Choices play into one's sense of individuality, be it choice of car, clothing, phone, wallpaper, whatever. To the extent that the choice makes a fashion statement relevant to the individual, it is good to have these choices available.
Standardization makes things functional. We expect a phone to work more or less a certain way, regardless of any fashion statement it might make, because every phone we've used before it was worked more or less that same certain way. When fashion choices start impacting the functionality of an established standard, they are bad.
So when a user, new to linux, is presented with a thousand different distros, 4 different window managers skinned 30 different ways each, and is informed that there can be no correct choice because no matter what, they will end up with some piece of software that cannot be convinced to play nicely on some particular setup, it is bad. Very, very bad.
I suggest, for a moment, the community step back from "FOSS as a way of life", and consider how such a product from a corporation would be received because this is how people outside of your community view your product.
Re:What is this doing in the Science area?
on
An Inconvenient Truth
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
One sided? It's supposed to be. It's a documentary
I'm calling bullshit. Documentary is meant to present an unimpassioned recording of events as they happen, without being tied to or filtered through pet theories.
This I hold as true, in spite of the fact that the Michael Moore school of "propoganda as documentary" continues to be so lucrative.
Not saying that we shouldn't be looking for ways to be kinder to the environment, or that Gore doesn't make some good points, but Documentary? Meh.
No, I don't think it has anything to do with that. The episode was just BAD!
Ummm...
I'll plead ignorance about pretty much anything that Gore has done or tried to do [...]
Well, there's the biggest part of your problem right there. Humor requires familiarity with the source material, otherwise someone has to explain the jokes. And as we all know, the joke is never funny if it has to be explained. Just because *you* didn't get the joke doesn't mean that it isn't relevant or funny.
That brings us back to the parent's "sacred cow". People get very, very touchy about humor pointed at things in which they have a personal investment. Jokes about Scientology are funny, apparently, unless you happen to be a Scientologist. Jokes about "my wife" are funny because we can all relate to difficulties in relationships. But let the joke be about "YOUR wife", and see how much you laugh.
The onslaught of hundreds of patent cases would be like the legal version of a DOS attack
We're already ramping up for this, or did I miss the underlying point of TFA? This is already going on, just really, really slowly. As long as the noise level stays low, as long as the damage is only one or two entities every so often, those responsible for deciding the system is broken and passing the laws to fix it will just keep assuming that it's not broken.
There has to be some level of action and discomfort between status quo and all-out holy war that will prompt effective change. I read the article, and I'm thinking that MS is trying to set themselves up to control that level of discomfort, and I don't like that idea.
A US software patent war would show what a disaster they are.
But, carnage aside, isn't this otherwise a Good Thing? Given the absurd things that the patent office approves under the flag of "[something common], but with a computer!", this might be the most expedient way to have software patents revoked across the board.
Maybe it's time for the Linux community to pull the trigger first for a change.
you consider transformers to be "inefficient", even though they are the most efficient machines known
Simple voltage to voltage transformers are incredibly efficient. Power bricks (or "wall warts") are not, because they are not simply transformers. They are also doing half-wave rectification (at minimum 50% power loss), which results in pretty significant thermal losses. Typical DC power bricks are around 30% efficient.
There are high-efficiency power bricks that do full-wave rectification & can be 95% efficient or better, but what do you think actually comes with your product?
significant evidence that many of those who go on to become [...]
That's why the parent post said "generally". Most people do not go on to become sado-masochistic sexual offenders. That most of this small segment of the population do engage in animal cruelty would not invalidate his statement that, generally, this is not the case.
Oh, come on! Don't "scientists" have anything better to do than state things that are already known?* It's been known that saliva in animals has antiseptic and pain-killing properties for ages. That's why they (and we) have the instint to lick our wounds.
* in the works next, a t-shirt that'll let you air-drum!
Nobody communicated their assumptions. People are now pissed off.
That's it! That's what isn't setting right about your argument. You're trying to cast this as a communications breakdown, as if all of us on the pissed-offy end of things were making vast unfounded assumptions about the intentions of the service.
But the thing is, we weren't making assumptions. CDDB was built as a community project, was intended to be a community project, was stated by the creators to be a community project, was presented as a community project, was run as a community project, was received and contributed to as a community project. It passed the duck test because it was, in fact, a duck.
Until, that is, Gracenote bought them out and subsequently yanked the plug. Enter the great unwashed pissed-offy masses. Gracenote violated the stated purpose and the spirit of the project, and to the extent that any of us had time and effort invested, we were also thereby directly violated.
