.
there seems to be a subtlety about the situation that is lost on a lot of people, at this point in history. when you don't like OSS, you Don't Use It. there's no contract, you're not paying money, there's no agreement that you're entitled to anything. if some OSSware pisses you off, you go elsewhere, perhaps to a commercial vendor. you don't "take your business elsewhere" or anything like that, since you didn't take your business anywhere in the first place.
i've never known anybody to "bitch and moan" when a company, out of either necessity or FUD, goes with a huge commercial software solution. if anything, i've seen OSS proponents lament the fact that you yourself outlined: company XYZ makes billions of dollars, often with nothing but a mediocre product and legal/marketing muscle.
you can't lump all FOSS together and "press" somebody about a "lack of support/quality." some projects are better and more active than others. (i don't feel the need to give examples.) it's like generalizing about the quality of random street musicians.
secondly, when you bring up the "if you don't like it, write your own code!" attitude, i don't know what you're talking about. the non-developer consumer can simply continue their search for a solution. there's nothing about a shoddy or unsuitable FOSS application that somehow demands a closed-source alternative (except in cases where there that's the only option, obviously). in other words, when a FOSS app doesn't appease or suit someone's purposes, it's logical to search for the real solution in both the FOSS and commercial realms. (additionally, could anybody refer me to a case of an OSS developer telling somebody "you don't like it? quit griping, it's free." i've never seen that before, and i've been through a lot of documentation and comment-threads.)
most people with brains have the notion of a cost-benefit analysis. you find the solution that WORKS FOR YOU, and that's the most COST-EFFECTIVE. and "free" takes the cake, except when the product sucks.
the few people i've known who were "pushed" toward closed commercial software are people who just don't "trust" anything free; they assume that something they pay for won't fail them miserably. the hacker stereotypes and "cheeto's on the keyboard" tropes just make people more afraid.
and at this point in time, we're only just beginning.
and i definitely fail to see how these strawman Bad Attitudes of the FOSS camp have contributed to microsoft's market dominance, which is what you just said. remember when microsoft was hung out to dry by the courts for being a monopoly? believe it or not, MS didn't get into that position because of FOSS promoters being jerky.
because, of course, there's no other way we'll be able to learn about the grave consequences of a group of children who never got spanked. we have to read about it in a work of fiction that an author made up out of Pure Imagination.
because, of course, there's no such thing as a "scientific" "method", and it's doubtful that we can use our common sense to parse reality for ourselves, and no human being has ever NOT been spanked. so we just don't know what's in store for civilization as a whole if the spanking stops.
you might imagine... that all youngsters will be terrifically INCORRIGIBLE, but the horror won't stop there. actually, not spanking your children will eventually result with Big Government kicking down your door.
why should you have to "flex your [nuclear] muscle" unless you feel weak? unless you don't have faith in any other strategy, or your cunning, diplomacy, alliances, and traditional military power?
(by a similar token, when you see a fascist poster that says "NO READING!", you know exactly what they're weakpoint is. (not quite the same, but provocative nevertheless))
the idea that this policy flexes our muscles is absurd. just like how somebody flexing their muscles is absurd; on the other hand, somebody demonstrating the speed and fighting efficiency of bruce lee is not absurd, and is pretty menacing. the necessity of having to suddenly "flex our muscle" probably means america has fallen a little behind on How Strong We Look. we're in the middle of at least one (or at least i only hear about one-- but i feel like i'm missing something, maybe it's long over?) war right now. so it seems clear that the administration knows that we're not impressing anyone with our military efforts. (and we haven't made up the ground on any domestic fronts, the fed.government can't/won't even get on top of a major disaster area
like somebody already said, trumpeting first-strike authority just prompts all of our enemies to get more serious about their first strike capabilities SO THAT THEY CAN PRE-EMPT OUR PRE-EMPTION. is it really going to come down to nuking somebody's nukes or proto-nukes?
hell if we'd nuked iraq, we wouldn't have all the evidence of ZERO WMD CAPABILITY staring us in the face. we wouldn't even have to bother with cooking up faulty intelligence.
i'm sure some trolls are going to come out now and say that the consequent arms race will bolster our economy, eliminate poverty, improve technology, bla bla bla. maybe i'll get trolled anyway, because i'm not chest-thumping, and because it actually concerns me that the advancement of nuclear technology in the last few decades has not coincided with any advancement of human civility. unfortunately, we're talking about weapons that are destructive on such a massive scale that they're only possible use is endless slaughter of civilians. the stakes are a little too high. (we already invaded a WMD-boogeyman, they had nothing, president declared "mission accomplished" with a flight suit on-- the war-mongering was bad enough, but at least it didn't involve using nuclear weapons.)
i don't want to antagonize you, but "If you sell those bombs on the black market, expect your nuclear reprocessing plants to be obliterated." is a pretty telling point. it was said that terrorists would gain nuclear weapons (and other wmds) from iraq-- but in truth they didn't, weren't, and couldn't possibly have done so because iraq didn't have anything, but iraq was invaded anyway. so it seems like we're just upping the psychosis here, and moving to a policy of nuclear attack, rather than conventional, for boogeyman nations that don't pose a threat to anybody. (or at least no more than anybody else)
can't say that "low-yield" "tactical" nuclear weapons make me any more comfortable.
