I concur that aerobic training is the way to go if you are looking to lose some weight. If you absolutely must do it in the privacy of your home, then either a little investment is in order (a stationary bike, a treadmill) or you can try not to think of the preteen girl connotations and skip rope. It's an excellent cardio and coordination exercise, an essential part of the training of boxers and weightlifters, and quite exhilarating once you get the hang of it.
My laptop is still a no go. When I can fire up Ubuntu or ANY OTHER linux distriubution and flawlessly connect to my AP use WPA (or WPA2) on a hidden SSID and change my sitekey whenever I feel like it, THEN I'll be happy.
I take it you imply that this is not the case. Funny thing is, I've found this to be exactly the opposite.
The University where I teach recently added a WPA Enterprise secured wireless network to the old unencrypted one, where one would login at an HTTP gateway. Despite the lack of documentation provided by the IT folks, joining that network in my Ubuntu 7.10 laptop was simply a matter of firing up NetworkManager and filling a few values in the rather straightforward configuration window. Doing it in my partner's one, running Vista Home Premium, involved downloading a third-party add-on module (from SourceForge, BTW; at least it's GPL stuff), rebooting twice and having to put up with Vista telling me that it doesn't have enough information to connect to the network despite its being already connected and transmitting.
Of course, this is simply anecdotal (although I can point you to the University's site, where the network config info is now available) and probably not representative, but I see no grounds to assume that your complaint is any more so.
I don't care about the openness of the drivers, and I don't care about anything else.
Many of us do, though.
I absolutely CANNOT be in a situation where the solution to make this work requires a download! The drivers for MY laptop (and that means EVERY wireless card) MUST be ON the install disk and working by default. Period.
That just goes to show that Windows is not ready for the desktop, doesn't it? As you probably know, a standard Windows installation disk has rather few drivers. It's hardware vendors that provide them, usually in separate media. The only reason all the necessary ones are installed when you purchase a laptop is because the OEM made sure they'd be there (and not always; my partner's Toshiba, which I mentioned above, still does not have a usable Vista driver for the integrated webcam). If you purchase a Dell with Ubuntu preinstalled, you get the same treatment.
a memo came through from headquarters requesting that the price of the shop's own brand be increased to more than the price of the band which was advertised nationally. the result was that most customers bought the shop's own brand
I'd think it rather unlikely in the case of pasta sauce, but this phenomenon is called Veblen effect in economics. Simply put, goods provide utility both from their intrinsic qualities, and from the social distinction their consumption provides. If a higher price tag leads consumers to think they will get higher social standing from their purchase, they will actually consume more as the price increases.
Please note that any reference or similarity to persons, places or activities involved in Apple marketing are purely coincidential and unintentional:)
Why bother blowing someone up if I don't care about him?
Uh, to ask for something in exchange for a ceasefire? You know, that is what terrorism used to mean: public extortion, using intimidation as a tool. Extending the word's meaning to encompass all forms of informal armed conflict between States and non-governmental organisations was already part of the semantic move now deployed by the neocons. Its purpose is to conflate political and common conflict.
But we're drifting quite far from the topic here. I agree that the Madrid bombings were a punishment for the Aznar government's automatic alignment with American foreign policy. In any case, saying that the American position is wrong (as I believe it is) does not mean Al-Qaeda is right.
I am not a native English speaker either, but I'm a linguist by trade. The collocations for "sway" in large corpora of written English prose show that figurative use of the verb is framed usually in a derogatory depiction of its object; among the top ones are "swayed by * propaganda", "swayed by prejudice", "unduly swayed", and "we should not be swayed" (from the BNC corpus).
Where did I mention mental and/or emotional inferiority?
You didn't need to. You clearly said "more easily swayed", not "more easily confused by the many details irrelevant to the question of law", or anything of the sort. "Swayed" implies less emotional stability and/or less rationality.
You're entitled to your opinion. I just happen to think it stinks, but even then I wouldn't have thought it worth mentioning if it were not for your phony disclaimer that you're not a snob.
Funny, so far nobody tried to kill me. Or anyone around me. Or anyone on (continental) Europe.
While I largely agree with the argument that (I think) you're trying to push, don't you think that the 2004 Madrid train bombings sort of contradict your statement above?
Of course, you could take the Spanish far-right's position and claim that Euskadi Ta Askatasuna was behind the bombing, or go with Alexandre Dumas and say that L'Afrique commence de l'autre côté des Pyrénées. I don't take much stock in either claim, though.
Not to say I'm some kind of snob, but really, uneducated people are more easily swayed.
