Not nearly the same situation either. When you put something on the web, you make it accessible to millions/billions of people. Your home AP is accessible to maybe 2 or 3 houses.
Your home AP is accessible to more than that -- like anyone walking or driving by your house. Things that are broadcast in the clear, including SSIDs, are inherently public.
Since when did a single Slashdot submitter speak for the whole of the FOSS community?
Its worse that that: the submitter didn't even say what is being attributed to the whole community. TFS ends with the question -- an invitation to comment in the attached comment thread -- "Is this a generous contribution to the open source community, or just Adobe offloading another failing technology?"
Some people have interpreted this as if it were a statement that "Adobe [is just] offloading another failing technology", but that's not what it says. It poses a question.
And the answer to the question of "is it A or B?" is that it is A and also B. Look, Adobe clearly sees Flex as, from its business perspective, a failing technology. The developers that are upset about it being abandoned in favor of HTML5 clearly see it as valuable. One of the benefits of open source is that it allows technologies to continue to be used and developed by others even when they no longer serve as a profit center for the original developer.
So, yeah, Adobe is offloading what it sees as a failing technology. On the other hand, it could just as easily kill it dead rather than handing it off to an open source foundation. By doing the latter, it is generously providing a way for someone else to maintain what has been an Adobe proprietary technology so that developers can keep using it.
You've already identified where the iPad is less functional than a Kindle/Nook, but let me round that out by pointing out areas where it is better (note this is in comparison to my Kindle3, which I also love)
It's better at PDFs and anything with images compared to an e-ink device... I much prefer my iPad to even a Kindle DX
which is good if you are comparing to an e-Ink reader, but GP was comparing to the Nook Color, a 7" LCD tablet with higher pixel density than the iPad.
It's better when you don't have ambient lighting (ie, in bed with spouse sleeping and no reading light, I can turn down brightness or use night-mode and still read stuff).
See previous note.
The browser navigation is actually usable
I suspect this is another "see previous note" issue; browser navigation on the Nook Color is quite usable.
Regarding comparisons with books in general, it is about as portable as a hardcover book (which incidentally, is all my Mom reads anyway... she prefers the Kindle app on her iPad2 to her Kindle despite my pushing the Kindle).
The iPad is significantly larger in every dimension but thickness to a hardcover novel (the Nook Color is about the same size as typical hardcover or trade paperback novels). The iPad is a similar size (ignoring its advantage in thickness) to large hardcover technical books.
So yeah, the iPad isn't the perfect reading device, but then again it does about 100 other things that an e-ink device cannot (some of these pros/cons are shared by the Fire, since it also is backlit and doesn't have e-ink).
And also the Nook Color, which was GPs point of comparison, and the Nook Tablet, which is replacing the NC as B&N's $249 tablet offering.
I guess I'm not sure how anyone is ruling out the possibility of a cumulative effect from the minor (2.8 and under) earthquakes, which we are being told can be caused by fracking, putting stress on the fault line. Is that really not possible?
If I recall correctly, that's pretty much the opposite of what is understood to happen; the mechanism by which fracking causes minor earthquakes is understood to be lubricating existing stressed faults and causing them to release stress with less built up than they normally would.
Its pretty hard to rule out what you suggest conclusively, but it doesn't seem like there is any reason to believe that it is true.
no hobbyist will spend $1000 for a cpu+cooler for these performances.
I've always kind of figurred that Intel's "Extreme" processors were targetted at "hobbyists" with more money than sense, and mostly served as a way to get that demographic to subsidize dev costs that are shared with the more mundane chips in the same generation.
Socket compatibility is only good if it lasts long enough there good reason to upgrade.
Socket compatibility is good for system builders independent of whether it is ever useful to upgrade, since it increases the marketable lifespan of motherboards, increasing the time in which manufacturers can recoup the fixed cost of a particular motherboard model, decreasing motherboard prices.
Well, if you don't want to abide by the GPL, then using that source is no different than stealing code from someone else with any other license. It's the same risk.
In a world where the legal system had (and used) a 100% reliable filter to assure that only claims that, in fact, had merit would be filed and impose any burden on the defendant, that would be true.
In the real world, expanding the number of people who have standing to sue you for an alleged license violation increases your legal risk even if you never violate the license in question.
