They started with the rape allegations. Perhaps they simply embellished what actually happened. Perhaps they twisted what was said, what was done. Perhaps they made the whole thing up. They've blurred the charges so much that I can't even tell what he's actually charged with anymore.
You can read the full allegations here. Perhaps the story is true and the US had nothing to do with it, and Assange is just a creepy sexual partner who had a habit of forcing sex without a condom. Or maybe these women are part of a US conspiracy. I don't know and neither do you.
I don't think they'll even extradite him to the US to face some vague treason charge
He can't commit treason against a country he's not a citizen of and doesn't reside in, not even "vaguely".
Then [Microsoft] started their long spiral decline. They took a shot in the arm up with W7 and 2k8, and Office365 has been a big success, but for the most part their asses have floated on the Xbox360 and residual corporate sales/licensing for some time.
"Microsoft's Xbox division reported disappointing results, recording a 16 percent drop in revenue, to $1.62 billion. The unit also reported a $229 million operating loss, versus a $210 million profit a year ago."
Xbox has never been a big moneymaker for Microsoft -- more often than not, it has lost money.
It was part of a discussion as to why this change mattered as part of a requirement. It would be obvious to you if you weren't arguing emotionally and in denial of basic facts. I'm not interested in replying to you anymore.
Where were you when this anthropomorphised Gnome hurt many people's workflow without bothering to address their grievances?
Complaining on Slashdot, along with everybody else. I even replied in the negative to one of the Gnome guys that actually responded on Slashdot in defense of the new shiny.
You're under the impression that I'm upset about Gnome 3 no longer being the default. I'm not. My point was that the CD issue was just a transparently weak excuse, as alluded to in the commit message.
I'm not sure what your point is. My point is that as far as software is concerned, defaults are a big deal. Losing out on users who click the defaults hurts Gnome.
There is no such thing as "download the USB image".
Wrong. From the MANIFEST: "hd-media/boot.img.gz -- 1 gb image (compressed) for USB memory stick"
There's also DVD images that will be impacted by whatever the default is.
If you have cheap USB drives that are bootable, you need not care what is the default desktop environment.
Defaults are important when it comes to new users.
So in the age of cheap USB drives that are bootable, something is changing for people who do not (have / want to use) cheap USB drives that are bootable.
So are you saying that if I download the USB image, it will default to Gnome? If not, then something has changed, hasn't it?
This guy organized a conspiracy to DDOS some sites, the digital equivalent of a sit-in, and he's facing over 100 years in jail.
A sit-in requires you to literally put your butt on the line and be at risk for arrest. Also, sit-ins were traditionally used for noble causes like racial equality. These guys did stuff "for the lulz". While some attacks had a stated political motivation, many were just gratuitous, such as attacking game servers that had nothing to do with anything.
They also compromised user account information and released it, and defaced websites with false information. In short, they were a bunch of punks, and deserve to spend a few years in jail.
If you "click on everything", which I assume means installing anything and everything and ignoring any security warnings, then you'll only be safer on Ubuntu due to obscurity.
This ensures that the desktop will fit on CD#1, which gnome currently does not.
There may be other reasons to prefer xfce as the default as well, but that is a complex and subjective topic. Unfortunatly, Debian does not have a well-defined procedure for making such choices, though it certianly has well-defined procedures for reviewing them. So, I've decided to be bold, and continue the tradition of making an arbitrary desktop selection for Debian in tasksel."
I would not be surprised if at least a few people said "I agree" while keeping their true reason--that GNOME 3 sucks--to themselves.
Seems like it, though it doesn't take much reading between the lines that the CD issue is as good an excuse as any to drop it.
Regardless of alarmists, one can hardly go wrong curbing our impact on the environment.
You can if you assess the risks wrongly. Imagine poisoning the environment in some other fashion over an unjustified fear of carbon dioxide. The truth is pretty much anything we do has some impact on the environment.
All those damn dinosaurs driving their monster SUVs to the mall, no doubt.
The article gives a reason for the increased CO2:
"The fossil record does not, however, show any indication of coal-fired power stations or heavy car use. So the question is, where did the CO2 come from? There is an obvious culprit. At the beginning of the Triassic, the world's dry land was united in a single continent, known as Pangea. By the end of the period, Pangea was starting to break up into the pieces familiar on the modern globe. The break-up was accompanied by massive volcanic activity--and in particular by the formation of the so-called Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, as the New World began the process of separating from the Old. A third of a million cubic kilometres of lava, covering 7m square kilometres of the earth's surface, poured out in fairly short order at, or near, the end of the Triassic. And when lava pours out of the earth's interior, so does CO2."
