And the thing about the priests of scientism is that they once they feel confident in a conclusion it becomes like a religious dogma. Once they have a council and get all the archbishops to agree on this conclusion it is in their eyes forever true and beyond question.
More than that, not just ordinary truth, but an ineffable, infallible truth, the very essence of all that is good. And anyone that questions it is thus promoting all that is evil, so these priests of course believe they are perfectly justified in using any and all means necessary to choke out the unbelievers, the skeptics - making it virtually impossible to fund and carry out research that does not explicitly accept and assume that conclusion. Which makes it exceedingly difficult to prove their hypothesis false, of course. Good for their personal positions, but very bad for science itself.
Because Science is not a secular religion. Science is a method for ascertaining reality. One that presumes and requires the very skepticism that the priests fight as a mortal enemy.
"Denialist" is obviously a slur word, your suspicious side should perk up the moment you hear it.
In this case, it is used to refer to anyone that doubts the pronouncement that HIV=AIDS. Several prominent researchers have fell into that category from the day that conclusion was announced.
There are several different alternative hypotheses, for instance Duesberg argues that HIV is harmless, a very weak virus that is found only in the blood of people experiencing immune collapse (for some other reason) because a healthy immune system wipes it out immediately. Just an opportunistic infection that can be used as a diagnostic.
On the other hand, the Perth group IIRC actually argues that there is no such thing as HIV at all. They challenge the claim that it's ever been properly isolated, and the best I recall they basically argue that what is being detected as HIV is simply cellular trash of a kind typical of an individual with severely compromised immunities.
Not at all. A straight copy simply means an opportunity for more people to see his work, which authors normally want. On the other hand someone taking it apart and cutting it up, 'remixing' it to make the author look bad (and whether you think it's justified or not that is clearly what was done) is not something the author normally wants to see.
So no, not suspicious at all, perfectly normal and expected.
The real question here is whether the hostile piece does fall within fair use or not, and that is unfortunately a very complicated legal question, ultimately based on somewhat subjective criteria, so it's not easy to know for sure. It may well require a court to make that determination, which means a lot of lawyer fees for both of the gentlemen involved.
Contracts of adhesion are weak and suspect, at best, and we could have a nice debate about it, but it's beside the point here because a EULA isnt a contract of adhesion either. A contract of adhesion, weak as it is, is still something that you see up front and accept or reject prior to closing the deal. With a EULA, the deal is complete, the money handed over, the product accepted, before it's seen.
Imagine if booksellers tried to get away with this. You buy a book, you pay your money, you get your receipt, you walk out of the store, and start reading. And find a nice little note from the publisher claiming to be a contract (though it isnt) and/or a license (and clearly not that) which purports to strip you of basic rights in return for permission (which you dont need) to read the book. It further cautions you in the strongest possible terms that violating these rules will result in the harshest legal actions.
Would you regard that as binding? Or would you just laugh and ignore it?
If as one would suspect based on your argument so far your answer is the former I am afraid you are part of the cancer that is killing our civilization. That may sound dramatic, but it's true. Civilization cannot long survive if people are buffaloed into submission so easily.
"No, you don't (unless you're representing a game publisher or developer, in which case maybe you do). Read the fine print included with any game you buy today on physical media."
No thank you, I have no desire wasting my time reading bunch of dense legalese written to intimidate the ignorant. Fine print that I do not read or sign has no bearing on the situation. It certainly comes nowhere close to having the required elements of a contract.
"You bought the disc, so you generally have the right to resell the disc, and the licenses are transferable as well"
Where do you get this absurd idea that you need a license to use a program?
Do you need a license to read a book? To listen to a CD?
No, you only need a license when you intend to do something with a work which is NOT normal use, which is NOT permitted by copyright law. Like modifying and redistributing the work.
A EULA is not a contract because it lacks the required elements of a contract, and it is not a license either, because it grants NO license! Instead, it purports to impose an anti-license, that is to impose draconian limits far above and beyond what copyright law provides, unilaterally. There is no legal principle to support this, other than 'who has the gold makes the rules.'
Companies are able to make ludicrous 'legal' threats and claims and abuse their customers and get away with it but that is the result of a legal system that requires money, and lots of it, to get satisfaction. Companies have tons of money, individuals of modest means who somehow come to their attention can be railroaded and the law be damned. But let's not pretend that there is any legal or ethical support for them to do it. It's brute corruption of the legal system and process, nothing more.