... and you think Microsoft would go to court to "validate" the GPL for us???? ROFL
I think Microsoft would find it worthwhile to go to court to "validate" that the GPL means that anyone who has ever contributed to non-assignment GPL project has standing to sue over any alleged GPL violation by any distributor of any work derivative of that project (they'd probably like to do the same with assignment-based GPL products under an intended-beneficiary theory, though that's more a stretch legally.) Now, in one sense, that would validate the strength of the GPL as a license for creators who wish to retain strong protection of the openness of their works.
It would also help validate the perception of GPL works as legally risky propositions for downstream users.
As someone else has pointed out that is a property of a political system wherein certain groups of people ask the political class to exercise more power every time there is a problem that results from the political class abusing its power.
Yeah, the political (actually, politico-economic) system involved is called "capitalism", which label -- as a term for a politico-economic system -- was coined by socialists to refer to specific real-world economies that they were criticising, particularly, those of dominant in the developed (for the time) world of the early-to-mid-18th Century, which exhibited exactly the features you claim are not properties of capitalism. (Prior to this "capitalist" was used to mean an owner of capital and "capitalism" was used to refer to the state of being a capitalist [in the sense just described], but "capitalism" wasn't used as a label for an economic or political system.)
Yes, but they won't upset it systemically in the way they do now.
Since the systematic disruption is largely due to conflicts of interests (many of which are directly enabled by the elimination, in the 1990s, of regulations imposed in response to the same conflicts and their contribution to the previous economic dislocations) that affect financial services firms and not bonuses paid to individual executives, eliminating bonuses paid to individual executives is unlikely to stop the systematic disruption.
It might mitigate one of the smaller sources of disruption, though.
Essentially, Republicans are trying to pass a law expressly forbidding the FCC from using powers that the courts hold the FCC doesn't have. (See page 2 of the article.)
No, they aren't. The authority that a court held that the FCC didn't have in one previous net-neutrality related action isn't the authority that the FCC relied on in the new net-neutrality-related action the Republicans are trying to reverse.
Obama, on the other hand, is "sticking it" to the Republicans by vetoing their useless bill in a useless gesture I can only imagine is intended to placate the Occupy Wall Street people.
Yeah, because its not like the President could actually believe the need for the regulation cited in the FCC's Report & Order.
It couldn't be someone who has an axe to grind on Android phones, no?
Why would you think that? The findings don't seem to be that negative on Android (despite the negative spin being given in many outlets.) I mean, even the part quoted in TFS notes that the higher failure rates on Android phones are due to the fact that there are more low-cost Android phones available.
Its not really surprising that the failure rate across all devices of an OS that is available on lower-end devices as well as high-end devices would be higher than ones that are only available on high-end devices.
It would be more interesting to see a failure rate comparison that controlled for the retail price of the device at introduction.
FWIW, you should only put two spaces after a period if you're typing in a monospaced font (like on a typewriter). For a proportionally spaced font, it's always one space.
Plenty of house styles places I've worked disagree, though that's my preferred style. The only time that I find doing two-spaces-after-sentence-ending-punctuation to be really problematic (assuming consistency within the document -- inconsistency is irritating anywhere) is when its done in full-justified text.
When you give an application to Apple to test, if it involves accounts you have to give them working logins. So it could be the test logins worked OK, just not some (or all?) general logins.
The error is, from all the reports I've read, related to the interaction with the on-device notifications API (which is why, in addition to producing the initial error message, it also prevents notifications from working, while leaving other functions operational), not the server-side login or interactions.
I disagree. By backing off, they're letting the cartels know that their methods of intimidation work.
Er, the cartels already know that.
And the discussions between different Anonymous-affiliated factions that I've seen reported didn't focus on fear of retaliation, they focussed on whether an action that would mainly reveal low level people who had been blackmailed into cooperation by the Zetas so that they could get murdered by rival drug gangs was in any way consistent with the ideals Anonymous wanted to advance, or productive in any way.
There's momentum now. Had this been dealt with in the wake of 9/11, I doubt very much that the train would still be rolling.
The momentum was pretty well established by several decades of similar abuses prior to 9/11, and perhaps most significantly the mother of all accountability-neutralizing moments in Ford's pardon of Nixon.
While, certainly, I'd like to see accountability for the post-9/11 abuses, its pretty clear that the momentum of the Imperial Presidency didn't start there.
