I think you're missing where I'm trying to go with this argument. I don't *want* one of these phone jammers. I don't think I have the right to block other people's phone calls in a public place. I just want them to be legally available, so that the theater managment could install them.
"Seems to me your beef is with the theaters. It's not your right to illegally block communication to someone if that communication is allowed by the owners of the property."
See, that's where you're wrong. It's not allowed by the owners of the property. There are signs posted in the theaters, and clips at the beginning of every movie telling people to silence their phones. It's just that there are a few people at every show who simply do not care that their conversation is disrupting the movie for a hundred other customers, and getting the managment to escort a phone-talker out of the theater is even more of a disturbance. Since their behavior is in violation of a posted rule, then I think the burden is on them, not me, to stay home from the movies!
"What rights are they violating, exactly? I don't recall the Right to no cell-phone talking."
If I paid eight and a half dollars for the privledge of seeing a movie, I think it *is* my right to see it without the ubiquitous rude bastard in the back yelling to his buddy in East Bumfuck, Mississippi about how stupid the film is through the whole show. If the theater managment doesn't have the nerve to physically throw those people out, then bring on the jammers, I say.
"Have only ONE GUI. No KDE vs Gnome, just standardize on one, but keep compatibllity libraries for leagacy gtk apps until they are replaced by modern QT apps"
I really wish someone could mod the KDE control center down to "-1, troll" for using that terminology. This pointless sniping makes both desktops look bad. It's just as valid to claim that QT libraries are for keeping compatibility with legacy GPL-violating apps, while GTK2 is the free toolkit to code future apps with. (I'm not saying that QT is still a GPL violator, just that calling GTK2 "legacy" is inaccurate in the same way as calling QT "un-free")
And it only got worse after the D20! One of the later emporers went insane trying to understand GURPS, and another bankrupted the entire Roman treasury buying Warhammer minis.
Maximum statutory damages for willful copyright violation is $150,000 per infringment. Multiply that by the 10,000+ machines in Google's cluster and you're up to more than $1.5 billion, not counting any other bogus charges that SCO's lawyers may come up with. It's the same reason the RIAA could file a $97 billion suit against that kid in Michigan...
In this case he's right, but I had to force myself really *really* hard to read your post, instead of giving it the standard "subject contains 'Chomsky'; roll eyes and scroll down" treatment. I do the same thing with any subject containing "Ayn Rand" (and a few others, too). I suspect a great many other people have subconsciously trained themselves in the same way.
I really don't have a point here, just musing about the effect certain words have on my opinion of a post before I even read it.
This system: -Requires a browser plugin (therefore doesn't work with mail, IRC, etc) -The plugin is Windows only and IE 5+ only -shortens domain names by 4 chars + at least 2 more per every accent/umlaut/kanji -Is mostly unreadable in it's ASCII-fied form...and this is supposed to be *better* than upgrading our DNS servers to support UTF-8?
I think the main point that people need to get from this is that coding technical solutions to social problems is a wasted effort.
The days of bits being scarce enough to sell are over, and music producers are going to have to either learn to provide value to fans that is not copiable (live performances, tangible goods, etc), or find a new line of work. Draconian copyright laws and DRM only delay the inevitable.
"First, you CSS elitists don't even have the web traffic to come even near 10% of your monthly bandwidth allocation. And that's for your own ISP's most basic and cheapest web hosting plan. (That's one of the reasons why these ISP's can host hundreds of web sites on a single server.)
Second, if you did have enough web pages to justify the bandwidth savings, you would be connected to a database anyway to at least produce some of those 1000 pages, which means you are better using tables for that tabular data.
So just these 2 points above means a DOUBLE WHAMMY and Catch-22 on the CSS ONLY Fanaticism!!"
Wow, such a rational argument. Fist an ad-hominem attack, then a complete misunderstanding of the difference between database tables and html <table> elements. This guy makes CSS look good just by being so vehemently and ignorantly opposed to it...