It would be nice to know exactly what they are doing with it, but it seems fair to assume they are doing something with it or it wouldnt be collected in the first place.
And I cant think of anything, however far-fetched, that they could be doing with it that would be legitimate.
Nonsense. I dont buy licenses. I buy games. I have no continuing business relationship with the retailers, the publishers, or the developers as a result. The games I have bought are mine, remain mine, and I use them as I see fit without any further involvement with the aforementioned.
The publishers can comfort themselves with unlawful legal fictions if it makes them feel better about the transaction but they got their money and I got my disk and that is an exchange, not a license. I have neither asked for, nor accepted, any sort of license.
Steam, on the other hand, does not merely console themselves with unenforceable legal fictions. They actually have the balls to demand you install their traitorware on your system to do business with them.
"If you never want to interact with Steam again, you wouldn't cancel your business relationship with them, since that would mean terminating the licenses you had to play their games (i.e. the digital equivalent of snapping the game discs in half)"
They, not I, actually took that step years ago, when they first released Steam. I had programs I had purchased from them prior to this, which were online games, which they therefore had the technical ability to disable. I believed at the time that they were good guys and could be trusted with that power, and they proved me wrong. They shamelessly used that technical ability to try to force me to install Steam, just in order to have access to the games I had already bought.
Obviously I am not submissive enough to be their customer. A company gets to treat me like that once only, and they better not expect to ever see another penny out of me after. At this point they couldn't pay me to enter any sort of relationship with them.
"It always seems that when companies start trying to branch out into wildly dissimilar industries, it's a sign of trouble within the organization. Do what you do well, figure out how to do it better if things aren't going how you'd like them. Don't try making sushi if you've always sold donuts."
The same thing is true of computer programs - the good ones have a clear job they do well, and when they start with the featuritis is when they go bad.
The submitter typically dashes it off in a hurry, afraid someone else will get it in first. He figures the 'editors' can fix an odd typo or whatnot before posting. He has not been here very long, or he would realize they never do. They just pick one of the two dozen nearly identical submissions at random and post it, maybe with a snide editorial comment added, but they never proofread anything.
In this case it appears they have paired 6w speakers with a soundcard that pushes 10w output. Someone probably tested it *very* minimally and said "it works, ship it."
Well yeah, that setup will work, most of the time. And clearly it's the cheapest option in the short run. But in the long run shoddy design like that does have a cost - increased returns, increased warranty claims.
You can wave your hands about waveforms and clipping all you want, the fact is that properly made equipment doesnt do this. I have pushed square waves through ridiculous amplification setups and thence to my speakers many, many times without damaging anything.
After digging deeper it seems the problem is they have matched a sound card that will put out 10w max and speakers that are only safe up to 6w max. So yes, playing an Iron Maiden album and using VLC to saturate the speakers even more should blow the speakers, it's exactly what I would expect.
And yes, they do this to cut costs, but they should be calculating warranty costs into it when they decide whether skimping is cost effective. Looks to me like they skipped that step and now want to disclaim their warranty. I get that they are putting out cheap crap because that is what customers demand but I dont think that gives them any legal grounds to deny the warranty.
"Actually almost any speaker can be damaged by overdriving it for long periods of time. "
Which is why when you design a system with an integrated audio system (like, say, a laptop) you have to match the components. The last stage of amplification should never send a signal to the speakers that they cant handle, regardless of input.
Dell has the whole chain here, it's their amplifier and their speaker. Anything VLC will feed into that system is something you could feed into it in other ways as well. That system should be designed so that the amplifier will not send a signal that destroys the speakers no matter what input it is given. If they cut corners and made a system that is given to damaging the speakers, then at minimum they should be replacing said speakers.
Homo *sapiens* migrated out of africa roughly 100k years ago.
These are not homo sapiens, they were members of an earlier and now extinct human race which had already spread from Africa to cover Europe and Asia at an earlier time.
For instance 'gives the author freedom' was simply taking what the poster I replied to had conceded and running with it. My contribution was not the original meme, simply reshaping it to a more appropriate shape with a bit of tongue in the cheek.
