Do you think the current W3C standards, when used properly, are adequate to create both an appealing and an accessible website? In other words: are the proper building blocks available? If not, what's lacking?
What you really need is a reason for them to switch. If they want to switch they will accept many inconveniences, whereas if you force them they will hate GNU/Linux from the start.
So you should set-up a dual boot system and allow them to choose what they want to run. Then, you turn off your sense of compassion and install... xkobo(-deluxe) and every other addictive game you can find. The first shot is always free, but this time so will be the next one, and the next one, and the next...
And when they're running GNU/Linux anyway, because they need their daily gaming fix, they'll start using it for other stuff as well: why reboot when there's no reason?
P.S. You might want to rephrase this argument when presenting it to your wife.
P.P.S. I've got several friends who want to install GNU/Linux after playing xkobo at my place. }:-)
Penguins can fly when being thrown, when on a plane or when you shoot them from a canon. I don't know exactly how migration would work. That's why I think this study is really great.
But imagine for a minute what would happen if advertising ceased to exist - your telephone screened out all telemarketers, your TiVo auto fast-forwards through commercials, and your mailboxes (snail and e-mail) automatically purged "crap". How would you find out about that shiny new nitrogen-cooled Pentium 8? Or the new movie at the multiplex? Or that Micky D's has 99c tofu burgers on special this week?
Easy, I'd opt in to one of the general purpose advertising mailing lists and one of the "special offers in your neighbourhood" lists that would pop up or I'd just enjoy the peace and quiet for a while.
Then you ask, "Would you approve of a law that mandated that all letters be sent in some easy-to-examine fashion?" (Say in the interest of national security or something like that.)
Interesting, but of course this is a different argument (the argument against banning strong crypto).
If they are smart, they will realize that they send a lot of stuff by post that they would not want others, no matter how good their intentions may be, to see. I.E., credit card numbers, bank statements, etc. Then apply that to email.
But they don't send that stuff by e-mail (yet?). The only really sensitive info most people I know send from their computer would be bankingtransactions. But those are either sent over a dedicated dial-up to the bank or using SSL in people's browsers, at least over here (the Netherlands) they are. So those shouldn't be easy to intercept.
I liked your comparison to using envelopes in standard mail (had been thinking along those lines myself), but I don't think we've got the killer salespitch just yet.
I don't believe most people with 'nothing to hide' will be convinced by this argument for privacy. So, can anyone come up with a concise line of reasoning that will work?
A solution to the problem mentioned: In australia we have an electoral roll, and I am sure you guys in the US do aswell. Why can't they just allow e-mail addresses to be added to the electoral role. Obviously some privacy protections would be needed, but it is surely possible.
Don't add e-mailaddresses; they change too often. Instead allow people to get a unique number (only used for communicating with representatives) from the same place they could get their driver's license or whatever is convenient and require that number to be present somewhere in the subject or body of e-mails. If no valid number is found, bounce the e-mail with an explanatory message.
That way no e-mail is ignored and constituents can easily be recognised. Numbers could be assigned anonymously from a local pool, so they could only be used to verify someone is a constituent, but not to uniquely identify that person. Privacy respected, system working, everybody happy.
What's this talk about coders not being suitable for lobbying? Did I miss character generation where you had to pick either coding skills or social graces? Sorry, words like "cultural tendency" are just meaningless generalizations to me.
Second, how does replacing human labor with machine labor allow mankind to evolve? How does our gene pool change?
More important than genetic evolution is our cultural evolution. Remember the industrial revolution? It didn't have any noticable effect on our gene pool, but it did improve living conditions for a lot of people.
That's pretty naive. There may be less lobbying in the Netherlands than for instance in the US and it may be somewhat more discreet, but it does happen and it is effective.
You may not like the spiritual packaging, but even for people with a more pragmatic attitude Feng Shui can provide some subtle insights into arranging your TV and couch for optimal slacking comfort.
1. Adopt some set of coding conventions. For instance, always return 0 on success/in the normal case.
2. Use informative variable and functionnames. Short names are preferred, but make sure it's clear what you mean. If it's impractical to fit all the required info into the var- or functionname, add a comment explaining the intended purpose of the variable/function.
3. Use small functions! Split actions up into logical steps. In combination with 2 this will help make your code a lot more readable, removing the need for many comments. Like Linus says: "The maximum length of a function is inversely proportional to the
complexity and indentation level of that function."
4. Document any abnormal behaviour. For instance, if you've adopted the convention that functions return -1 on errors and you have a function that differentiates between different errors by returning either -1 or -2, document what the abnormal return values mean.
5. If the overall purpose of a group of functions (e.g. in one sourcefile) isn't obvious, add a general comment that explains the big picture. Code is much more readable if you know what it's trying to do.
Nit pick: IIRC, the rule is 3 consecutive
passes...
Yes, of course. After the first 3 consecutive passes no new situation can possibly occur. (After 2 passes new situations may occur due to a rule that in essence forbids ondoing the other player's previous move.) My bad.