I understand that you are looking at this as us being the victims of a shell game, and that it is our own faults for not heeding the rules carefully enough at the beginning, but that's not the case.
Interesting. We have had to go over this with our kids too. Sharing doesn't have limits anymore than giving.
This isn't about giving, or sharing... and I feel sorry for your kids.
This is about Rock Stew, or something akin to that. Everybody brings to the pot what they have, for the benefit of all, not just the owner of the pot. That is why Gracenote's actions pissed everybody off. I can't say it any more clearly, and I fail to understand why this simple truth eludes you.
Say a bunch of kids want to play baseball. Everybody has something, a bat, a ball, some gloves, but no one person has all of the equipment for a game. The kids realize that they can pool what they have together and they all benefit - all they need now is a place to play.
The guy down the street says, "I love baseball! You can come play in my field!"
After a while, people start coming to watch the games, and volunteering their own time and efforts - somebody builds some bleachers, somebody else donates some uniforms, somebody volunteers to mow the grass - analogous to the software projects that spoke with CDDB. These are essentially free capital improvements to the guy's field, and to the baseball games themselves. All is good, everybody's happy.
Now imagine, if you will, the guy with the field turning on the kids and saying, essentially, "All your balls are belong to us." You can't come play ball anymore unless you rent your own equipment back from me.
It's his field, so I guess it's his call if he wants to roll that way, but how can you with a straight face act surprised that this pisses people the fuck off?
Sure you must understand that guns are very dangerous if given to the bad people and bad people are the ones who need them most.
There are no grounds to the assumption that a gun owner is automatically a bad person. Of the millions of guns in the United States, only a fraction of a percent will ever be used in a criminal act at all, let alone to shoot or kill a person. The fact is, most guns are owned by responsible, law-abiding people who handle them in responsible, law-abiding ways.
But, sure, in the hands of a bad person, it can be used to do bad things. So can knives, baseball bats, cars, rope, bricks, peanuts, dairy products....
What about the Houston mother who drowned her five children in a bathtub? Does that make a bathtub full of water inherently evil because, in the hands of a clinically depressed mother, it makes children die?
Hasty and ill-conceived piece of legislation? Most of the meat of the act had been on paper for years [...]
See, now, I was trying to give the benefit of the doubt. If this is true, that makes this Act more of an opportunistic power-grab at the expense of several thousand people's lives, and in my mind moves it out of the realm of typical bad policy and more into the realm of actively malicious policy.
Kidding? No. Operative words: "virtually", "in America".
Not to be too dismissive, but an embassy in Lebanon isn't quite the same discussion as downtown New York City. I say "in America" meaning within the political borders of the continental United States, North America.
That said, from your list:
1920 - 35 dead
1975 - 4 dead
1993 - 6 dead
1995 - 168 dead
To this point, Oklahoma City has a higher death toll than the rest of the list, and that's domestic terrorism, seemingly not the impetus behind the Patriot Act. I suppose one could count incidents such as arson and the beltway sniper as acts of terrorism as well, and quite possibly Pearl Harbor (but no, that's an "act of war"), but these didn't get listed in your source.
So, of the four "on American soil" incidents above, there are 213 dead. Then we come to the morning of September 11, 2001:
2973 dead - 2749 in NY, 184 in the Pentagon, 40 in PA, and I refuse to count the 19 hijackers
One attack, 14-fold the damage of everything else combined. So, yeah, "virtually" no Americans died in America from terrorist attacks prior to 9/11. Half that many people die in car accidents each day.
Do you want to compare our scars of terrorism against places like Lebanon, Ireland, Israel? These places put up with this shit on a very, very regular basis. We don't.
Nevermind that this is completely off the point. My point was less about the statistics and severity of terrorism against the US, and more about the fact that I don't believe the Patriot Act has a lot to do with that either which way.
Virtually no Americans have died in America from terrorist attacks following implementation of the USA PATRIOT Act.
Virtually no Americans died in America from terrorist attacks prior to the Patriot Act, either, excepting one particular day in September. I am far more inclined to attribute the relative safety of the past 5 years to status quo than to some hastily and ill-conceived piece of legislation, but that's just me.
That we are safer from terrorism as a result is obvious.
This is not obvious to me. That the Act mandates better comms between the alphabet soup agencies is a Good Thing, but at what cost? How many freedoms and liberties lost or curtailed? How much indignity? How much opacity added to the process?