Either way I'd say you know more with this research than you did without it.
I agree with all of your points. I think his mindset was clearly displayed with the statement, "it is particularly only useful to the deniers, so expect to see a lot of that". In his mind the science is settled for human-caused global warming, and any skepticism is to be met with a "denier" label.
Maybe all replies, regardless of depth, are being sent as notifications? I don't know, I can't even see email preferences as an option anymore, maybe because I'm using the Classic system.
I replied to Bill. You can verify this by checking the comment id (cid) on the Parent link. As for mentioning I'm someone else, meh. Sometimes I do that, but generally I expect people to realize Slashdot is an open discussion and anybody can jump in.
An iPad is not a general purpose computing device.
"There's an app for that." Actually, that was for the iPhone. The iPad is pretty much the iPhone with a bigger screen and not intended to act as a phone. The device is locked down because Apple wants iron-fisted control, not because it inherently needs to be.
And don't the people who create the new frontier deserve some sort of reward for opening it up?
There are already plenty of rewards in place, whether it's people earning a salary, government grants, or first-mover advantage. Lots of people got rich in the early days of software without patents.
20 years is a pretty short time in the scheme of things.
It's an incredibly long time in the scheme of things. It's about 1/4 of the average person's lifetime. In technology terms, it's an an era.
For example, the patent on the computer mouse had already expired before it became a major feature of computer operating systems.
That's a failure of the people who had the technology. It took somebody like Steve Jobs to actually make it useful to the world at large.
And most of the time, there are workarounds that are nearly as good--or better.
Most patents these days lay claim to the most obvious solution in a general fashion, hence the gold-rush mentality.
If an open-source product is really all that valuable, users will be willing to pay a few bucks for a license.
If you have to pay for a license, it isn't open source, by definition.
And there is no reason why open-source projects--if they truly innovate and do not merely piggyback on the advances of others--cannot develop their own patent and copyright portfolios to trade.
And back in the real world, where everything and anything is patented for "on the Internet" or "social widget", it isn't so simple.
I suspect that spreadsheet programs would be much better today if Bricklin and Frankson had received royalties enabling them to pursue further development.
He had a company with several people, the first-mover advantage I was talking about. I don't know his personal financials, and he obviously wasn't Bill Gates rich, but I'm willing to bet he made a nice chunk of change that gave him financial independence. Spreadsheets developed just fine as it is, surely moreso than if just one company owned the patents.
They were also early innovators in GUI development, but they were pushed out of the market by imitators.
Boo hoo. The world moves on and is a better place without every software innovation, major or minor, being locked up in a red tape monopoly for 20 years.
For the most part, it is a transient problem dating from the early days of computing and the internet, when people were still figuring out how to do things
There's always a new frontier, and a 20 year monopoly in the latest patent gold-rush is a ridiculous restriction.
So at worst, they add a buck or two to the price of a product.
Most open source products can't afford a "buck or two", and it completely invalidates their license.
Big. deal.
If it was your business being threatened by rent-seeking leeches, you would think it was.
Compared to the value of providing a financial incentive for companies to innovate, that seems a very, very minor expense.
Funny, in the early days of computing there were no patents on software, and yet innovation happened anyways.
Slashdot Mirror
What if the US had nothing to do with it and he didn't do it?
That's another possibility. Nobody on the outside can say for sure what happened.
Nevertheless, covering it up is illegal.
Then cite the law that was broken.
They started with the rape allegations. Perhaps they simply embellished what actually happened. Perhaps they twisted what was said, what was done. Perhaps they made the whole thing up. They've blurred the charges so much that I can't even tell what he's actually charged with anymore.
You can read the full allegations here. Perhaps the story is true and the US had nothing to do with it, and Assange is just a creepy sexual partner who had a habit of forcing sex without a condom. Or maybe these women are part of a US conspiracy. I don't know and neither do you.
I don't think they'll even extradite him to the US to face some vague treason charge
He can't commit treason against a country he's not a citizen of and doesn't reside in, not even "vaguely".