Neither license actually gives the author freedom. The license is not for the author. A license amounts to a covenant not to sue from the author - who needs mental, not legal, help if he tries to sue himself.
The BSD license gives your immediate downstream maximum freedom, including the ability to cut off freedom, refuse to offer it, to their own downstream.
The GPL license gives immediate downstream nearly the same thing, minus only the ability to cut off the freedom of their downstream.
Interesting. On my screen instead of a gear it shows a tiny little box with the code "F013" scrunched up inside like it's Korean, but it does actually seem to work, once you turn off all security, reload, and find the little bugger.
Not as bad as I feared, on that particular score at least. It certainly still seems very much like 'design' is being put first and function is an afterthought, however.
Even after finding the control and setting it, it just resets every time you change pages too.
I am not completely sure how far it goes myself, I have not had mod points to see if that changes it, but from other comments it appears that moderation is just GONE. I can see that even after allowing them to run all their dirty scripts and clicking madly to get a few comments to show up, still no scores are shown, and no thresholds available. It does not appear to be possible to link a particular comment, to filter by score... yeah it looks like the moderation system itself has been thrown out the window.
Yeah, the other poster mentioned it breaks the moderation system. The moderation system is what results (usually) in the better, more insightful, informative, or funny comments being modded up into the default view, making them easy to find.
The slashdot article is usually confused, muddled, horse crap but what makes the site interesting is that people that actually know what they are talking about will correct it, and explain it. Those posts get modded up, making them easy to find and read, making the entire thing worth visiting. This is the unique killer feature of Slashdot, the thing that makes it different from any other boring stale user-driven news site. So yeah, if that is broken that is a HUGE deal.
I never got far enough to notice that, frankly. I load an article and there are no comments, I am in the wrong place and I leave. I went back later, temporarily disabled my browser security to test it, and it loaded ONE apparently randomly selected comment.
I come here for the comments. Threaded, with higher rated posts broken out. Take that away and this is just another stupid boring site that no one other than on-the-clock shills and the occasional clueless joe redirected via adware will read.
My old cheap Samsung tracks via accel. and compass most of the time, because the GPS is so poor. As long as it can get a GPS fix every few minutes it covers up for the crappy GPS antenna quite well. IIRC the 'Tomtom' that I used to use at work would do the same thing, only of course it didnt need the capability near as often, but you could drive through a long tunnel with it and still show actual position until the signal re-established at the other end.
Presumably there is something new here, but the basic concept certainly is not.
Text is our most efficient method of encoding language, however.
The only language-agnostic way to program is to do it directly in binary or hex. The only reason this is language agnostic is because the Arabic numerals, unlike the Latin alphabet, is ideographic.
A "visual" system where you point and drool and get code generated for you *still has to generate some code* in order to work, whether directly in binary or through some higher-level intermediary language then fed to a compiler or an interpreter. If it's done right it might be a very useful tool but it's never going to change the fact that the only thing a computer can do is perform operations on numbers and push them back and forth across the bus.
What it gets you is extra overhead and resource usage on a device that is probably already hideously slow and chronically short of resources at best.
They are making the right call here. JQuery is an extra and completely unneeded layer of abstraction over the ecmascript which is more than abstract enough to begin with. It's used to let you run the same code across incompatible interpreters. In this case the app will run on one and only one interpreter and you should know which one that is ahead of time.
Easy solution, copy the bits of jquery you are using inline, then READ them, and delete all the stuff you dont need. Test and resubmit.
Beta is so pretty, I love how they use these wierd little boxes with cryptic codes inside instead of graphics, and manage to fit 20% of the information on the page while still wasting the entire right third of the screen on empty space. And refusing to load any comments sure is a time saver! With nothing but the usually erroneous (and only semi-intelligible) blurb to see, and no ability to reply, the hour or two a week I currently waste on slashdot will certainly be spent doing more productive things in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
And the thing about the priests of scientism is that they once they feel confident in a conclusion it becomes like a religious dogma. Once they have a council and get all the archbishops to agree on this conclusion it is in their eyes forever true and beyond question.