I mean, do you really feel safer when Gatorade is banned from airline flights? I think the continuous fostering of unfounded paranoia does us more regular damage. After all, if the point of terrorism is to make us feel fear and thereby use it as a weapon, and that is bad, then I can see no good in the fear mongering of our own elected officials. That is the real and continuing cost of 9/11.
But the most valuable lesson for my kid is the "don't try this at home lesson":
If things could in any way go wrong, or burn, or explode, keep a healthy distance.
So sayeth the Mythbusters: "Don't try this at home. We're what you call 'professionals'." But how did they become 'professionals'? Does anybody think they just woke up one morning and thought, "you know, this bus driving gig just ain't cutting it. I think I'll destroy a cement truck with high explosives for television instead."
Of course it didn't happen this way. They are 'professionals' because they've been blowing things up and building Rube Goldberg contraptions for a long time, and you can bet your bottom dollar they started out trying this stuff at home. That would make the advice hypocritical, wouldn't it?
Perhaps on the face of it, but not really. The advice is enough to keep anybody only passingly interested from blowing their fingers off, but they know that anybody "interested enough" will dismiss the warnings... just as they did.
So try this at home, kids! There is no problem that cannot be solved with the proper application of high explosives!
Over 10 minutes, the range goes from 6 feet down to about 3 feet. It gets progressively worse the longer it's on until you have to be right up next to the receiver.
I bought a cordless mouse for my Mom that did something quite similar, also Logitech. The range would just suck, assuming it ever established a connection at all. She had tucked the "ugly little wonky part" (the receiver) behind her phone, between a fluorescent desk lamp & the PC (pizza box, the corner with the PS). Somewhere in there the RF was just stomping the signal. Moving the "ugly little wonky part" out into the open brought it back to life.
Mom: "But now I have to look at it!"
Me: "No, now your mouse works. Looking at the receiver is optional, and probably not very exciting."
FTFA: "Microsoft is recruiting two 'feet on the street' personnel whose role will be to provide proactive assistance during customer visits, and help you get the value proposition for pre-installed software and related services. Give us a call and let's get those feet walking," Alexander wrote.
BINGO! I've got bingo over here! I didn't think I could do that off of two sentences... wow. Now that's innovation for ya!
WooHoo! Verizon hasn't pulled fibre, hasn't upgraded my CO, and has no intentions of doing either in the forseeable future, but THIS marks a happy day! I can finally get BroadBand, and all I have to do is convince ComCast to pull a wire for Verizon to piggyback on, that should be easy.
At least, no more difficult than convincing ComCast to pull a wire so I can subscribe to their own offering.
Slashdot Mirror
Choices play into one's sense of individuality, be it choice of car, clothing, phone, wallpaper, whatever. To the extent that the choice makes a fashion statement relevant to the individual, it is good to have these choices available.
Standardization makes things functional. We expect a phone to work more or less a certain way, regardless of any fashion statement it might make, because every phone we've used before it was worked more or less that same certain way. When fashion choices start impacting the functionality of an established standard, they are bad.
So when a user, new to linux, is presented with a thousand different distros, 4 different window managers skinned 30 different ways each, and is informed that there can be no correct choice because no matter what, they will end up with some piece of software that cannot be convinced to play nicely on some particular setup, it is bad. Very, very bad.
I suggest, for a moment, the community step back from "FOSS as a way of life", and consider how such a product from a corporation would be received because this is how people outside of your community view your product.
One sided? It's supposed to be. It's a documentary
I'm calling bullshit. Documentary is meant to present an unimpassioned recording of events as they happen, without being tied to or filtered through pet theories.
This I hold as true, in spite of the fact that the Michael Moore school of "propoganda as documentary" continues to be so lucrative.
Not saying that we shouldn't be looking for ways to be kinder to the environment, or that Gore doesn't make some good points, but Documentary? Meh.
No, I don't think it has anything to do with that. The episode was just BAD!
Ummm...
I'll plead ignorance about pretty much anything that Gore has done or tried to do [...]
Well, there's the biggest part of your problem right there. Humor requires familiarity with the source material, otherwise someone has to explain the jokes. And as we all know, the joke is never funny if it has to be explained. Just because *you* didn't get the joke doesn't mean that it isn't relevant or funny.
That brings us back to the parent's "sacred cow". People get very, very touchy about humor pointed at things in which they have a personal investment. Jokes about Scientology are funny, apparently, unless you happen to be a Scientologist. Jokes about "my wife" are funny because we can all relate to difficulties in relationships. But let the joke be about "YOUR wife", and see how much you laugh.