Then [Microsoft] started their long spiral decline. They took a shot in the arm up with W7 and 2k8, and Office365 has been a big success, but for the most part their asses have floated on the Xbox360 and residual corporate sales/licensing for some time.
Reality check:
"Microsoft's Xbox division reported disappointing results, recording a 16 percent drop in revenue, to $1.62 billion. The unit also reported a $229 million operating loss, versus a $210 million profit a year ago."
Xbox has never been a big moneymaker for Microsoft -- more often than not, it has lost money.
So what's the point of saying this?
It was part of a discussion as to why this change mattered as part of a requirement. It would be obvious to you if you weren't arguing emotionally and in denial of basic facts. I'm not interested in replying to you anymore.
Where were you when this anthropomorphised Gnome hurt many people's workflow without bothering to address their grievances?
Complaining on Slashdot, along with everybody else. I even replied in the negative to one of the Gnome guys that actually responded on Slashdot in defense of the new shiny.
You're under the impression that I'm upset about Gnome 3 no longer being the default. I'm not. My point was that the CD issue was just a transparently weak excuse, as alluded to in the commit message.
New users who hate XFCE?
I'm not sure what your point is. My point is that as far as software is concerned, defaults are a big deal. Losing out on users who click the defaults hurts Gnome.
There is no such thing as "download the USB image".
Wrong. From the MANIFEST: "hd-media/boot.img.gz -- 1 gb image (compressed) for USB memory stick"
There's also DVD images that will be impacted by whatever the default is.
If you have cheap USB drives that are bootable, you need not care what is the default desktop environment.
Defaults are important when it comes to new users.
So in the age of cheap USB drives that are bootable, something is changing for people who do not (have / want to use) cheap USB drives that are bootable.
So are you saying that if I download the USB image, it will default to Gnome? If not, then something has changed, hasn't it?
Which this guy did.
No, they had to find him. At a sit-in you're not hiding and can be arrested at any time.
This guy organized a conspiracy to DDOS some sites, the digital equivalent of a sit-in, and he's facing over 100 years in jail.
A sit-in requires you to literally put your butt on the line and be at risk for arrest. Also, sit-ins were traditionally used for noble causes like racial equality. These guys did stuff "for the lulz". While some attacks had a stated political motivation, many were just gratuitous, such as attacking game servers that had nothing to do with anything.
They also compromised user account information and released it, and defaced websites with false information. In short, they were a bunch of punks, and deserve to spend a few years in jail.
Adhere more exactingly to the social organization trait of social insects and the Borg.
Is this an advertisement for Anonymous or against it? Serious question.
If you "click on everything", which I assume means installing anything and everything and ignoring any security warnings, then you'll only be safer on Ubuntu due to obscurity.
Why does that make incompetent software developers any less responsible for the bugs in their code?
Because they aren't being paid for it. Commercial transactions are, in general, held to a different standard than something offered for free.
In other words, they want it to be possible to install Debian along with a fully-functional desktop environment by downloading only one CD-ROM image.
Which is a pretty dumb requirement in the age of cheap USB drives that are bootable. It's like requiring a bootable floppy in the age of CDs.
To be fair though, in the announcement, they do acknowledge that many people just don't like GNOME 3
Here's the commit message:
"switch default desktop task to xfce
This ensures that the desktop will fit on CD#1, which gnome currently does not.
There may be other reasons to prefer xfce as the default as well, but that is a complex and subjective topic. Unfortunatly, Debian does not have a well-defined procedure for making such choices, though it certianly has well-defined procedures for reviewing them. So, I've decided to be bold, and continue the tradition of making an arbitrary desktop selection for Debian in tasksel."
I would not be surprised if at least a few people said "I agree" while keeping their true reason--that GNOME 3 sucks--to themselves.
Seems like it, though it doesn't take much reading between the lines that the CD issue is as good an excuse as any to drop it.
Regardless of alarmists, one can hardly go wrong curbing our impact on the environment.
You can if you assess the risks wrongly. Imagine poisoning the environment in some other fashion over an unjustified fear of carbon dioxide. The truth is pretty much anything we do has some impact on the environment.
All those damn dinosaurs driving their monster SUVs to the mall, no doubt.