More than that, not just ordinary truth, but an ineffable, infallible truth, the very essence of all that is good. And anyone that questions it is thus promoting all that is evil, so these priests of course believe they are perfectly justified in using any and all means necessary to choke out the unbelievers, the skeptics - making it virtually impossible to fund and carry out research that does not explicitly accept and assume that conclusion. Which makes it exceedingly difficult to prove their hypothesis false, of course. Good for their personal positions, but very bad for science itself.
Because Science is not a secular religion. Science is a method for ascertaining reality. One that presumes and requires the very skepticism that the priests fight as a mortal enemy.
"Denialist" is obviously a slur word, your suspicious side should perk up the moment you hear it.
In this case, it is used to refer to anyone that doubts the pronouncement that HIV=AIDS. Several prominent researchers have fell into that category from the day that conclusion was announced.
There are several different alternative hypotheses, for instance Duesberg argues that HIV is harmless, a very weak virus that is found only in the blood of people experiencing immune collapse (for some other reason) because a healthy immune system wipes it out immediately. Just an opportunistic infection that can be used as a diagnostic.
On the other hand, the Perth group IIRC actually argues that there is no such thing as HIV at all. They challenge the claim that it's ever been properly isolated, and the best I recall they basically argue that what is being detected as HIV is simply cellular trash of a kind typical of an individual with severely compromised immunities.
Not at all. A straight copy simply means an opportunity for more people to see his work, which authors normally want. On the other hand someone taking it apart and cutting it up, 'remixing' it to make the author look bad (and whether you think it's justified or not that is clearly what was done) is not something the author normally wants to see.
So no, not suspicious at all, perfectly normal and expected.
The real question here is whether the hostile piece does fall within fair use or not, and that is unfortunately a very complicated legal question, ultimately based on somewhat subjective criteria, so it's not easy to know for sure. It may well require a court to make that determination, which means a lot of lawyer fees for both of the gentlemen involved.
Contracts of adhesion are weak and suspect, at best, and we could have a nice debate about it, but it's beside the point here because a EULA isnt a contract of adhesion either. A contract of adhesion, weak as it is, is still something that you see up front and accept or reject prior to closing the deal. With a EULA, the deal is complete, the money handed over, the product accepted, before it's seen.
Imagine if booksellers tried to get away with this. You buy a book, you pay your money, you get your receipt, you walk out of the store, and start reading. And find a nice little note from the publisher claiming to be a contract (though it isnt) and/or a license (and clearly not that) which purports to strip you of basic rights in return for permission (which you dont need) to read the book. It further cautions you in the strongest possible terms that violating these rules will result in the harshest legal actions.
Would you regard that as binding? Or would you just laugh and ignore it?
If as one would suspect based on your argument so far your answer is the former I am afraid you are part of the cancer that is killing our civilization. That may sound dramatic, but it's true. Civilization cannot long survive if people are buffaloed into submission so easily.
"No, you don't (unless you're representing a game publisher or developer, in which case maybe you do). Read the fine print included with any game you buy today on physical media."
No thank you, I have no desire wasting my time reading bunch of dense legalese written to intimidate the ignorant. Fine print that I do not read or sign has no bearing on the situation. It certainly comes nowhere close to having the required elements of a contract.
"You bought the disc, so you generally have the right to resell the disc, and the licenses are transferable as well"
Where do you get this absurd idea that you need a license to use a program?
Do you need a license to read a book? To listen to a CD?
No, you only need a license when you intend to do something with a work which is NOT normal use, which is NOT permitted by copyright law. Like modifying and redistributing the work.
A EULA is not a contract because it lacks the required elements of a contract, and it is not a license either, because it grants NO license! Instead, it purports to impose an anti-license, that is to impose draconian limits far above and beyond what copyright law provides, unilaterally. There is no legal principle to support this, other than 'who has the gold makes the rules.'
Companies are able to make ludicrous 'legal' threats and claims and abuse their customers and get away with it but that is the result of a legal system that requires money, and lots of it, to get satisfaction. Companies have tons of money, individuals of modest means who somehow come to their attention can be railroaded and the law be damned. But let's not pretend that there is any legal or ethical support for them to do it. It's brute corruption of the legal system and process, nothing more.
It would be nice to know exactly what they are doing with it, but it seems fair to assume they are doing something with it or it wouldnt be collected in the first place.
And I cant think of anything, however far-fetched, that they could be doing with it that would be legitimate.