The onslaught of hundreds of patent cases would be like the legal version of a DOS attack
We're already ramping up for this, or did I miss the underlying point of TFA? This is already going on, just really, really slowly. As long as the noise level stays low, as long as the damage is only one or two entities every so often, those responsible for deciding the system is broken and passing the laws to fix it will just keep assuming that it's not broken.
There has to be some level of action and discomfort between status quo and all-out holy war that will prompt effective change. I read the article, and I'm thinking that MS is trying to set themselves up to control that level of discomfort, and I don't like that idea.
A US software patent war would show what a disaster they are.
But, carnage aside, isn't this otherwise a Good Thing? Given the absurd things that the patent office approves under the flag of "[something common], but with a computer!", this might be the most expedient way to have software patents revoked across the board.
Maybe it's time for the Linux community to pull the trigger first for a change.
5) In Soviet Russia, ??? profits you!
I, for one, welcome our new ??? profiting Russian overlords.
I always thought it would be cool if someone created a quantum telephone switching device...
You mean I could finally carry on a conversation on my cel phone without being dropped? This must violate some law of space-time.
you consider transformers to be "inefficient", even though they are the most efficient machines known
Simple voltage to voltage transformers are incredibly efficient. Power bricks (or "wall warts") are not, because they are not simply transformers. They are also doing half-wave rectification (at minimum 50% power loss), which results in pretty significant thermal losses. Typical DC power bricks are around 30% efficient.
There are high-efficiency power bricks that do full-wave rectification & can be 95% efficient or better, but what do you think actually comes with your product?
WOOHOO! Time to crack out all of my old Leisure-Suit Larry games!
significant evidence that many of those who go on to become [...]
That's why the parent post said "generally". Most people do not go on to become sado-masochistic sexual offenders. That most of this small segment of the population do engage in animal cruelty would not invalidate his statement that, generally, this is not the case.
Oh, come on! Don't "scientists" have anything better to do than state things that are already known?* It's been known that saliva in animals has antiseptic and pain-killing properties for ages. That's why they (and we) have the instint to lick our wounds.
* in the works next, a t-shirt that'll let you air-drum!
Nobody communicated their assumptions. People are now pissed off.
That's it! That's what isn't setting right about your argument. You're trying to cast this as a communications breakdown, as if all of us on the pissed-offy end of things were making vast unfounded assumptions about the intentions of the service.
But the thing is, we weren't making assumptions. CDDB was built as a community project, was intended to be a community project, was stated by the creators to be a community project, was presented as a community project, was run as a community project, was received and contributed to as a community project. It passed the duck test because it was, in fact, a duck.
Until, that is, Gracenote bought them out and subsequently yanked the plug. Enter the great unwashed pissed-offy masses. Gracenote violated the stated purpose and the spirit of the project, and to the extent that any of us had time and effort invested, we were also thereby directly violated.
I understand that you are looking at this as us being the victims of a shell game, and that it is our own faults for not heeding the rules carefully enough at the beginning, but that's not the case.
Interesting. We have had to go over this with our kids too. Sharing doesn't have limits anymore than giving.
This isn't about giving, or sharing... and I feel sorry for your kids.
This is about Rock Stew, or something akin to that. Everybody brings to the pot what they have, for the benefit of all, not just the owner of the pot. That is why Gracenote's actions pissed everybody off. I can't say it any more clearly, and I fail to understand why this simple truth eludes you.
Say a bunch of kids want to play baseball. Everybody has something, a bat, a ball, some gloves, but no one person has all of the equipment for a game. The kids realize that they can pool what they have together and they all benefit - all they need now is a place to play.
The guy down the street says, "I love baseball! You can come play in my field!"
After a while, people start coming to watch the games, and volunteering their own time and efforts - somebody builds some bleachers, somebody else donates some uniforms, somebody volunteers to mow the grass - analogous to the software projects that spoke with CDDB. These are essentially free capital improvements to the guy's field, and to the baseball games themselves. All is good, everybody's happy.
Now imagine, if you will, the guy with the field turning on the kids and saying, essentially, "All your balls are belong to us." You can't come play ball anymore unless you rent your own equipment back from me.
It's his field, so I guess it's his call if he wants to roll that way, but how can you with a straight face act surprised that this pisses people the fuck off?
Sure you must understand that guns are very dangerous if given to the bad people and bad people are the ones who need them most.
There are no grounds to the assumption that a gun owner is automatically a bad person. Of the millions of guns in the United States, only a fraction of a percent will ever be used in a criminal act at all, let alone to shoot or kill a person. The fact is, most guns are owned by responsible, law-abiding people who handle them in responsible, law-abiding ways.