Evidence, please. I have actually been working on experimental measures of the impact of erroneous or irrelevant information, and no singly study I am aware of has shown general education level to factor in at any significant degree. In fact, most of those that have conclusively shown irelevant information to have an effect have been performed on undergraduate and graduate college students (say, Zillman, D., Gibson, R., Sundar, S. S., & Perkins, J. W. Jr. (1996). Effects of exemplification in news reports on the perception of social issues. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 73, 427-444).
This is not to say that eventual studies may find an effect for educational level, but on the absence of such evidence nor any adequate conceptual ground, your statement is just an expression of prejudice. In other words: what you say makes you a snob, and I don't care for what you say that you're saying.
And, BTW: I have no sympathy for trial by jury. I prefer a professional judge to deal with the inevitable subtleties, but that is because having people serve in jury duty requires society to train them each time in the specifics, not because they are mentally or emotionally inferior for lacing a degree in Law.
Clearly it does, but it's not necessarily the case that because Copyright exists Public Domain must also. I can easily imagine a government corrupt enough as to abolish the Public Domain entirely.
You seem to be completely missing Bruce's point. As far as I can see, neither he nor anyone else has claimed that there is no such thing as works in the public domain. The law is crystal clear in that regard; once copyright on a work expires, it enters the public domain.
What is not clear at all is whether you are entitled to renounce copyright on works of your authorship before it expires. There are many examples of rights that cannot be waived, such as those to liberty or life; you can't sell yourself into slavery, nor lawfully commit suicide. A case could therefore be made that the moral rights entailed by copyright law are similarly unrenounceable, and that any legal instrument purporting to renounce them is actually invalid. I am not saying that this is the case (AFAIK there is no precedent on the matter in the USA), but given that it is a clear possibility, it may actually be more reasonable to choose a generous license than to attempt dedication to the public domain.
Many open source developers train themselves on the basics through open source projects and then become closed system developers (using Microsoft, Flash, Apple, Sony, etc. systems) when they realize they prefer getting paid for their work.
Any chance of providing any form of data to back up your data, or are you just hoping someone feeds the troll? I have yet to see any actual study showing this trend, not least because there is a large number of people being paid for their work in free software (Red Hat alone has employees in the thousands range, to mention only one of the best known).
Free meaning free as in speech, many people who work in FS do not do so for free. The largest producers of FS, measured in lines of code, are commercial companies, who in turn obtain revenue from support, hardware or custom development contracts.
It isn't that hard to employ analogic reasoning and infer that by "polygenesis" the OP probably means "independent formulation of identical conclusions by separate researchers". Not that I heard the term before with that meaning, but the concept itself is pretty standard in neo-institutional theories of knowledge diffusion.
Building a package is almost exactly not what I mean by easy installation - and the fact that software authors so rarely provide packages on their websites suggests that they don't feel it's a trivial amount of work either.
I think you're missing the point. There are many reasons why developers may not wish to provide binary packages for different platforms; except for some traditional *NIX-style utilities, binaries tend to depend on the presence and version of a good many libraries and tools. Developers do not necessrily know which are available on every possible platform and distribution, which would be necessary for them to provide packages for them all; or even less have access to said for compiling. Most of the time they just limit themselves to the ones they're personally acquainted with or develop on.
Now, the beauty of./configure scripts is that you don't have to know too much about versions and locations either; you just throw an environment at them, and detection proceeds automagically. Instead of a single group of developers having to account for every possible configuration, it can be safely determined at compile-time. Typing./configure && make && sudo make install is all it often takes. Of course, this isn't necessarily true for complex pieces of software (I shudder at the thought of compiling XFree86 again), but it is actually unusual that any of these not be available in prepackaged form.
I don't think I've ever seen a Windows program that didn't run within a couple of mouse clicks.
That may be true if all goes well, which is a fairly weighty assumption. I have seen my share of mispackaged MSIs, not to mention old-style applications that can only be installed with Administrator rights, yet refuse to run for any user other than the installer (a situation you cannot circumvent with Run As); fixing these installations is far more painful than compiling your average program from source, even if only because there is no guidance whatsoever as to what may be wrong (there are many software publishers out there that havent heard of install logs). Other installation packages are known to aggressively overwrite Registry settings (Norton Internet Security comes to mind).
With that said, I am not advocating for source compilation as a general method for software distribution. I strongly support the Debian paradigm of having everything under the sun in their repository tree and doing away with inconsistencies. Except for portage, which is intended to address a wholly different situation, I fail to see what can actually be improved in that system.