Let's check out the last section...
"UPDATE: It seems a lot of people are really UPSET at this itsy bitsy web page....
Well, I guess, if you had been brainwashed for the last 2 years or so on the absolute superiority of CSS over table tags (e.g. sort of like the Nazis who thought they were the superior race) only to watch it crumbling down with just one (1) little unknown web page article, I guess you would be upset as well. (especially considering there are at least a thousand or more well established elitist-type CSS-P books, web sites, authors, gurus, and who knows what out there) "
*tweeet* Nazi analogy! 10-yard penalty, automatic loss of argument!
SCO said recently (yeasterday? It was on slashdot) that they intend to sue one or two end users to "make an example". Disclosing that your company recently added a bunch of new Linux systems may make you a target. Whether or not SCO has a case, sitting opposite David Boies in courtroom is never a comfortable position...
Spam is a minor annoyance, and the article proposes a minor solution for it. Spamming the spammers is something that can be done in 5 minutes, while I'm sitting on my arse on front of the computer. Solutions to the world's major problems (war, hunger, plague, etc) require a little more time and resources. Do you have any practical suggestions on how one can stop Mideast bombings, avert World War III, end famine, and/or save people with AIDS in Africa? (preferable something that can be done in 5 to 10 minutes/day without leaving one's desk) Or were you just hoping for a "+1, wow man, that's like deep" moderation? If the latter is the case, try posting on K5 next time, that sort of stuff is much better-recieved there.
The right thing to do is what Windows has always done: make it easy to change.
XFree 4.3 has an extension called randr that allows changing resolution and vertical refresh on the fly, and the latest versions of both Gnome and KDE now include control panel applets for setting resolution and refresh rate. How long it will take for that to trickle down into Debian stable is anyone's guess, but the Linux community at large is already there.
"Longshoremen? Blue-collar shipping jobs don't rank very high as the toughest jobs to get. And many blue-collar jobs pay pretty high salaries. People don't do them because they don't like the job."
Actually they are hard to get. At the Pacific ports, the longshoremen's union works to keep jobs artificially scarce to preserve high wages. If more jobs were available in the ports, there would be little difficulty filling them. Many people working in construction work under the same time pressure and levels of physical exertion and danger longshoremen face for about a third of the pay.
Wake me up when someone with the ability to effectively take over and technical know-how to run the internet starts making noises like this. The UN can make declarations to the effect that they control the internet all day, but intil they have a military force ready to march in and shut down the current DNS/IP allocation systems and a ready replacement for them, it's all just wasted paper.
But for whatever reason the manufacturers have decided that documenting their products is a practice that belongs in the past.
I think Intel decided releasing specs was a legal risk. (at least in the US) Apparently with the right driver code, the Centrino chip can be programmed to transmit more power than the legal limit and on frequencies outside the 2.4GHz unlicensed band.
...demonstrating once again the utter futility of trying to make analogies between intellectual property and real property.
What does it cost you if someone makes a copy of your square block in Manhattan? Anything? What if they copy it way out in the jungle of Vietnam, where land is cheap? Does it cost you the same amount? Is asking about the cost of copying even a meaningful question?
The parent poster has a valid point. SCO (in the form of Caldera) was a friend of open-source too. They were going to bring in big bucks for development, build an enterprise-friendly Linux, use their experience in the business systems market to open the door for Linux, pretty much all the stuff people think Novell would do for SuSe. Then Linux started outperforming Caldera/SCO's proprietary offering, at a lower price. If you read/. you know how things have gone between SCO and the Linux community since then.
Novell now sounds a lot like SCO did in 1999, a deep-pocketed sponsor with a long record in enterprise systems. Why would things turn out differently with Novell when some open-source system can beat NDS? Samba/OpenLDAP isn't there yet, but could be in 4 or 5 years. Why *wouldn't* Novell turn and sue them?