In Go the rules say the game is over if both players pass for 3 consecutive turns. Players will only pass if they feel they can not improve their score by playing. As such, the endpoint of the game is clearly defined and not as fuzzy as your post suggests.
The great difficulty in programming a computer to play Go arises from the combinatorial complexity of the game. (There are 19x19 points on the board, each of which can be either empty or contain a black or white stone with relatively few invalid positions.)
So, are there any places where you can get a free e-mail account that do respect your privacy? I need something to recommend to people who'd otherwise just go with Hotmail.
Unfortunately the world hasn't been flat for quite some time and neither are most humans. Your calculations are correct for strangelets hitting the earth at a perpendicular angle.
However, chances of getting hit are much higher if you take into account strangelets hitting the earth from all other angles, like the ones just missing the earth's surfice and hitting you in the head.
You will just be in your garden, minding your own business, when WHAM!, you get hit from behind by one of those sneeky strangelets. They are evil, I tell you, evil!
Nobody does but if you are smart you should have learned by now that systems motivated by financial rewards ( capitalism and free market economy) are way more productive than systems that are do not offer such rewards ( communism.)
That is exactly my point: no artificial measures are necessary to ensure programmmers make money. Let the market sort it out. If the required software is somehow produced without programmers making money, well, tough luck for them. However, I believe there will always be a demand for (custom) software that will not be met by free (as in 'gratis') software.
Who are these "people" you speak of? I find it rather funny that a lot of "Open Source" proponents, who obviously aren't really programmers, assume that just because the source code is available just about anyone with a little tech background can just go make some changes to have it function the way they want!! Hah hah. That might work fine for a 5 line Perl script (ie. 95% of everything on Sourceforge and Freshmeat) but it doesn't work for real-world software!
Well, I can only speak from experience. The few times I really needed a new feature or bug fixed in some program I was using, changes to be made were pretty straight forward. I imagine this would be the case with any well-designed (read: modular) program, but then I have been known to be a little optimistic at times...
Slashdot Mirror
Do you think the current W3C standards, when used properly, are adequate to create both an appealing and an accessible website? In other words: are the proper building blocks available? If not, what's lacking?
What you really need is a reason for them to switch. If they want to switch they will accept many inconveniences, whereas if you force them they will hate GNU/Linux from the start.
So you should set-up a dual boot system and allow them to choose what they want to run. Then, you turn off your sense of compassion and install... xkobo(-deluxe) and every other addictive game you can find. The first shot is always free, but this time so will be the next one, and the next one, and the next...
And when they're running GNU/Linux anyway, because they need their daily gaming fix, they'll start using it for other stuff as well: why reboot when there's no reason?
P.S. You might want to rephrase this argument when presenting it to your wife.
P.P.S. I've got several friends who want to install GNU/Linux after playing xkobo at my place. }:-)
For the record, the previous comment was inspired by an example from Marvin Minsky illustrating what is known in AI as the qualification problem.
Since when do penguins fly?
Penguins can fly when being thrown, when on a plane or when you shoot them from a canon. I don't know exactly how migration would work. That's why I think this study is really great.
This walkthrough will give away all the secrets to the textadventure that is the Debian installer.
But imagine for a minute what would happen if advertising ceased to exist - your telephone screened out all telemarketers, your TiVo auto fast-forwards through commercials, and your mailboxes (snail and e-mail) automatically purged "crap". How would you find out about that shiny new nitrogen-cooled Pentium 8? Or the new movie at the multiplex? Or that Micky D's has 99c tofu burgers on special this week?
Easy, I'd opt in to one of the general purpose advertising mailing lists and one of the "special offers in your neighbourhood" lists that would pop up or I'd just enjoy the peace and quiet for a while.
...the effectiveness of their investment tends to depend more on the share of the IT budget than the absolute amount.
Perhaps businesses that spend a larger share of their IT budget on security give it a larger priority in general.
... and then it occurs to them they don't need to do any of those anymore either. :-)
Then you ask, "Would you approve of a law that mandated that all letters be sent in some easy-to-examine fashion?" (Say in the interest of national security or something like that.)
Interesting, but of course this is a different argument (the argument against banning strong crypto).
If they are smart, they will realize that they send a lot of stuff by post that they would not want others, no matter how good their intentions may be, to see. I.E., credit card numbers, bank statements, etc. Then apply that to email.
But they don't send that stuff by e-mail (yet?). The only really sensitive info most people I know send from their computer would be bankingtransactions. But those are either sent over a dedicated dial-up to the bank or using SSL in people's browsers, at least over here (the Netherlands) they are. So those shouldn't be easy to intercept.
I liked your comparison to using envelopes in standard mail (had been thinking along those lines myself), but I don't think we've got the killer salespitch just yet.
I don't believe most people with 'nothing to hide' will be convinced by this argument for privacy. So, can anyone come up with a concise line of reasoning that will work?
A solution to the problem mentioned: In australia we have an electoral roll, and I am sure you guys in the US do aswell. Why can't they just allow e-mail addresses to be added to the electoral role. Obviously some privacy protections would be needed, but it is surely possible.