part of the real feat is the full auto-pilot that's talented enough now to dock with the ISS without any manual over-ride at all. (apparently, unlike earlier i recall.)
i wasn't exclaiming just about the fact that it's a craft with no people inside.
the guy down below makes the hilarious/informative point: any decent program would have a [...]. the thrust of that joke is related to my surprise at RTFA. i'm used to the ameri-spaceprogram.
can't REALLY say anything for the profitibility question, but i hear you. i stopped using all the planet[crap] pages and IGN once they started asking me for registration just to download a game DEMO. a game DEMO! i think the publishing companies and IGN decided they want to put every possible obstacle in my way to stop me from trying out and buying a game. and the commercials... flash ads.
i'd say it's a bad thing for IGN if news corps doesn't make the content more accessible. i don't know how they could sustain their visitor-flow if anything gets any worse. (but i'm also clueless as to what the visitor flow is, or its trends recently.)
the internet was different back then. i remember two things: i frequently couldn't connect to a mirror, because their capacity was full. (that never happens anymore to me-- NEVER.) but on the other hand... content and data (videos, patches, demos) weren't hidden away behind commercials, flash flashers, and registration/login systems. and for that, i'm out of the loop now.
i mean damn, some publishing companies don't even host their own game demos. you have to go through all the megasite planet[crap] and IGN and the like, and it gaddam pisses me off.
i suppose my grief was more of a historical artifact. from the days of playing sega genesis as a kid and wondering why the controller was terrible, then there split-button d-pad for playstation... and then came those god-awful PC gamepads (especially the microsoft ones).
yeah, Expose implements some screen corner usage. great. but Mac OS X stil doesn't have any visual feedback when you hover over buttons or any other clickable part of the interface. (no special mousepointer for window resize, no visual button changes to indicate that youre hovering on the proper clickable space, etc.) i'm a-- mostly-- contented mac user, but that really gets my goat. and my goose.
what's the hold-up? it's not like we're talking about the video-game directional pad which was patented decades ago and has a reason for not being standard. (in other words, there's a reason for all the CRAP alternatives. i hope to god there's not a sleeper patent on the GUI/OS feature i'm talking about....)
In the event of a terrorist attack, natural disaster or other large-scale emergency, the Department of Homeland Security will assume primary responsibility on March 1st for ensuring that emergency response professionals are prepared for any situation. This will entail providing a coordinated, comprehensive federal response to any large-scale crisis and mounting a swift and effective recovery effort. The new Department will also prioritize the important issue of citizen preparedness. Educating America's families on how best to prepare their homes for a disaster and tips for citizens on how to respond in a crisis will be given special attention at DHS.
NOT DESIGNED TO MOVE FAST you say? how about swiftly, comprehensively, effectively? they use billions of dollars to move slowly, unswiftly, and not at all?
(we're putting aside FEMA and army corps of engineers for the moment)
i'm not saying nobody in LA made any bad decisions, but it's ridiculous to claim that all the death can be put "squarely on the shoulders" of the government of NO and LA.
"not designed to move fast" looks like another way of saying "it's not the government's job to do anything, losers." and i've seen a lot of that lately. despite....those um.... TAXES everyone pays, and the mission statements and budgets of these federal agencies and departments.
better watch yourself. i got flamed yesterday, pretty severely, for wondering where the federal response and swiftness was. yeah.
in the words of the bushco mob, it's a "state problem."
see, we just brush under the rug the money (and national guard resources) used to secure a foreign nation at the expense of our own land, all the tax money that's gone to FEMA (and hell, also to homeland security: terrorists could have planned to blow up the levees , not to mention the tax money that's gone to the army corp of engineers so that the water-works section could do absolutely nothing for the levees over the last few years despite their being one of the top 3 official vulnerabilities facing the nation.
at times like this, the federal government and a band of citizen lackeys just take the chance to say "no, sorry, it's not the government's job to do anything, losers."
(i'm not necessarily criticizing congressional appropriation action that's underway (which is strictly a financial mobilization), but the FEMA, corps, MP, and national guard rescue/security effort was or has been incompetent to non-existent. just read what people on the ground there have been saying.)
hi there friend, your response just happens to be the most poignantly stupid one i've received.
it's funny you should say what you just did, considering the federal government has jurisdiction right now over half of LA's national guard resources-- which are overseas
secondly-- i already know what the role of federal government is, evidently you don't. you'd
here's some food for thought from March 2002:
"The assistant secretary of the Army, Mississippi's former U.S. Rep. Mike Parker, was forced out Wednesday after he criticized the Bush administration's proposed spending cuts on Army Corps of Engineers' water projects, members of Congress said.
"Apparently he was asked to resign," said U.S. Rep. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., a member of the House Appropriations Committee's energy and water development subcommittee that oversees the corps' budget.