It takes 26 lbs. of corn to make a gallon of ethanol, with the benefit that we're only using solar energy that would have hit the earth in the same year, and not adding net carbon dioxide to the earth, as burning stuff out of the ground does. It takes a lot of energy to produce ethanol. Either you're burning fossil fuels (increasing net CO2 emissions), or you're burning a lot of your potential ethanol. Did you actually read the article you linked to three posts up?
"According to the research from Cornell, you need about 140 gallons (530 liters) of fossil fuel to plant, grow and harvest an acre of corn."
So the acre of corn which produces 328 gallons (1241 liters) of ethanol requires burning 530 liters of gasoline (or 795 liters of ethanol) just to grow the corn. There goes 64% of your energy right there. By the time you factor in energy spent to distill, transport, and sell the ethanol, I would not be surprised if the whole exercise ended up as a net loss of energy.
Ethanol as a motor fuel is a crock. In the long run, we need practical fusion or orbital solar stations and electric or hydrogen-powered transportation, and in the short run, thermal depolymerization is a better process for turning organic stuff into fuel.
You know, Netscape, the first browser to really have it's own brand? Seriously, has the author never heard about the relation between Mozilla and Netscape? It sounds that way.
The plan from the very beginning was that Mozilla would be the fun development branch with 12-digit version numbers and embedded nerd humor (see about:mozilla) that appeals to hardcore open-source, linux-using, branding-is-for-dweebs types, and the branded, commoditized, productized, tarted-up version would be distributed as Netscape 6 (and now 7). The Mozilla code has a brand, it's just not well connected to the Mozilla organization, and it doesn't need to be. Their job is to write good code. It's AOL/Netscape's job to provide branding and marketing for that code.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're missing where I'm trying to go with this argument. I don't *want* one of these phone jammers. I don't think I have the right to block other people's phone calls in a public place. I just want them to be legally available, so that the theater managment could install them.
"Seems to me your beef is with the theaters. It's not your right to illegally block communication to someone if that communication is allowed by the owners of the property."
See, that's where you're wrong. It's not allowed by the owners of the property. There are signs posted in the theaters, and clips at the beginning of every movie telling people to silence their phones. It's just that there are a few people at every show who simply do not care that their conversation is disrupting the movie for a hundred other customers, and getting the managment to escort a phone-talker out of the theater is even more of a disturbance. Since their behavior is in violation of a posted rule, then I think the burden is on them, not me, to stay home from the movies!
"What rights are they violating, exactly? I don't recall the Right to no cell-phone talking."
If I paid eight and a half dollars for the privledge of seeing a movie, I think it *is* my right to see it without the ubiquitous rude bastard in the back yelling to his buddy in East Bumfuck, Mississippi about how stupid the film is through the whole show. If the theater managment doesn't have the nerve to physically throw those people out, then bring on the jammers, I say.
...and vice versa
"Have only ONE GUI. No KDE vs Gnome, just standardize on one, but keep compatibllity libraries for leagacy gtk apps until they are replaced by modern QT apps"
I really wish someone could mod the KDE control center down to "-1, troll" for using that terminology. This pointless sniping makes both desktops look bad. It's just as valid to claim that QT libraries are for keeping compatibility with legacy GPL-violating apps, while GTK2 is the free toolkit to code future apps with. (I'm not saying that QT is still a GPL violator, just that calling GTK2 "legacy" is inaccurate in the same way as calling QT "un-free")
And it only got worse after the D20! One of the later emporers went insane trying to understand GURPS, and another bankrupted the entire Roman treasury buying Warhammer minis.
I still don't see why putting stuff pulled from a database table between td and /td tags is any easier than putting it between div and /div tags.
Maximum statutory damages for willful copyright violation is $150,000 per infringment. Multiply that by the 10,000+ machines in Google's cluster and you're up to more than $1.5 billion, not counting any other bogus charges that SCO's lawyers may come up with. It's the same reason the RIAA could file a $97 billion suit against that kid in Michigan...