I do not know whether you can read Spanish. If you do, the Spanish Wikipedia article on the subject is rather accurate, although sadly insufficiently backed by citations. It describes at some length the three most widely used systems. I could dig out some more references, but it would make sense to do so only if you're moderately fluent in Spanish; I don't think anything very extensive has been written in any other language, except of course Mapudungun itself.
At last an adequate comment. Of course, this being Slashdot, where posters don't read TFA, only diehard optimists like me would expect anyone to research the issue.
The question here is not one of patents or copyrights. It has to do with the potentially disastrous impact a standardised Mapudungun devised by people out of touch with the culture and history behind it may have.
Unlike most European languages, Mapudungun has been exclusively oral until very recently. In the process of devising a reasonable writing system for it --reasonable meaning, with a robust correspondence between phonemes and graphemes, unlike English, French or Spanish--, there has been a lot of literate discussion, and a good deal of disagreement. The process of devising a writing system is one of the first steps towards standardising a language; it should take into account the cultural and dialectal variations, and many political choices have to be made to obtain a satisfactory result (think of the ongoing criticism the standardisation of Catalan has provoked, and the extreme reaction from Valencian speakers, who would rather call theirs a different language than acknowledge as normative the Barcelona pronounciation on which the standard is based).
There are currently no less than three proposals for a standardised Mapudungun writing system. They all have their supporters and their critics, and discussion is likely to remain lively for a while. However, MS may exert a great influence over the subsequent course of it, by imposing a de facto standard for computer operation. Well-meaning schooling officials may foster the use of MS's version, thinking it might help the development of bilingualism, and further complicate the issue.
What the Mapuche are defending is their right to discuss in an informed manner and without a cultural monopoly being leveraged against us the future course of their language, not a matter of ownership. I, for one, think their position is understandable.
Except that you missed one point that makes Linux adoption more difficult: Hardware compatibility. I'm not talking about standard hardware compatibility--Linux detects and works with that just fine, and even better than Windows in some cases. But if newbie buys some MP3 player or bluetooth keyboard online, regardless of the brand, they can be sure that it works with Windows
That's accurate as new fresh-off-the-shelf hardware goes. With slightly obsolete hardware, it may be surprising that other OSes offer better support than Windows. I have to maintain some rather old machines, and drivers for their internals and peripherics are simply not available for current versions of Win32. Getting an UMAX SCSI scanner to work under Win XP required quite a lot of trickery and hacking at the drivers' packaging (the drivers themselves, of course, are untouchable), with the added difficulty of lacking both serious documentation and source code. In some other cases, drivers have to be carefully hunted from the manufacturers' sites, where often they're only indexed by chipset code or some other crucial datum that is likely to be completely obscure for the newbies. And there's nothing like lspci to get you started.
The fact that Windows is supposed to just work makes it far more difficult to get it to work when it doesn't, as the tools simply aren't there. You need specialized knowledge even to get them.
Slashdot Mirror
Only some of them. Most (at least judging from the general level of comments here in Slashdot) are Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons.
Perhaps GMail is glad it's a Beta, because Alphas work too hard?
I concur that aerobic training is the way to go if you are looking to lose some weight. If you absolutely must do it in the privacy of your home, then either a little investment is in order (a stationary bike, a treadmill) or you can try not to think of the preteen girl connotations and skip rope. It's an excellent cardio and coordination exercise, an essential part of the training of boxers and weightlifters, and quite exhilarating once you get the hang of it.
I take it you imply that this is not the case. Funny thing is, I've found this to be exactly the opposite.
The University where I teach recently added a WPA Enterprise secured wireless network to the old unencrypted one, where one would login at an HTTP gateway. Despite the lack of documentation provided by the IT folks, joining that network in my Ubuntu 7.10 laptop was simply a matter of firing up NetworkManager and filling a few values in the rather straightforward configuration window. Doing it in my partner's one, running Vista Home Premium, involved downloading a third-party add-on module (from SourceForge, BTW; at least it's GPL stuff), rebooting twice and having to put up with Vista telling me that it doesn't have enough information to connect to the network despite its being already connected and transmitting.
Of course, this is simply anecdotal (although I can point you to the University's site, where the network config info is now available) and probably not representative, but I see no grounds to assume that your complaint is any more so.
Many of us do, though.