Parker earned the ire of administration officials when he questioned Bush's planned budget cuts for the corps, including two controversial Mississippi projects.
that's from missi's Clarion-Ledger
what do you think we pay taxes to the army corps of engineers for? in your world apparently, just so you/they can say "too bad, it's not the government's job to do something about it, losers."
by the same reasoning i suppose you don't think congress should not make any appropriations to assist the devestated areas. and speaking of other problems, like terrorism, why have an FBI or CIA at all? 9/11 was new york's problem
and there's more: "The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says it expects to finish closing off New Orleans' 17th Street Canal from Lake Pontchartrain on Friday. Most of the water now covering the city came from breaches in that canal and two others." (from npr)
makes you wonder what the federal government is doing there, eh, when it's just a problem that the state should have to deal with on its own. and you might like to know that your esteemed leader bush has already declared that the disaster will require the attention of the country for a long time-- i guess you'd really clash with him about the role of the executive, the federal government, and so forth.
as for the rest of you reactionary cowards,
" What, you think this is called "Slashdot: Only for Americans" ? This is typical american patriotism bullshit. Do you even realise that there are places in this world that look like this, even worse, every day? While I applaud the people surviving this and feel sorry for the losses of others, it does not concern me one bit.
Get off your high horse, let the rest of us get on with our lives and shut up."
yeah i do realizes there are places in the world that look like that, all the time. i'm there, most of the time. it's nice to know that while you "feel sorry", none of it concerns you one bit. i can't possibly fathom how mentioning the destruction of one of the most internationally-known cities in america is "american patriotism bullshit." when the tsunami happened did you flame anyone who talked about it in public as bullshit patriots for [whatever nation they might have mentioned, if any] ?
you obviously have major problems if what i posed somehow hindered you from Getting On With Your Life. you must feel really guilty and helpless, or somehow utterly inconvenienced, otherwise i don't know how you react so extremely. so i'm sorry for you.
oh, and dear soapbox guy: maybe you were referring to the/. post not to me, since it's a useless front-page commercial spot for nikon, right?
last things last. "stop bitching, nobody here can help. it's distance. go help yourself." you very clearly missed the entire thrust of what i said (you can disagree all you want, but unfortunately you're missing the point.) i wasn't trying to enlist help. i was pointing out a few absurdities that strangely haven't seemed to dawn on the american conscience as a whole. yeah it even applies to you too, imagine that.
also, an entire american city is underwater with many people dying, the refugees haven't been provided for, hospitals have filled their stairwells with dead, and half the region's national guard is in iraq along with many of billions of dollars
but don't worry folks, homeland security will protect you-- just continue to BUY your gadgets and what not, and we'll get through this. oh, and, keep paying your taxes (except if you're in the top 2% of richest people in america of course, if that's you, we'll give you a break) and keep supporting the current administration
if only a natural disaster could give us an opportunity for tough-guy macho posturing in the same way that a foreign attack does, well, then there'd be something to say about the catastrophe down south instead of just staring the incompetent/non-existent national rescue effort in the face.
crucial phrase: in a "free society"
the real killer point here is the FUTURE CONNECTION between "our culture" and a "free society"
what do you think the self-righteous extremists will do when people Just Stop Caring? keep in mind, they're the ones with money, power, and political influence right now. (did you ever see that unpromoted commercial with the RIAA freakforce busting into peoples homes and gunning them down, slitting their throats? that comes to mind.)
by your argument, all bureacratic convolution, kafkaesque absurdity, and orwellian aspects of reality wouldn't exist-- because people would discount them for their absurdity.
we've already instituted so-called "free speech zones", implying that the constitution does not apply to public space, except when the man says so. we have countless people imprisoned, with no charges, no trial, no legal counsel-- presumably because the nation state has no case against them. some bigwig justice official just the other day said that the primary concern for law enforcement and the justice deptarment is pornography. file-sharing and "downloading" is constantly demonized in a sensational way as illegal/infringement, totally disregarding the facts about what cds/tapes/whatever people already own when they download some songs, which files are freeware
i'm not really arguing with you. i'm probably more pessimistic. in other words i usually think things will get worse before they get a lot worse.
how much "intelligence" do most animals need to find more than enough food to survive?
maybe you're only talking about a possibility, ("we needn't have [NECESSARILY] directly killed them"), but still your comments seem pretty off-target or at least shallow. --along with a lot of other comments around here when such topics come up.
you have absolutely no evidence that the humans simply had "higher intelligence." what you just said is a foolish just-so story. "well, humans had higher intelligence, so they got the food. the neanderthals couldn't compete." it's totally circular, just running around the fact that neanderthals are gone and humans aren't. any number of things can lead to a species extinction or apparent disappearance.
neanders and humans would only have had to "compete" in the way you're describing if they were trying to fill the same ecological niche-- which would mean that they were most likely competing in a confrontational way, if anything like what you're saying actually happened. if your totally vacuous story was true, then all neanderthal remains would show signs of starvation. (...take a guess about whether that's true or not)
it's just as silly and oversimplified as all the garbage about how humans simply started using "blade tech" and could "clean house" on all the HUGE GAME ANIMALS RUNNING ALL OVER THE PLACE. in fact, the role that big game animals and "hunting" played in the prehistoric human diet is overexaggerrated, and over-represented for physical and chemical reasons. plus, it makes windbags (like some people in this thread) feel like they have a big johnson, i think. or like they have acute intelligence, or super-hunting ferocity, embedded in their souls. nice try. (in most environments, "hunting" can't sustain a human population by itself, and meat-eating itself is usually only a pivotal part of the diet when those resources are maintained by intervention, pastoralism, and the animal-analogs to agricultre.)
you must not have noticed:
1) you didn't learn to read by walking through a library and picking up books. no, you had to be explicitly taught. nobody learns to read spontaneously, but they learn to speak and use language expertly without teaching (and, no, mothers saying "honey, it's CAUGHT, not CATCHED... say CAUGHT!" doesn't have anything to do with it). the only way anybody could possibly learn to read in a way that's comparable to the way people learn to use language is if written sentences/text were immediately present for the context to which they refer. (at least present to the same degree that situational context is present for vocal utterances that refer to them.)