Software patents are a government program for creating "fairness" among software developers and companies.
No, they aren't.
They are a government program for creating an incentive to create inventions that end up contributing to the common good. It says so right in the Constitutional provision that authorizes them.
I partially disagree. The White House has plenty of influence on the legislative process due to deal-making.
If Congress is interested in making deals. If the Congressional majority (even if its just in one of the two houses) is more interested in grandstanding by symbolic measures to appeal to the most extreme faction of their base rather than making deals to actually pass legislation, the White House's legislative influence is essentially non-existent.
However, the overall response redirects action to the petitioners through participating in the open implementation site and contacting Congress, instead of a promise to prepare additional legislative measures for Congress to consider on behalf of the petitioners.
As a practical matter, absent substantial political pressure from the electorate, the administration preparing legislation doesn't mean a whole lot. You get legislation that is prepared, and then dead-on-arrival in the Congress.
We don't have a monarchy. You aren't going to get a meaningful solution to problems that aren't specifically within the executive domain by petitioning the President alone. If you want changes in patent law (or anything else set in statute), you need to put pressure on Congress, first and foremost.
Also trying to get the White House on board probably doesn't hurt, but its not the main place you need to expend effort.
Psychological addiction to pot is of course possible, as it is with any other substance, object or activity.
The divide between "psychological addiction" and "physiological addiction" is rooted in the belief that the psychology of the mind is somehow independent of the physiology of the body. While that's a popular belief and tied in with popular religious views, there is, at best, little scientific support for it, and in the particular case of addiction its completely bunk: so-called "psychological addictions" are just as physiological as any other addiction.
There are, of course, real differences in the degrees and manners to which different addictive substances manifest the various traits that define addiction, but the "psychological" vs. "physiological" divide isn't a real axis of variation.
We all know that we're talking about semantic idents.
No, the statement "languages that consider whitespace need to die" comment was clearly attempting to present semantic indentation as a violation of some more-general rule.
Yes, but it should only be used when tokenizing. The idea of using it to indicate scope is absurd.
I'm not particularly fond of Python's indent-sensitivity, OTOH, its useful for lots of people and not particularly troublesome for me. I don't see any basis for characterizing it as absurd. I think that too many people mistakenly equate "it doesn't match my preferences" with "it is objectively wrong".
Comments in C are written/* text */. The slash-slash-to-newline comments are from C++.
C has changed since the 1980s -- largely due to interaction with C++.What you said was once true, but is no longer.
The point was that the airline industry has falsely claimed that air travel is the safest, when bus travel is safer, both by hours and by distance.
The only comparison you refer to in GGPper mile favors airplanes, (you do refer to automobiles -- which are different than buses -- being safer than airplanes per mile if you include only those miles travelled on superhighways.)
Add to that the fact that buses are MUCH more energy-efficient in terms of person-mile.
That's a non-sequitur when the issue is passenger safety.
And that the "air travel is safer" also ignores the trips to and from the airport as part of the overall package.
This is relevant, somewhat, but also offset by the fact that per mile comparisons need to be adjusted to account for the fact that the road miles between two points are generally greater than the air miles, since airplanes can take great circle routes, but roads rarely do.
It's like claiming that space shuttles are the safest form of travel because they have fewer deaths per passenger mile - no matter that they're WAY more dangerous than #2 - motorcycles - in terms of users killed per trip.
Well, its really not. People often make a decision between different modes of travel for a trip with fixed endpoints where bus and airplane might be valid options, and where the safety of each given a trip of fixed distance would be a concern.
People rarely make decisions where the alternatives are an average (or random) space shuttle trip and an average (or random) motorcycle trip, such that per-trip comparisons of the safety of a space shuttle flight and a motorcycle would be relevant.
Comparisons between things that aren't substitutes for each other, or that don't hold the thing constant that would be constant when they are alternatives to each other are meaningless.
Slashdot Mirror
Your home AP is accessible to more than that -- like anyone walking or driving by your house. Things that are broadcast in the clear, including SSIDs, are inherently public.
Its worse that that: the submitter didn't even say what is being attributed to the whole community. TFS ends with the question -- an invitation to comment in the attached comment thread -- "Is this a generous contribution to the open source community, or just Adobe offloading another failing technology?"