The article gives a reason for the increased CO2:
"The fossil record does not, however, show any indication of coal-fired power stations or heavy car use. So the question is, where did the CO2 come from? There is an obvious culprit. At the beginning of the Triassic, the world's dry land was united in a single continent, known as Pangea. By the end of the period, Pangea was starting to break up into the pieces familiar on the modern globe. The break-up was accompanied by massive volcanic activity--and in particular by the formation of the so-called Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, as the New World began the process of separating from the Old. A third of a million cubic kilometres of lava, covering 7m square kilometres of the earth's surface, poured out in fairly short order at, or near, the end of the Triassic. And when lava pours out of the earth's interior, so does CO2."
Either way I'd say you know more with this research than you did without it.
I agree with all of your points. I think his mindset was clearly displayed with the statement, "it is particularly only useful to the deniers, so expect to see a lot of that". In his mind the science is settled for human-caused global warming, and any skepticism is to be met with a "denier" label.
Why should FOSS get a bye?
Because in general there's no money changing hands, and hence no contract or sale.
Maybe all replies, regardless of depth, are being sent as notifications? I don't know, I can't even see email preferences as an option anymore, maybe because I'm using the Classic system.
I replied to Bill. You can verify this by checking the comment id (cid) on the Parent link. As for mentioning I'm someone else, meh. Sometimes I do that, but generally I expect people to realize Slashdot is an open discussion and anybody can jump in.
An iPad is not a general purpose computing device.
"There's an app for that." Actually, that was for the iPhone. The iPad is pretty much the iPhone with a bigger screen and not intended to act as a phone. The device is locked down because Apple wants iron-fisted control, not because it inherently needs to be.
I got to pretend that I was shoplifting the item as I walked out the door with it.
So how do the employees tell the difference between a shoplifter and a legitimate customer?
Whatever. It's still extortion in my book.
A formal request instead of a phone call is extortion? Some people would call the due diligence instead, as in "get it in writing".
It's certainly not behavior that would lead me to conclude that Gizmodo is a credible source for news or rumors.
Why? Were they caught making up stories? They got a scoop, so in my eyes I'd more inclined to believe them.
And don't the people who create the new frontier deserve some sort of reward for opening it up?
There are already plenty of rewards in place, whether it's people earning a salary, government grants, or first-mover advantage. Lots of people got rich in the early days of software without patents.
20 years is a pretty short time in the scheme of things.
It's an incredibly long time in the scheme of things. It's about 1/4 of the average person's lifetime. In technology terms, it's an an era.
For example, the patent on the computer mouse had already expired before it became a major feature of computer operating systems.
That's a failure of the people who had the technology. It took somebody like Steve Jobs to actually make it useful to the world at large.
And most of the time, there are workarounds that are nearly as good--or better.
Most patents these days lay claim to the most obvious solution in a general fashion, hence the gold-rush mentality.
If an open-source product is really all that valuable, users will be willing to pay a few bucks for a license.
If you have to pay for a license, it isn't open source, by definition.
And there is no reason why open-source projects--if they truly innovate and do not merely piggyback on the advances of others--cannot develop their own patent and copyright portfolios to trade.
And back in the real world, where everything and anything is patented for "on the Internet" or "social widget", it isn't so simple.
I suspect that spreadsheet programs would be much better today if Bricklin and Frankson had received royalties enabling them to pursue further development.
He had a company with several people, the first-mover advantage I was talking about. I don't know his personal financials, and he obviously wasn't Bill Gates rich, but I'm willing to bet he made a nice chunk of change that gave him financial independence. Spreadsheets developed just fine as it is, surely moreso than if just one company owned the patents.
They were also early innovators in GUI development, but they were pushed out of the market by imitators.
Boo hoo. The world moves on and is a better place without every software innovation, major or minor, being locked up in a red tape monopoly for 20 years.
For the most part, it is a transient problem dating from the early days of computing and the internet, when people were still figuring out how to do things
There's always a new frontier, and a 20 year monopoly in the latest patent gold-rush is a ridiculous restriction.
So at worst, they add a buck or two to the price of a product.
Most open source products can't afford a "buck or two", and it completely invalidates their license.
Big. deal.
If it was your business being threatened by rent-seeking leeches, you would think it was.
Compared to the value of providing a financial incentive for companies to innovate, that seems a very, very minor expense.
Funny, in the early days of computing there were no patents on software, and yet innovation happened anyways.