2) music isn't anything like a spoken human language
most people are explicitly taught to read music, whereas children spontaneously learn languages-- quit automatically-- just from exposure to the ambient language. secondly, practically all human beings learn their native language (easily) to a proficiency that only a small few musicians achieve (instrumentally/compositionally.) i still don't agree on the language/music relationship you're throwing out there [as two cents....], but if you actually think about them, the facts about music versus language tend to negate your point.
3) sign languages are as grammatically complex (sometimes even richer) as spoken languages like english. sign languages have syntactic properties just like spoken languages. and interestingly, deaf babies make hand motions that are equivalent to a speaking/hearing baby's vocal babble. sign languages have a "sensitive" period for learning: an adult cannot learn a sign language to fluency, just like [almost] no adults can learn a language to fluency, in adulthood.
please notice that sign language, when used, is exactly parallel to spoken language, but READING/text/written-language is not.
the real thrust of this is that if it was A GENERAL ABILITY OF PATTERN RECOGNITION THAT ALLOWED YOU TO LEARN LANGUAGE, why is there a sensitive period? why can't people in adulthood learn new languages to fluency?
anyway, even if you tried you couldn't possibly identify all the "patterns" that are present in the sentences you are writing. your knowledge is unconscious. so, no, language doesn't rest on a "general purpose ability" to recognize patterns.
there are language-impaired people who can recognize all kinds of patterns just fine, but they can't form a sentence (even when they can speak separate words perfectly fine
your post is half-ass and pretty miserable. why am i even bothering?
Slashdot Mirror
amen to you. honestly. amen.
the so-called "problem" really is a delusion of outsiders.
the slashdot excerpt demonstrates these delusions quite well:
"Most blogs are created by someone you don't know, often about something you don't care about, but that hasn't stopped 'blogging' from becoming a remarkably ubiquitous phenomenon."
Wrong. if you specify an individual, and present them with every blog on the planet, the person probably won't care about the majority of the blogs. but crucially, if you specify any given blog, the chances are extremely high that at least SOMEBODY will be interested in it. You can say "nobody cares" ad nauseum. it's arguable whether or not anybody cares, but the point is, the bloggers don't care whether anybody cares.
"There are even blogs about blogs such as The Blog Herald. It looks like everyone wants their fifteen minutes of fame online."
Who says anybody wants fame? not a SINGLE ONE of the great popular blogs i know ever had any pretensions about fame or attention or the spotlight. some blogs become big, others stay small. bloggers will blog, regardless.
humans like to communicate and to form communities with likeminded individuals. the only problems are these: how does one find the weblogs that will and loggers who will appeal to them? and secondly, when will the sensational detractors and knee-jerk "Nobody Cares What You Think!" peanut gallery get over it?
i've read blogs from all over the world. the internet has closed so many gaps of TIME and SPACE between people, i've absorbed peoples thoughts and ideas that previously i never would have had any contact with (or at least it would have been very difficult or limited). i'm speaking more generally about the internet as a whole, but the potential for human interaction and exchange is unprecedented in human history. weblogs are just the latest form that the planetary social cyberweb has taken.
somebody who posts random thoughts or pictures of their cat is doing the most passively expressive thing possible: they're not dictating anything to anybody, they're not demanding anything, they're just making their own existence manifest in cyberspace. (maybe someone will care, great, maybe the person just likes doing it, great, maybe nobody will care--ANY HARM DONE? no). on the other hand, the chorus of snobbery is pretty noxious in contrast. projecting that somebody is demanding attention or assuming "Everybody Cares About Me!" is just a means for putting-on a bunch of reactionary nonsense.
of course, nobody will BE CONCERNED with dropping the family's mobile computer down the stairs, when mobile laptops are as inexpensive and as durable as a cigar box, or a frozen pizza, or a regular paper notebook. (in other words, a PADD device from star trek TNG that bounces like a superball.)
and these devices are RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER, folks. get in line!
consumers increasing the value of the products they've purchased? tailoring them to their own sinister ends? i predict massive retaliation.
and the best kind of retaliation! fruitless retaliation.
gg.
not really. i thought it was about some guy who was embroiled in a legal battle with a robotic DHCP router droid for thinking he owned his own IP address and for cyberwaltzing around the network like he owned the place.
my own network is enforced by RDRD's.
and it's really not a laughing matter, believe me.
freedom comes from business?
slavery was a business. did you know that? have you heard of it? it was a major cashcow, too.
i don't think you've noticed this either: many, or even most, people who have jobs still can't afford to donate to political campaigns.
have you ever heard of child-labor? the so-called free market necessitates such things, from the perspective of THE BOTTOM LINE, the profit/greed motive.
maybe you're about to say "Everyone is Free to be Rich." unfortunately, "being rich" by definition means a CONCENTRATION of wealth, which by definition means other people aren't rich.
have you ever heard of colonialism? mercantilism? the subjugation of entire countries had "business", money, and resources as its goal.
have you heard of christopher columbus? his crews murdered many people for gold. they came to the so-called New World for money and resources. that's business.
and i'm sure you also haven't realized this: some of the most tyrannical regimes in modern history had "free markets." they even hunted down and imprisoned or executed communists (communists are people who oppose capitalism and say a lot of nasty things about "free markets). hitler and mussolini both gave entirely free reign to big business. (in your view, the bigger the business, the freer the people, right?)
you're telling me that when i denigrate those enterprises, i'm denigrating freedom?
if freedom only comes from business, then what did the "heros" you're talking about sacrifice to protect my freedom to live? you make no sense.
the idea that "freedom" only exists because of the free market is one of the most absurd things i've heard in recent times. maybe you were joking, maybe this doesn't need a response, but i can't say i'm very optimistic these days.
i don't love to hate them.
i love to stop using their products, in favor of better alternatives.