In this case he's right, but I had to force myself really *really* hard to read your post, instead of giving it the standard "subject contains 'Chomsky'; roll eyes and scroll down" treatment. I do the same thing with any subject containing "Ayn Rand" (and a few others, too). I suspect a great many other people have subconsciously trained themselves in the same way.
I really don't have a point here, just musing about the effect certain words have on my opinion of a post before I even read it.
This system: ...and this is supposed to be *better* than upgrading our DNS servers to support UTF-8?
-Requires a browser plugin (therefore doesn't work with mail, IRC, etc)
-The plugin is Windows only and IE 5+ only
-shortens domain names by 4 chars + at least 2 more per every accent/umlaut/kanji
-Is mostly unreadable in it's ASCII-fied form
I think the main point that people need to get from this is that coding technical solutions to social problems is a wasted effort.
The days of bits being scarce enough to sell are over, and music producers are going to have to either learn to provide value to fans that is not copiable (live performances, tangible goods, etc), or find a new line of work. Draconian copyright laws and DRM only delay the inevitable.
Quoth the linked site:
"First, you CSS elitists don't even have the web traffic to come even near 10% of your monthly bandwidth allocation. And that's for your own ISP's most basic and cheapest web hosting plan. (That's one of the reasons why these ISP's can host hundreds of web sites on a single server.)
Second, if you did have enough web pages to justify the bandwidth savings, you would be connected to a database anyway to at least produce some of those 1000 pages, which means you are better using tables for that tabular data.
So just these 2 points above means a
DOUBLE WHAMMY and Catch-22 on the CSS ONLY Fanaticism!!"
Wow, such a rational argument. Fist an ad-hominem attack, then a complete misunderstanding of the difference between database tables and html <table> elements. This guy makes CSS look good just by being so vehemently and ignorantly opposed to it...
Let's check out the last section...
"UPDATE:
It seems a lot of people are really UPSET at this itsy bitsy web page....
Well, I guess, if you had been brainwashed for the last 2 years or so on the absolute superiority of CSS over table tags (e.g. sort of like the Nazis who thought they were the superior race) only to watch it crumbling down with just one (1) little unknown web page article, I guess you would be upset as well. (especially considering there are at least a thousand or more well established elitist-type CSS-P books, web sites, authors, gurus, and who knows what out there) "
*tweeet* Nazi analogy! 10-yard penalty, automatic loss of argument!
Thank you, troll again.
SCO said recently (yeasterday? It was on slashdot) that they intend to sue one or two end users to "make an example". Disclosing that your company recently added a bunch of new Linux systems may make you a target. Whether or not SCO has a case, sitting opposite David Boies in courtroom is never a comfortable position...
Can we get that icon Google news is using (man pointing a gun at his foot) for future SCO stories? It sums up Darl's reign at SCO so well.
Spam is a minor annoyance, and the article proposes a minor solution for it. Spamming the spammers is something that can be done in 5 minutes, while I'm sitting on my arse on front of the computer. Solutions to the world's major problems (war, hunger, plague, etc) require a little more time and resources. Do you have any practical suggestions on how one can stop Mideast bombings, avert World War III, end famine, and/or save people with AIDS in Africa? (preferable something that can be done in 5 to 10 minutes/day without leaving one's desk) Or were you just hoping for a "+1, wow man, that's like deep" moderation? If the latter is the case, try posting on K5 next time, that sort of stuff is much better-recieved there.
The right thing to do is what Windows has always done: make it easy to change.
XFree 4.3 has an extension called randr that allows changing resolution and vertical refresh on the fly, and the latest versions of both Gnome and KDE now include control panel applets for setting resolution and refresh rate. How long it will take for that to trickle down into Debian stable is anyone's guess, but the Linux community at large is already there.