But, sure, in the hands of a bad person, it can be used to do bad things. So can knives, baseball bats, cars, rope, bricks, peanuts, dairy products....
What about the Houston mother who drowned her five children in a bathtub? Does that make a bathtub full of water inherently evil because, in the hands of a clinically depressed mother, it makes children die?
Hasty and ill-conceived piece of legislation? Most of the meat of the act had been on paper for years [...]
See, now, I was trying to give the benefit of the doubt. If this is true, that makes this Act more of an opportunistic power-grab at the expense of several thousand people's lives, and in my mind moves it out of the realm of typical bad policy and more into the realm of actively malicious policy.
Kidding? No. Operative words: "virtually", "in America".
Not to be too dismissive, but an embassy in Lebanon isn't quite the same discussion as downtown New York City. I say "in America" meaning within the political borders of the continental United States, North America.
That said, from your list:
To this point, Oklahoma City has a higher death toll than the rest of the list, and that's domestic terrorism, seemingly not the impetus behind the Patriot Act. I suppose one could count incidents such as arson and the beltway sniper as acts of terrorism as well, and quite possibly Pearl Harbor (but no, that's an "act of war"), but these didn't get listed in your source.
So, of the four "on American soil" incidents above, there are 213 dead. Then we come to the morning of September 11, 2001:
One attack, 14-fold the damage of everything else combined. So, yeah, "virtually" no Americans died in America from terrorist attacks prior to 9/11. Half that many people die in car accidents each day.
Do you want to compare our scars of terrorism against places like Lebanon, Ireland, Israel? These places put up with this shit on a very, very regular basis. We don't.
Nevermind that this is completely off the point. My point was less about the statistics and severity of terrorism against the US, and more about the fact that I don't believe the Patriot Act has a lot to do with that either which way.
Virtually no Americans have died in America from terrorist attacks following implementation of the USA PATRIOT Act.
Virtually no Americans died in America from terrorist attacks prior to the Patriot Act, either, excepting one particular day in September. I am far more inclined to attribute the relative safety of the past 5 years to status quo than to some hastily and ill-conceived piece of legislation, but that's just me.
That we are safer from terrorism as a result is obvious.
This is not obvious to me. That the Act mandates better comms between the alphabet soup agencies is a Good Thing, but at what cost? How many freedoms and liberties lost or curtailed? How much indignity? How much opacity added to the process?
I mean, do you really feel safer when Gatorade is banned from airline flights? I think the continuous fostering of unfounded paranoia does us more regular damage. After all, if the point of terrorism is to make us feel fear and thereby use it as a weapon, and that is bad, then I can see no good in the fear mongering of our own elected officials. That is the real and continuing cost of 9/11.
*cough* *ahem* ... "with frickin' laser beams".
Kinda like 'Brainiac' and their ongoing war against microwave ovens. L-Ox & steel wool, anyone?
So sayeth the Mythbusters: "Don't try this at home. We're what you call 'professionals'." But how did they become 'professionals'? Does anybody think they just woke up one morning and thought, "you know, this bus driving gig just ain't cutting it. I think I'll destroy a cement truck with high explosives for television instead."
Of course it didn't happen this way. They are 'professionals' because they've been blowing things up and building Rube Goldberg contraptions for a long time, and you can bet your bottom dollar they started out trying this stuff at home. That would make the advice hypocritical, wouldn't it?
Perhaps on the face of it, but not really. The advice is enough to keep anybody only passingly interested from blowing their fingers off, but they know that anybody "interested enough" will dismiss the warnings... just as they did.
So try this at home, kids! There is no problem that cannot be solved with the proper application of high explosives!
I bought a cordless mouse for my Mom that did something quite similar, also Logitech. The range would just suck, assuming it ever established a connection at all. She had tucked the "ugly little wonky part" (the receiver) behind her phone, between a fluorescent desk lamp & the PC (pizza box, the corner with the PS). Somewhere in there the RF was just stomping the signal. Moving the "ugly little wonky part" out into the open brought it back to life.
Mom: "But now I have to look at it!"
Me: "No, now your mouse works. Looking at the receiver is optional, and probably not very exciting."
Do you think... maybe... it's your Dad?
Would that fall under "pollutant" or "chemical warfare agent"?
BINGO! I've got bingo over here! I didn't think I could do that off of two sentences... wow. Now that's innovation for ya!
At least, no more difficult than convincing ComCast to pull a wire so I can subscribe to their own offering.
So, err, wait a minute....
damn.