Some people have interpreted this as if it were a statement that "Adobe [is just] offloading another failing technology", but that's not what it says. It poses a question.
And the answer to the question of "is it A or B?" is that it is A and also B. Look, Adobe clearly sees Flex as, from its business perspective, a failing technology. The developers that are upset about it being abandoned in favor of HTML5 clearly see it as valuable. One of the benefits of open source is that it allows technologies to continue to be used and developed by others even when they no longer serve as a profit center for the original developer.
So, yeah, Adobe is offloading what it sees as a failing technology. On the other hand, it could just as easily kill it dead rather than handing it off to an open source foundation. By doing the latter, it is generously providing a way for someone else to maintain what has been an Adobe proprietary technology so that developers can keep using it.
which is good if you are comparing to an e-Ink reader, but GP was comparing to the Nook Color, a 7" LCD tablet with higher pixel density than the iPad.
See previous note.
I suspect this is another "see previous note" issue; browser navigation on the Nook Color is quite usable.
The iPad is significantly larger in every dimension but thickness to a hardcover novel (the Nook Color is about the same size as typical hardcover or trade paperback novels). The iPad is a similar size (ignoring its advantage in thickness) to large hardcover technical books.
And also the Nook Color, which was GPs point of comparison, and the Nook Tablet, which is replacing the NC as B&N's $249 tablet offering.
If I recall correctly, that's pretty much the opposite of what is understood to happen; the mechanism by which fracking causes minor earthquakes is understood to be lubricating existing stressed faults and causing them to release stress with less built up than they normally would.
Its pretty hard to rule out what you suggest conclusively, but it doesn't seem like there is any reason to believe that it is true.
The main legal obstacle to setting up an ISP that actually reaches customers is property rights.
I've always kind of figurred that Intel's "Extreme" processors were targetted at "hobbyists" with more money than sense, and mostly served as a way to get that demographic to subsidize dev costs that are shared with the more mundane chips in the same generation.
Socket compatibility is good for system builders independent of whether it is ever useful to upgrade, since it increases the marketable lifespan of motherboards, increasing the time in which manufacturers can recoup the fixed cost of a particular motherboard model, decreasing motherboard prices.
In a world where the legal system had (and used) a 100% reliable filter to assure that only claims that, in fact, had merit would be filed and impose any burden on the defendant, that would be true.
In the real world, expanding the number of people who have standing to sue you for an alleged license violation increases your legal risk even if you never violate the license in question.
I think Microsoft would find it worthwhile to go to court to "validate" that the GPL means that anyone who has ever contributed to non-assignment GPL project has standing to sue over any alleged GPL violation by any distributor of any work derivative of that project (they'd probably like to do the same with assignment-based GPL products under an intended-beneficiary theory, though that's more a stretch legally.) Now, in one sense, that would validate the strength of the GPL as a license for creators who wish to retain strong protection of the openness of their works.
It would also help validate the perception of GPL works as legally risky propositions for downstream users.
Yes, it is.
Yeah, the political (actually, politico-economic) system involved is called "capitalism", which label -- as a term for a politico-economic system -- was coined by socialists to refer to specific real-world economies that they were criticising, particularly, those of dominant in the developed (for the time) world of the early-to-mid-18th Century, which exhibited exactly the features you claim are not properties of capitalism. (Prior to this "capitalist" was used to mean an owner of capital and "capitalism" was used to refer to the state of being a capitalist [in the sense just described], but "capitalism" wasn't used as a label for an economic or political system.)
Since the systematic disruption is largely due to conflicts of interests (many of which are directly enabled by the elimination, in the 1990s, of regulations imposed in response to the same conflicts and their contribution to the previous economic dislocations) that affect financial services firms and not bonuses paid to individual executives, eliminating bonuses paid to individual executives is unlikely to stop the systematic disruption.
It might mitigate one of the smaller sources of disruption, though.
No, they aren't. The authority that a court held that the FCC didn't have in one previous net-neutrality related action isn't the authority that the FCC relied on in the new net-neutrality-related action the Republicans are trying to reverse.
Yeah, because its not like the President could actually believe the need for the regulation cited in the FCC's Report & Order.
Why would you think that? The findings don't seem to be that negative on Android (despite the negative spin being given in many outlets.) I mean, even the part quoted in TFS notes that the higher failure rates on Android phones are due to the fact that there are more low-cost Android phones available.