"Next time a Hitler storms the continent and you come screaming for help, don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out of the White House."
there was an attack on pearl harbor. US entered world war II.
did anybody come "screaming"? no. but it makes a good story for chest-thumping and for hanging around the neck of any european who criticizes the US.
to rephrase that: did anybody come "screaming"? yes. many jews were turned away and barred from immigration, and by the time of pearl harbor, poland, france, UK, china, egypt, indochina, were all already invaded/at-war at best or defeated/occupied at worst. US joined the war after it, itself, was attacked. not before. (there was merely some oil-market jockeying before that point.)
truman admired stalin, too.
those are the facts, jack.
i wonder if the truth will bring my mod-karma down even lower.
oooooooooooooh, too bad at home i have nothing but dial-up access with my ibook, and i'm on broadband here at work with a windows machine, and THE OPERA WEBSITE WON'T LET ME DOWNLOAD THE MAC/OSX INSTALLER FROM A WINDOWS MACHINE TO STICK ON A FLASHDRIVE AND HAPPILY BRING HOME.
goddam smart-ass browser-checker cgi script download-redirecting assholes.
oh, wait. it worked.
FOSS seems to baffle and confuse a lot of people. the article is either very confused, or has major ulterior motives, or money-driven paranoia. OSS isn't a household term. never before in human history has there been an entity or domain where a product/good could be MASS-PRODUCED without investment (digital reproduction) and distributed the world over, free of charge. (that i can think of.) software + internet = completely new kind of non-economy. you don't need a printing press, or a factory, or a warehouse, to GET GOOD THINGS TO PEOPLE.
now, getting onto your post, i haven't seen anybody profess that FOSS is always superior over closed-source alternatives, or that nobody has a right to complain about it when an app has problems.
what people are saying is this: it's free. you just can't have the same kind of expectation about being coddled or about commitment to you as a "customer", getting your ass kissed, getting "service". because you're not paying. it's like complaining about staff/service shortage while eating at a volunteer-run charity dinner. the "business model" vocabulary has obviously failed us; everyone can and should have standards and expectations about the quality of a piece of software, but TFA and some commentators have just been blurring the issues.
there seems to be a subtlety about the situation that is lost on a lot of people, at this point in history. when you don't like OSS, you Don't Use It. there's no contract, you're not paying money, there's no agreement that you're entitled to anything. if some OSSware pisses you off, you go elsewhere, perhaps to a commercial vendor. you don't "take your business elsewhere" or anything like that, since you didn't take your business anywhere in the first place.
i've never known anybody to "bitch and moan" when a company, out of either necessity or FUD, goes with a huge commercial software solution. if anything, i've seen OSS proponents lament the fact that you yourself outlined: company XYZ makes billions of dollars, often with nothing but a mediocre product and legal/marketing muscle.
you can't lump all FOSS together and "press" somebody about a "lack of support/quality." some projects are better and more active than others. (i don't feel the need to give examples.) it's like generalizing about the quality of random street musicians.
secondly, when you bring up the "if you don't like it, write your own code!" attitude, i don't know what you're talking about. the non-developer consumer can simply continue their search for a solution. there's nothing about a shoddy or unsuitable FOSS application that somehow demands a closed-source alternative (except in cases where there that's the only option, obviously). in other words, when a FOSS app doesn't appease or suit someone's purposes, it's logical to search for the real solution in both the FOSS and commercial realms. (additionally, could anybody refer me to a case of an OSS developer telling somebody "you don't like it? quit griping, it's free." i've never seen that before, and i've been through a lot of documentation and comment-threads.)
most people with brains have the notion of a cost-benefit analysis. you find the solution that WORKS FOR YOU, and that's the most COST-EFFECTIVE. and "free" takes the cake, except when the product sucks.
the few people i've known who were "pushed" toward closed commercial software are people who just don't "trust" anything free; they assume that something they pay for won't fail them miserably. the hacker stereotypes and "cheeto's on the keyboard" tropes just make people more afraid.
and at this point in time, we're only just beginning.
and i definitely fail to see how these strawman Bad Attitudes of the FOSS camp have contributed to microsoft's market dominance, which is what you just said. remember when microsoft was hung out to dry by the courts for being a monopoly? believe it or not, MS didn't get into that position because of FOSS promoters being jerky.
probably the remains of some folks that were flourishing in the area before the "genocide phase" of the American Experiment took place.
when you mod me down as a troll, i'll consider it your conscience speaking.
yes everyone, go read a science fiction novel.
because, of course, there's no other way we'll be able to learn about the grave consequences of a group of children who never got spanked. we have to read about it in a work of fiction that an author made up out of Pure Imagination.
because, of course, there's no such thing as a "scientific" "method", and it's doubtful that we can use our common sense to parse reality for ourselves, and no human being has ever NOT been spanked. so we just don't know what's in store for civilization as a whole if the spanking stops.
you might imagine... that all youngsters will be terrifically INCORRIGIBLE, but the horror won't stop there. actually, not spanking your children will eventually result with Big Government kicking down your door.
i fear the worst. INSTANT. MISCREANTS.