Nonsense. I dont buy licenses. I buy games. I have no continuing business relationship with the retailers, the publishers, or the developers as a result. The games I have bought are mine, remain mine, and I use them as I see fit without any further involvement with the aforementioned.
The publishers can comfort themselves with unlawful legal fictions if it makes them feel better about the transaction but they got their money and I got my disk and that is an exchange, not a license. I have neither asked for, nor accepted, any sort of license.
Steam, on the other hand, does not merely console themselves with unenforceable legal fictions. They actually have the balls to demand you install their traitorware on your system to do business with them.
"If you never want to interact with Steam again, you wouldn't cancel your business relationship with them, since that would mean terminating the licenses you had to play their games (i.e. the digital equivalent of snapping the game discs in half)"
They, not I, actually took that step years ago, when they first released Steam. I had programs I had purchased from them prior to this, which were online games, which they therefore had the technical ability to disable. I believed at the time that they were good guys and could be trusted with that power, and they proved me wrong. They shamelessly used that technical ability to try to force me to install Steam, just in order to have access to the games I had already bought.
Obviously I am not submissive enough to be their customer. A company gets to treat me like that once only, and they better not expect to ever see another penny out of me after. At this point they couldn't pay me to enter any sort of relationship with them.
"It always seems that when companies start trying to branch out into wildly dissimilar industries, it's a sign of trouble within the organization. Do what you do well, figure out how to do it better if things aren't going how you'd like them. Don't try making sushi if you've always sold donuts."
The same thing is true of computer programs - the good ones have a clear job they do well, and when they start with the featuritis is when they go bad.
It's not one of those things that looks ugly but works fine, either. Those are fine. We get used to those.
That thing looks fugly and does NOT work. At all. By design, it seems.
I've been a regular here since '97 and I am really going to miss this place.
The submitter typically dashes it off in a hurry, afraid someone else will get it in first. He figures the 'editors' can fix an odd typo or whatnot before posting. He has not been here very long, or he would realize they never do. They just pick one of the two dozen nearly identical submissions at random and post it, maybe with a snide editorial comment added, but they never proofread anything.
In this case it appears they have paired 6w speakers with a soundcard that pushes 10w output. Someone probably tested it *very* minimally and said "it works, ship it."
Well yeah, that setup will work, most of the time. And clearly it's the cheapest option in the short run. But in the long run shoddy design like that does have a cost - increased returns, increased warranty claims.
You can wave your hands about waveforms and clipping all you want, the fact is that properly made equipment doesnt do this. I have pushed square waves through ridiculous amplification setups and thence to my speakers many, many times without damaging anything.
After digging deeper it seems the problem is they have matched a sound card that will put out 10w max and speakers that are only safe up to 6w max. So yes, playing an Iron Maiden album and using VLC to saturate the speakers even more should blow the speakers, it's exactly what I would expect.
And yes, they do this to cut costs, but they should be calculating warranty costs into it when they decide whether skimping is cost effective. Looks to me like they skipped that step and now want to disclaim their warranty. I get that they are putting out cheap crap because that is what customers demand but I dont think that gives them any legal grounds to deny the warranty.
"Actually almost any speaker can be damaged by overdriving it for long periods of time. "
Which is why when you design a system with an integrated audio system (like, say, a laptop) you have to match the components. The last stage of amplification should never send a signal to the speakers that they cant handle, regardless of input.
This sounds to me like a design defect.
Dell has the whole chain here, it's their amplifier and their speaker. Anything VLC will feed into that system is something you could feed into it in other ways as well. That system should be designed so that the amplifier will not send a signal that destroys the speakers no matter what input it is given. If they cut corners and made a system that is given to damaging the speakers, then at minimum they should be replacing said speakers.
Homo *sapiens* migrated out of africa roughly 100k years ago.
These are not homo sapiens, they were members of an earlier and now extinct human race which had already spread from Africa to cover Europe and Asia at an earlier time.
I am not actually doing that, no.
For instance 'gives the author freedom' was simply taking what the poster I replied to had conceded and running with it. My contribution was not the original meme, simply reshaping it to a more appropriate shape with a bit of tongue in the cheek.