Its not really surprising that the failure rate across all devices of an OS that is available on lower-end devices as well as high-end devices would be higher than ones that are only available on high-end devices.
It would be more interesting to see a failure rate comparison that controlled for the retail price of the device at introduction.
Plenty of house styles places I've worked disagree, though that's my preferred style. The only time that I find doing two-spaces-after-sentence-ending-punctuation to be really problematic (assuming consistency within the document -- inconsistency is irritating anywhere) is when its done in full-justified text.
The error is, from all the reports I've read, related to the interaction with the on-device notifications API (which is why, in addition to producing the initial error message, it also prevents notifications from working, while leaving other functions operational), not the server-side login or interactions.
Er, the cartels already know that.
And the discussions between different Anonymous-affiliated factions that I've seen reported didn't focus on fear of retaliation, they focussed on whether an action that would mainly reveal low level people who had been blackmailed into cooperation by the Zetas so that they could get murdered by rival drug gangs was in any way consistent with the ideals Anonymous wanted to advance, or productive in any way.
The momentum was pretty well established by several decades of similar abuses prior to 9/11, and perhaps most significantly the mother of all accountability-neutralizing moments in Ford's pardon of Nixon.
While, certainly, I'd like to see accountability for the post-9/11 abuses, its pretty clear that the momentum of the Imperial Presidency didn't start there.
No, they aren't.
They are a government program for creating an incentive to create inventions that end up contributing to the common good. It says so right in the Constitutional provision that authorizes them.
Creating "fairness" isn't a factor.
If Congress is interested in making deals. If the Congressional majority (even if its just in one of the two houses) is more interested in grandstanding by symbolic measures to appeal to the most extreme faction of their base rather than making deals to actually pass legislation, the White House's legislative influence is essentially non-existent.
As a practical matter, absent substantial political pressure from the electorate, the administration preparing legislation doesn't mean a whole lot. You get legislation that is prepared, and then dead-on-arrival in the Congress.
We don't have a monarchy. You aren't going to get a meaningful solution to problems that aren't specifically within the executive domain by petitioning the President alone. If you want changes in patent law (or anything else set in statute), you need to put pressure on Congress, first and foremost.
Also trying to get the White House on board probably doesn't hurt, but its not the main place you need to expend effort.
The divide between "psychological addiction" and "physiological addiction" is rooted in the belief that the psychology of the mind is somehow independent of the physiology of the body. While that's a popular belief and tied in with popular religious views, there is, at best, little scientific support for it, and in the particular case of addiction its completely bunk: so-called "psychological addictions" are just as physiological as any other addiction.
There are, of course, real differences in the degrees and manners to which different addictive substances manifest the various traits that define addiction, but the "psychological" vs. "physiological" divide isn't a real axis of variation.
No, the statement "languages that consider whitespace need to die" comment was clearly attempting to present semantic indentation as a violation of some more-general rule.
I'm not particularly fond of Python's indent-sensitivity, OTOH, its useful for lots of people and not particularly troublesome for me. I don't see any basis for characterizing it as absurd. I think that too many people mistakenly equate "it doesn't match my preferences" with "it is objectively wrong".
C has changed since the 1980s -- largely due to interaction with C++.What you said was once true, but is no longer.
The only comparison you refer to in GGPper mile favors airplanes, (you do refer to automobiles -- which are different than buses -- being safer than airplanes per mile if you include only those miles travelled on superhighways.)
That's a non-sequitur when the issue is passenger safety.
This is relevant, somewhat, but also offset by the fact that per mile comparisons need to be adjusted to account for the fact that the road miles between two points are generally greater than the air miles, since airplanes can take great circle routes, but roads rarely do.
Well, its really not. People often make a decision between different modes of travel for a trip with fixed endpoints where bus and airplane might be valid options, and where the safety of each given a trip of fixed distance would be a concern.
People rarely make decisions where the alternatives are an average (or random) space shuttle trip and an average (or random) motorcycle trip, such that per-trip comparisons of the safety of a space shuttle flight and a motorcycle would be relevant.
Comparisons between things that aren't substitutes for each other, or that don't hold the thing constant that would be constant when they are alternatives to each other are meaningless.
But how likely is that, really?