That just goes to show that Windows is not ready for the desktop, doesn't it? As you probably know, a standard Windows installation disk has rather few drivers. It's hardware vendors that provide them, usually in separate media. The only reason all the necessary ones are installed when you purchase a laptop is because the OEM made sure they'd be there (and not always; my partner's Toshiba, which I mentioned above, still does not have a usable Vista driver for the integrated webcam). If you purchase a Dell with Ubuntu preinstalled, you get the same treatment.
I'd think it rather unlikely in the case of pasta sauce, but this phenomenon is called Veblen effect in economics. Simply put, goods provide utility both from their intrinsic qualities, and from the social distinction their consumption provides. If a higher price tag leads consumers to think they will get higher social standing from their purchase, they will actually consume more as the price increases.
Please note that any reference or similarity to persons, places or activities involved in Apple marketing are purely coincidential and unintentional :)
Uh, to ask for something in exchange for a ceasefire? You know, that is what terrorism used to mean: public extortion, using intimidation as a tool. Extending the word's meaning to encompass all forms of informal armed conflict between States and non-governmental organisations was already part of the semantic move now deployed by the neocons. Its purpose is to conflate political and common conflict.
But we're drifting quite far from the topic here. I agree that the Madrid bombings were a punishment for the Aznar government's automatic alignment with American foreign policy. In any case, saying that the American position is wrong (as I believe it is) does not mean Al-Qaeda is right.
I am not a native English speaker either, but I'm a linguist by trade. The collocations for "sway" in large corpora of written English prose show that figurative use of the verb is framed usually in a derogatory depiction of its object; among the top ones are "swayed by * propaganda", "swayed by prejudice", "unduly swayed", and "we should not be swayed" (from the BNC corpus).
You didn't need to. You clearly said "more easily swayed", not "more easily confused by the many details irrelevant to the question of law", or anything of the sort. "Swayed" implies less emotional stability and/or less rationality.
You're entitled to your opinion. I just happen to think it stinks, but even then I wouldn't have thought it worth mentioning if it were not for your phony disclaimer that you're not a snob.
While I largely agree with the argument that (I think) you're trying to push, don't you think that the 2004 Madrid train bombings sort of contradict your statement above?
Of course, you could take the Spanish far-right's position and claim that Euskadi Ta Askatasuna was behind the bombing, or go with Alexandre Dumas and say that L'Afrique commence de l'autre côté des Pyrénées. I don't take much stock in either claim, though.
Evidence, please. I have actually been working on experimental measures of the impact of erroneous or irrelevant information, and no singly study I am aware of has shown general education level to factor in at any significant degree. In fact, most of those that have conclusively shown irelevant information to have an effect have been performed on undergraduate and graduate college students (say, Zillman, D., Gibson, R., Sundar, S. S., & Perkins, J. W. Jr. (1996). Effects of exemplification in news reports on the perception of social issues. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 73, 427-444).
This is not to say that eventual studies may find an effect for educational level, but on the absence of such evidence nor any adequate conceptual ground, your statement is just an expression of prejudice. In other words: what you say makes you a snob, and I don't care for what you say that you're saying.
And, BTW: I have no sympathy for trial by jury. I prefer a professional judge to deal with the inevitable subtleties, but that is because having people serve in jury duty requires society to train them each time in the specifics, not because they are mentally or emotionally inferior for lacing a degree in Law.
You seem to be completely missing Bruce's point. As far as I can see, neither he nor anyone else has claimed that there is no such thing as works in the public domain. The law is crystal clear in that regard; once copyright on a work expires, it enters the public domain.
What is not clear at all is whether you are entitled to renounce copyright on works of your authorship before it expires. There are many examples of rights that cannot be waived, such as those to liberty or life; you can't sell yourself into slavery, nor lawfully commit suicide. A case could therefore be made that the moral rights entailed by copyright law are similarly unrenounceable, and that any legal instrument purporting to renounce them is actually invalid. I am not saying that this is the case (AFAIK there is no precedent on the matter in the USA), but given that it is a clear possibility, it may actually be more reasonable to choose a generous license than to attempt dedication to the public domain.
Incidentally, see the template to that effect in the Wikimedia Commons to see a cautious approach to the issue.
Any chance of providing any form of data to back up your data, or are you just hoping someone feeds the troll? I have yet to see any actual study showing this trend, not least because there is a large number of people being paid for their work in free software (Red Hat alone has employees in the thousands range, to mention only one of the best known).
Free meaning free as in speech, many people who work in FS do not do so for free. The largest producers of FS, measured in lines of code, are commercial companies, who in turn obtain revenue from support, hardware or custom development contracts.