Neither license actually gives the author freedom. The license is not for the author. A license amounts to a covenant not to sue from the author - who needs mental, not legal, help if he tries to sue himself.
The BSD license gives your immediate downstream maximum freedom, including the ability to cut off freedom, refuse to offer it, to their own downstream.
The GPL license gives immediate downstream nearly the same thing, minus only the ability to cut off the freedom of their downstream.
There's very little more to it.
Except that you did it wrong.
BSD gives the author freedom, but screws the user. (1-1=0)
GP gives the author freedom, and preserves it for the user also. (1+1=2)
Really, this is simple math, there is no excuse for such a fundamental mistake.
Interesting. On my screen instead of a gear it shows a tiny little box with the code "F013" scrunched up inside like it's Korean, but it does actually seem to work, once you turn off all security, reload, and find the little bugger.
Not as bad as I feared, on that particular score at least. It certainly still seems very much like 'design' is being put first and function is an afterthought, however.
Even after finding the control and setting it, it just resets every time you change pages too.
I am not completely sure how far it goes myself, I have not had mod points to see if that changes it, but from other comments it appears that moderation is just GONE. I can see that even after allowing them to run all their dirty scripts and clicking madly to get a few comments to show up, still no scores are shown, and no thresholds available. It does not appear to be possible to link a particular comment, to filter by score... yeah it looks like the moderation system itself has been thrown out the window.
Yeah, the other poster mentioned it breaks the moderation system. The moderation system is what results (usually) in the better, more insightful, informative, or funny comments being modded up into the default view, making them easy to find.
The slashdot article is usually confused, muddled, horse crap but what makes the site interesting is that people that actually know what they are talking about will correct it, and explain it. Those posts get modded up, making them easy to find and read, making the entire thing worth visiting. This is the unique killer feature of Slashdot, the thing that makes it different from any other boring stale user-driven news site. So yeah, if that is broken that is a HUGE deal.
I never got far enough to notice that, frankly. I load an article and there are no comments, I am in the wrong place and I leave. I went back later, temporarily disabled my browser security to test it, and it loaded ONE apparently randomly selected comment.
I come here for the comments. Threaded, with higher rated posts broken out. Take that away and this is just another stupid boring site that no one other than on-the-clock shills and the occasional clueless joe redirected via adware will read.
My old cheap Samsung tracks via accel. and compass most of the time, because the GPS is so poor. As long as it can get a GPS fix every few minutes it covers up for the crappy GPS antenna quite well. IIRC the 'Tomtom' that I used to use at work would do the same thing, only of course it didnt need the capability near as often, but you could drive through a long tunnel with it and still show actual position until the signal re-established at the other end.
Presumably there is something new here, but the basic concept certainly is not.
Text is not precisely synonymous with language.
Text is our most efficient method of encoding language, however.
The only language-agnostic way to program is to do it directly in binary or hex. The only reason this is language agnostic is because the Arabic numerals, unlike the Latin alphabet, is ideographic.
A "visual" system where you point and drool and get code generated for you *still has to generate some code* in order to work, whether directly in binary or through some higher-level intermediary language then fed to a compiler or an interpreter. If it's done right it might be a very useful tool but it's never going to change the fact that the only thing a computer can do is perform operations on numbers and push them back and forth across the bus.
What it gets you is extra overhead and resource usage on a device that is probably already hideously slow and chronically short of resources at best.
They are making the right call here. JQuery is an extra and completely unneeded layer of abstraction over the ecmascript which is more than abstract enough to begin with. It's used to let you run the same code across incompatible interpreters. In this case the app will run on one and only one interpreter and you should know which one that is ahead of time.
Easy solution, copy the bits of jquery you are using inline, then READ them, and delete all the stuff you dont need. Test and resubmit.
Beta is so pretty, I love how they use these wierd little boxes with cryptic codes inside instead of graphics, and manage to fit 20% of the information on the page while still wasting the entire right third of the screen on empty space. And refusing to load any comments sure is a time saver! With nothing but the usually erroneous (and only semi-intelligible) blurb to see, and no ability to reply, the hour or two a week I currently waste on slashdot will certainly be spent doing more productive things in the future.
Thanks Dice!
/sarcasm
So from now on keep a list on your end of post IDs. Each time you post add the ID to your list. Next time one is deleted you will be able to prove it.