(were you joking?)
anybody got fined 12,000 dollars for renting or selling a "violent" movie to a youngster?
or better yet, a cartoon.
or an orson scott card novel.
why should you have to "flex your [nuclear] muscle" unless you feel weak? unless you don't have faith in any other strategy, or your cunning, diplomacy, alliances, and traditional military power?
(by a similar token, when you see a fascist poster that says "NO READING!", you know exactly what they're weakpoint is. (not quite the same, but provocative nevertheless))
the idea that this policy flexes our muscles is absurd. just like how somebody flexing their muscles is absurd; on the other hand, somebody demonstrating the speed and fighting efficiency of bruce lee is not absurd, and is pretty menacing. the necessity of having to suddenly "flex our muscle" probably means america has fallen a little behind on How Strong We Look. we're in the middle of at least one (or at least i only hear about one-- but i feel like i'm missing something, maybe it's long over?) war right now. so it seems clear that the administration knows that we're not impressing anyone with our military efforts. (and we haven't made up the ground on any domestic fronts, the fed.government can't/won't even get on top of a major disaster area
like somebody already said, trumpeting first-strike authority just prompts all of our enemies to get more serious about their first strike capabilities SO THAT THEY CAN PRE-EMPT OUR PRE-EMPTION. is it really going to come down to nuking somebody's nukes or proto-nukes?
hell if we'd nuked iraq, we wouldn't have all the evidence of ZERO WMD CAPABILITY staring us in the face. we wouldn't even have to bother with cooking up faulty intelligence.
i'm sure some trolls are going to come out now and say that the consequent arms race will bolster our economy, eliminate poverty, improve technology, bla bla bla. maybe i'll get trolled anyway, because i'm not chest-thumping, and because it actually concerns me that the advancement of nuclear technology in the last few decades has not coincided with any advancement of human civility. unfortunately, we're talking about weapons that are destructive on such a massive scale that they're only possible use is endless slaughter of civilians. the stakes are a little too high. (we already invaded a WMD-boogeyman, they had nothing, president declared "mission accomplished" with a flight suit on-- the war-mongering was bad enough, but at least it didn't involve using nuclear weapons.)
i don't want to antagonize you, but "If you sell those bombs on the black market, expect your nuclear reprocessing plants to be obliterated." is a pretty telling point. it was said that terrorists would gain nuclear weapons (and other wmds) from iraq-- but in truth they didn't, weren't, and couldn't possibly have done so because iraq didn't have anything, but iraq was invaded anyway. so it seems like we're just upping the psychosis here, and moving to a policy of nuclear attack, rather than conventional, for boogeyman nations that don't pose a threat to anybody. (or at least no more than anybody else)
can't say that "low-yield" "tactical" nuclear weapons make me any more comfortable.
part of the real feat is the full auto-pilot that's talented enough now to dock with the ISS without any manual over-ride at all. (apparently, unlike earlier i recall.)
i wasn't exclaiming just about the fact that it's a craft with no people inside.
the guy down below makes the hilarious/informative point: any decent program would have a [...]. the thrust of that joke is related to my surprise at RTFA. i'm used to the ameri-spaceprogram.
the russians have unmanned cargo spacecraft?
and one just docked successfully with the ISS?
do i live under a rock?
i think i'm impressed.
i suppose umannedness eliminates all logistical problems of life support on a craft bound for the ISS, but still i'm impressed.
can't REALLY say anything for the profitibility question, but i hear you. i stopped using all the planet[crap] pages and IGN once they started asking me for registration just to download a game DEMO. a game DEMO! i think the publishing companies and IGN decided they want to put every possible obstacle in my way to stop me from trying out and buying a game. and the commercials... flash ads.
i'd say it's a bad thing for IGN if news corps doesn't make the content more accessible. i don't know how they could sustain their visitor-flow if anything gets any worse. (but i'm also clueless as to what the visitor flow is, or its trends recently.)
the internet was different back then. i remember two things: i frequently couldn't connect to a mirror, because their capacity was full. (that never happens anymore to me-- NEVER.) but on the other hand... content and data (videos, patches, demos) weren't hidden away behind commercials, flash flashers, and registration/login systems. and for that, i'm out of the loop now.
i mean damn, some publishing companies don't even host their own game demos. you have to go through all the megasite planet[crap] and IGN and the like, and it gaddam pisses me off.
i suppose my grief was more of a historical artifact. from the days of playing sega genesis as a kid and wondering why the controller was terrible, then there split-button d-pad for playstation... and then came those god-awful PC gamepads (especially the microsoft ones).
yeah, Expose implements some screen corner usage. great. but Mac OS X stil doesn't have any visual feedback when you hover over buttons or any other clickable part of the interface. (no special mousepointer for window resize, no visual button changes to indicate that youre hovering on the proper clickable space, etc.) i'm a-- mostly-- contented mac user, but that really gets my goat. and my goose.
what's the hold-up? it's not like we're talking about the video-game directional pad which was patented decades ago and has a reason for not being standard. (in other words, there's a reason for all the CRAP alternatives. i hope to god there's not a sleeper patent on the GUI/OS feature i'm talking about....)