It isn't that hard to employ analogic reasoning and infer that by "polygenesis" the OP probably means "independent formulation of identical conclusions by separate researchers". Not that I heard the term before with that meaning, but the concept itself is pretty standard in neo-institutional theories of knowledge diffusion.
I think you're missing the point. There are many reasons why developers may not wish to provide binary packages for different platforms; except for some traditional *NIX-style utilities, binaries tend to depend on the presence and version of a good many libraries and tools. Developers do not necessrily know which are available on every possible platform and distribution, which would be necessary for them to provide packages for them all; or even less have access to said for compiling. Most of the time they just limit themselves to the ones they're personally acquainted with or develop on.
Now, the beauty of ./configure scripts is that you don't have to know too much about versions and locations either; you just throw an environment at them, and detection proceeds automagically. Instead of a single group of developers having to account for every possible configuration, it can be safely determined at compile-time. Typing ./configure && make && sudo make install is all it often takes. Of course, this isn't necessarily true for complex pieces of software (I shudder at the thought of compiling XFree86 again), but it is actually unusual that any of these not be available in prepackaged form.
I don't think I've ever seen a Windows program that didn't run within a couple of mouse clicks.That may be true if all goes well, which is a fairly weighty assumption. I have seen my share of mispackaged MSIs, not to mention old-style applications that can only be installed with Administrator rights, yet refuse to run for any user other than the installer (a situation you cannot circumvent with Run As); fixing these installations is far more painful than compiling your average program from source, even if only because there is no guidance whatsoever as to what may be wrong (there are many software publishers out there that havent heard of install logs). Other installation packages are known to aggressively overwrite Registry settings (Norton Internet Security comes to mind).
With that said, I am not advocating for source compilation as a general method for software distribution. I strongly support the Debian paradigm of having everything under the sun in their repository tree and doing away with inconsistencies. Except for portage, which is intended to address a wholly different situation, I fail to see what can actually be improved in that system.
I do not know whether you can read Spanish. If you do, the Spanish Wikipedia article on the subject is rather accurate, although sadly insufficiently backed by citations. It describes at some length the three most widely used systems. I could dig out some more references, but it would make sense to do so only if you're moderately fluent in Spanish; I don't think anything very extensive has been written in any other language, except of course Mapudungun itself.
At last an adequate comment. Of course, this being Slashdot, where posters don't read TFA, only diehard optimists like me would expect anyone to research the issue.
The question here is not one of patents or copyrights. It has to do with the potentially disastrous impact a standardised Mapudungun devised by people out of touch with the culture and history behind it may have.
Unlike most European languages, Mapudungun has been exclusively oral until very recently. In the process of devising a reasonable writing system for it --reasonable meaning, with a robust correspondence between phonemes and graphemes, unlike English, French or Spanish--, there has been a lot of literate discussion, and a good deal of disagreement. The process of devising a writing system is one of the first steps towards standardising a language; it should take into account the cultural and dialectal variations, and many political choices have to be made to obtain a satisfactory result (think of the ongoing criticism the standardisation of Catalan has provoked, and the extreme reaction from Valencian speakers, who would rather call theirs a different language than acknowledge as normative the Barcelona pronounciation on which the standard is based).
There are currently no less than three proposals for a standardised Mapudungun writing system. They all have their supporters and their critics, and discussion is likely to remain lively for a while. However, MS may exert a great influence over the subsequent course of it, by imposing a de facto standard for computer operation. Well-meaning schooling officials may foster the use of MS's version, thinking it might help the development of bilingualism, and further complicate the issue.
What the Mapuche are defending is their right to discuss in an informed manner and without a cultural monopoly being leveraged against us the future course of their language, not a matter of ownership. I, for one, think their position is understandable.
If you do this a lot, may I introduce you to RIG, the random identity generator? It generates valid, yet fake US-address data.
That's accurate as new fresh-off-the-shelf hardware goes. With slightly obsolete hardware, it may be surprising that other OSes offer better support than Windows. I have to maintain some rather old machines, and drivers for their internals and peripherics are simply not available for current versions of Win32. Getting an UMAX SCSI scanner to work under Win XP required quite a lot of trickery and hacking at the drivers' packaging (the drivers themselves, of course, are untouchable), with the added difficulty of lacking both serious documentation and source code. In some other cases, drivers have to be carefully hunted from the manufacturers' sites, where often they're only indexed by chipset code or some other crucial datum that is likely to be completely obscure for the newbies. And there's nothing like lspci to get you started.
The fact that Windows is supposed to just work makes it far more difficult to get it to work when it doesn't, as the tools simply aren't there. You need specialized knowledge even to get them.