"Longshoremen? Blue-collar shipping jobs don't rank very high as the toughest jobs to get. And many blue-collar jobs pay pretty high salaries. People don't do them because they don't like the job."
Actually they are hard to get. At the Pacific ports, the longshoremen's union works to keep jobs artificially scarce to preserve high wages. If more jobs were available in the ports, there would be little difficulty filling them. Many people working in construction work under the same time pressure and levels of physical exertion and danger longshoremen face for about a third of the pay.
Wake me up when someone with the ability to effectively take over and technical know-how to run the internet starts making noises like this. The UN can make declarations to the effect that they control the internet all day, but intil they have a military force ready to march in and shut down the current DNS/IP allocation systems and a ready replacement for them, it's all just wasted paper.
Not only is it "not spyware", but now it's prior-artware too!
Is it really easier or more cost-effective to change the world than to change your business practices?
Well, it seems to work for the RIAA...
But for whatever reason the manufacturers have decided that documenting their products is a practice that belongs in the past.
I think Intel decided releasing specs was a legal risk. (at least in the US) Apparently with the right driver code, the Centrino chip can be programmed to transmit more power than the legal limit and on frequencies outside the 2.4GHz unlicensed band.
...demonstrating once again the utter futility of trying to make analogies between intellectual property and real property.
What does it cost you if someone makes a copy of your square block in Manhattan? Anything? What if they copy it way out in the jungle of Vietnam, where land is cheap? Does it cost you the same amount? Is asking about the cost of copying even a meaningful question?
The parent poster has a valid point. SCO (in the form of Caldera) was a friend of open-source too. They were going to bring in big bucks for development, build an enterprise-friendly Linux, use their experience in the business systems market to open the door for Linux, pretty much all the stuff people think Novell would do for SuSe. Then Linux started outperforming Caldera/SCO's proprietary offering, at a lower price. If you read /. you know how things have gone between SCO and the Linux community since then.
Novell now sounds a lot like SCO did in 1999, a deep-pocketed sponsor with a long record in enterprise systems. Why would things turn out differently with Novell when some open-source system can beat NDS? Samba/OpenLDAP isn't there yet, but could be in 4 or 5 years. Why *wouldn't* Novell turn and sue them?
It takes 26 lbs. of corn to make a gallon of ethanol, with the benefit that we're only using solar energy that would have hit the earth in the same year, and not adding net carbon dioxide to the earth, as burning stuff out of the ground does.
It takes a lot of energy to produce ethanol. Either you're burning fossil fuels (increasing net CO2 emissions), or you're burning a lot of your potential ethanol. Did you actually read the article you linked to three posts up?
"According to the research from Cornell, you need about 140 gallons (530 liters) of fossil fuel to plant, grow and harvest an acre of corn."
So the acre of corn which produces 328 gallons (1241 liters) of ethanol requires burning 530 liters of gasoline (or 795 liters of ethanol) just to grow the corn. There goes 64% of your energy right there. By the time you factor in energy spent to distill, transport, and sell the ethanol, I would not be surprised if the whole exercise ended up as a net loss of energy.
Ethanol as a motor fuel is a crock. In the long run, we need practical fusion or orbital solar stations and electric or hydrogen-powered transportation, and in the short run, thermal depolymerization is a better process for turning organic stuff into fuel.
So are future versions of Netscape still going to be based on Mozilla?
You know, Netscape, the first browser to really have it's own brand? Seriously, has the author never heard about the relation between Mozilla and Netscape? It sounds that way.
The plan from the very beginning was that Mozilla would be the fun development branch with 12-digit version numbers and embedded nerd humor (see about:mozilla) that appeals to hardcore open-source, linux-using, branding-is-for-dweebs types, and the branded, commoditized, productized, tarted-up version would be distributed as Netscape 6 (and now 7). The Mozilla code has a brand, it's just not well connected to the Mozilla organization, and it doesn't need to be. Their job is to write good code. It's AOL/Netscape's job to provide branding and marketing for that code.