From the Department of Homeland Security Website:
In the event of a terrorist attack, natural disaster or other large-scale emergency, the Department of Homeland Security will assume primary responsibility on March 1st for ensuring that emergency response professionals are prepared for any situation. This will entail providing a coordinated, comprehensive federal response to any large-scale crisis and mounting a swift and effective recovery effort. The new Department will also prioritize the important issue of citizen preparedness. Educating America's families on how best to prepare their homes for a disaster and tips for citizens on how to respond in a crisis will be given special attention at DHS.
NOT DESIGNED TO MOVE FAST you say? how about swiftly, comprehensively, effectively? they use billions of dollars to move slowly, unswiftly, and not at all?
(we're putting aside FEMA and army corps of engineers for the moment)
i'm not saying nobody in LA made any bad decisions, but it's ridiculous to claim that all the death can be put "squarely on the shoulders" of the government of NO and LA.
"not designed to move fast" looks like another way of saying "it's not the government's job to do anything, losers." and i've seen a lot of that lately. despite....those um.... TAXES everyone pays, and the mission statements and budgets of these federal agencies and departments.
better watch yourself. i got flamed yesterday, pretty severely, for wondering where the federal response and swiftness was. yeah.
in the words of the bushco mob, it's a "state problem."
see, we just brush under the rug the money (and national guard resources) used to secure a foreign nation at the expense of our own land, all the tax money that's gone to FEMA (and hell, also to homeland security: terrorists could have planned to blow up the levees , not to mention the tax money that's gone to the army corp of engineers so that the water-works section could do absolutely nothing for the levees over the last few years despite their being one of the top 3 official vulnerabilities facing the nation.
at times like this, the federal government and a band of citizen lackeys just take the chance to say "no, sorry, it's not the government's job to do anything, losers."
(i'm not necessarily criticizing congressional appropriation action that's underway (which is strictly a financial mobilization), but the FEMA, corps, MP, and national guard rescue/security effort was or has been incompetent to non-existent. just read what people on the ground there have been saying.)
hi there friend, your response just happens to be the most poignantly stupid one i've received.
/. post not to me, since it's a useless front-page commercial spot for nikon, right?
it's funny you should say what you just did, considering the federal government has jurisdiction right now over half of LA's national guard resources-- which are overseas
secondly-- i already know what the role of federal government is, evidently you don't. you'd
here's some food for thought from March 2002:
"The assistant secretary of the Army, Mississippi's former U.S. Rep. Mike Parker, was forced out Wednesday after he criticized the Bush administration's proposed spending cuts on Army Corps of Engineers' water projects, members of Congress said.
"Apparently he was asked to resign," said U.S. Rep. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., a member of the House Appropriations Committee's energy and water development subcommittee that oversees the corps' budget.
Parker earned the ire of administration officials when he questioned Bush's planned budget cuts for the corps, including two controversial Mississippi projects.
that's from missi's Clarion-Ledger
what do you think we pay taxes to the army corps of engineers for? in your world apparently, just so you/they can say "too bad, it's not the government's job to do something about it, losers."
by the same reasoning i suppose you don't think congress should not make any appropriations to assist the devestated areas. and speaking of other problems, like terrorism, why have an FBI or CIA at all? 9/11 was new york's problem
and there's more: "The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says it expects to finish closing off New Orleans' 17th Street Canal from Lake Pontchartrain on Friday. Most of the water now covering the city came from breaches in that canal and two others." (from npr)
makes you wonder what the federal government is doing there, eh, when it's just a problem that the state should have to deal with on its own. and you might like to know that your esteemed leader bush has already declared that the disaster will require the attention of the country for a long time-- i guess you'd really clash with him about the role of the executive, the federal government, and so forth.
as for the rest of you reactionary cowards,
" What, you think this is called "Slashdot: Only for Americans" ? This is typical american patriotism bullshit. Do you even realise that there are places in this world that look like this, even worse, every day? While I applaud the people surviving this and feel sorry for the losses of others, it does not concern me one bit.
Get off your high horse, let the rest of us get on with our lives and shut up."
yeah i do realizes there are places in the world that look like that, all the time. i'm there, most of the time. it's nice to know that while you "feel sorry", none of it concerns you one bit. i can't possibly fathom how mentioning the destruction of one of the most internationally-known cities in america is "american patriotism bullshit." when the tsunami happened did you flame anyone who talked about it in public as bullshit patriots for [whatever nation they might have mentioned, if any] ?
you obviously have major problems if what i posed somehow hindered you from Getting On With Your Life. you must feel really guilty and helpless, or somehow utterly inconvenienced, otherwise i don't know how you react so extremely. so i'm sorry for you.
oh, and dear soapbox guy: maybe you were referring to the
last things last. "stop bitching, nobody here can help. it's distance. go help yourself." you very clearly missed the entire thrust of what i said (you can disagree all you want, but unfortunately you're missing the point.) i wasn't trying to enlist help. i was pointing out a few absurdities that strangely haven't seemed to dawn on the american conscience as a whole. yeah it even applies to you too, imagine that.