Don't add e-mailaddresses; they change too often. Instead allow people to get a unique number (only used for communicating with representatives) from the same place they could get their driver's license or whatever is convenient and require that number to be present somewhere in the subject or body of e-mails. If no valid number is found, bounce the e-mail with an explanatory message.
That way no e-mail is ignored and constituents can easily be recognised. Numbers could be assigned anonymously from a local pool, so they could only be used to verify someone is a constituent, but not to uniquely identify that person. Privacy respected, system working, everybody happy.
... sending a continuous stream of garbage packets to random IPs from random IPs?
Any halfway decent ISP should filter all outbound traffic from IPs outside of its assigned IP space, so you can't actually spoof random IPs.
If every /.er tried to have a meeting with his or her senator about the DMCA, DRM or any other topic, we could really change things.
Yeah, we would slashdot the senators.
What's this talk about coders not being suitable for lobbying? Did I miss character generation where you had to pick either coding skills or social graces? Sorry, words like "cultural tendency" are just meaningless generalizations to me.
Second, how does replacing human labor with machine labor allow mankind to evolve? How does our gene pool change?
More important than genetic evolution is our cultural evolution. Remember the industrial revolution? It didn't have any noticable effect on our gene pool, but it did improve living conditions for a lot of people.
Dutch politics is pretty immune to lobbying.
That's pretty naive. There may be less lobbying in the Netherlands than for instance in the US and it may be somewhat more discreet, but it does happen and it is effective.
You may not like the spiritual packaging, but even for people with a more pragmatic attitude Feng Shui can provide some subtle insights into arranging your TV and couch for optimal slacking comfort.
If went to the original Klingon^WDutch version (little link, bottom right) to see if by any chance it was just a very bad translation. It isn't.
By the way, Bolkestein (answering on behalf of the commision) is also Dutch.
1. Adopt some set of coding conventions. For instance, always return 0 on success/in the normal case.
2. Use informative variable and functionnames. Short names are preferred, but make sure it's clear what you mean. If it's impractical to fit all the required info into the var- or functionname, add a comment explaining the intended purpose of the variable/function.
3. Use small functions! Split actions up into logical steps. In combination with 2 this will help make your code a lot more readable, removing the need for many comments. Like Linus says: "The maximum length of a function is inversely proportional to the complexity and indentation level of that function."
4. Document any abnormal behaviour. For instance, if you've adopted the convention that functions return -1 on errors and you have a function that differentiates between different errors by returning either -1 or -2, document what the abnormal return values mean.
5. If the overall purpose of a group of functions (e.g. in one sourcefile) isn't obvious, add a general comment that explains the big picture. Code is much more readable if you know what it's trying to do.
Nit pick: IIRC, the rule is 3 consecutive passes ...
Yes, of course. After the first 3 consecutive passes no new situation can possibly occur. (After 2 passes new situations may occur due to a rule that in essence forbids ondoing the other player's previous move.) My bad.
In Go the rules say the game is over if both players pass for 3 consecutive turns. Players will only pass if they feel they can not improve their score by playing. As such, the endpoint of the game is clearly defined and not as fuzzy as your post suggests.
The great difficulty in programming a computer to play Go arises from the combinatorial complexity of the game. (There are 19x19 points on the board, each of which can be either empty or contain a black or white stone with relatively few invalid positions.)
So, are there any places where you can get a free e-mail account that do respect your privacy? I need something to recommend to people who'd otherwise just go with Hotmail.
Unfortunately the world hasn't been flat for quite some time and neither are most humans. Your calculations are correct for strangelets hitting the earth at a perpendicular angle.
However, chances of getting hit are much higher if you take into account strangelets hitting the earth from all other angles, like the ones just missing the earth's surfice and hitting you in the head.
You will just be in your garden, minding your own business, when WHAM!, you get hit from behind by one of those sneeky strangelets. They are evil, I tell you, evil!
(You may now panic.)
Nobody does but if you are smart you should have learned by now that systems motivated by financial rewards ( capitalism and free market economy) are way more productive than systems that are do not offer such rewards ( communism.)
That is exactly my point: no artificial measures are necessary to ensure programmmers make money. Let the market sort it out. If the required software is somehow produced without programmers making money, well, tough luck for them. However, I believe there will always be a demand for (custom) software that will not be met by free (as in 'gratis') software.
Who are these "people" you speak of? I find it rather funny that a lot of "Open Source" proponents, who obviously aren't really programmers, assume that just because the source code is available just about anyone with a little tech background can just go make some changes to have it function the way they want!! Hah hah. That might work fine for a 5 line Perl script (ie. 95% of everything on Sourceforge and Freshmeat) but it doesn't work for real-world software!
Well, I can only speak from experience. The few times I really needed a new feature or bug fixed in some program I was using, changes to be made were pretty straight forward. I imagine this would be the case with any well-designed (read: modular) program, but then I have been known to be a little optimistic at times...