oh great. a wifi digital camera or something.
also, an entire american city is underwater with many people dying, the refugees haven't been provided for, hospitals have filled their stairwells with dead, and half the region's national guard is in iraq along with many of billions of dollars
but don't worry folks, homeland security will protect you-- just continue to BUY your gadgets and what not, and we'll get through this. oh, and, keep paying your taxes (except if you're in the top 2% of richest people in america of course, if that's you, we'll give you a break) and keep supporting the current administration
if only a natural disaster could give us an opportunity for tough-guy macho posturing in the same way that a foreign attack does, well, then there'd be something to say about the catastrophe down south instead of just staring the incompetent/non-existent national rescue effort in the face.
crucial phrase: in a "free society" the real killer point here is the FUTURE CONNECTION between "our culture" and a "free society" what do you think the self-righteous extremists will do when people Just Stop Caring? keep in mind, they're the ones with money, power, and political influence right now. (did you ever see that unpromoted commercial with the RIAA freakforce busting into peoples homes and gunning them down, slitting their throats? that comes to mind.) by your argument, all bureacratic convolution, kafkaesque absurdity, and orwellian aspects of reality wouldn't exist-- because people would discount them for their absurdity. we've already instituted so-called "free speech zones", implying that the constitution does not apply to public space, except when the man says so. we have countless people imprisoned, with no charges, no trial, no legal counsel-- presumably because the nation state has no case against them. some bigwig justice official just the other day said that the primary concern for law enforcement and the justice deptarment is pornography. file-sharing and "downloading" is constantly demonized in a sensational way as illegal/infringement, totally disregarding the facts about what cds/tapes/whatever people already own when they download some songs, which files are freeware i'm not really arguing with you. i'm probably more pessimistic. in other words i usually think things will get worse before they get a lot worse.
how much "intelligence" do most animals need to find more than enough food to survive?
maybe you're only talking about a possibility, ("we needn't have [NECESSARILY] directly killed them"), but still your comments seem pretty off-target or at least shallow. --along with a lot of other comments around here when such topics come up.
you have absolutely no evidence that the humans simply had "higher intelligence." what you just said is a foolish just-so story. "well, humans had higher intelligence, so they got the food. the neanderthals couldn't compete." it's totally circular, just running around the fact that neanderthals are gone and humans aren't. any number of things can lead to a species extinction or apparent disappearance.
neanders and humans would only have had to "compete" in the way you're describing if they were trying to fill the same ecological niche-- which would mean that they were most likely competing in a confrontational way, if anything like what you're saying actually happened. if your totally vacuous story was true, then all neanderthal remains would show signs of starvation. (...take a guess about whether that's true or not)
it's just as silly and oversimplified as all the garbage about how humans simply started using "blade tech" and could "clean house" on all the HUGE GAME ANIMALS RUNNING ALL OVER THE PLACE. in fact, the role that big game animals and "hunting" played in the prehistoric human diet is overexaggerrated, and over-represented for physical and chemical reasons. plus, it makes windbags (like some people in this thread) feel like they have a big johnson, i think. or like they have acute intelligence, or super-hunting ferocity, embedded in their souls. nice try. (in most environments, "hunting" can't sustain a human population by itself, and meat-eating itself is usually only a pivotal part of the diet when those resources are maintained by intervention, pastoralism, and the animal-analogs to agricultre.)
you must not have noticed: 1) you didn't learn to read by walking through a library and picking up books. no, you had to be explicitly taught. nobody learns to read spontaneously, but they learn to speak and use language expertly without teaching (and, no, mothers saying "honey, it's CAUGHT, not CATCHED... say CAUGHT!" doesn't have anything to do with it). the only way anybody could possibly learn to read in a way that's comparable to the way people learn to use language is if written sentences/text were immediately present for the context to which they refer. (at least present to the same degree that situational context is present for vocal utterances that refer to them.) 2) music isn't anything like a spoken human language most people are explicitly taught to read music, whereas children spontaneously learn languages-- quit automatically-- just from exposure to the ambient language. secondly, practically all human beings learn their native language (easily) to a proficiency that only a small few musicians achieve (instrumentally/compositionally.) i still don't agree on the language/music relationship you're throwing out there [as two cents....], but if you actually think about them, the facts about music versus language tend to negate your point. 3) sign languages are as grammatically complex (sometimes even richer) as spoken languages like english. sign languages have syntactic properties just like spoken languages. and interestingly, deaf babies make hand motions that are equivalent to a speaking/hearing baby's vocal babble. sign languages have a "sensitive" period for learning: an adult cannot learn a sign language to fluency, just like [almost] no adults can learn a language to fluency, in adulthood. please notice that sign language, when used, is exactly parallel to spoken language, but READING/text/written-language is not. the real thrust of this is that if it was A GENERAL ABILITY OF PATTERN RECOGNITION THAT ALLOWED YOU TO LEARN LANGUAGE, why is there a sensitive period? why can't people in adulthood learn new languages to fluency? anyway, even if you tried you couldn't possibly identify all the "patterns" that are present in the sentences you are writing. your knowledge is unconscious. so, no, language doesn't rest on a "general purpose ability" to recognize patterns. there are language-impaired people who can recognize all kinds of patterns just fine, but they can't form a sentence (even when they can speak separate words perfectly fine your post is half-ass and pretty miserable. why am i even bothering?