I asked the RDF search engine, and that's what it told me. Maybe if we ask it the right question it could come up with an answer to do that. Now if only we could devise a machine powerful enough to tell us what that question would be...
"Why dont you use it and try to develop your own opinions objectively rather than believing everything you read on an enourmously biased website?"
Because he doesn't really have $300+ lying around to buy a new OS he apparently isn't too interested in using? Because installing a brand new OS just because you can serves no real purpose? Because he might read sites other than Slashdot? Because personal, objective opinions are both virtually impossible to have and very frequently of no use? I could keep going with reasons that your suggestion serves no purpose other than to say he should be a good Microsoft customer just for the hell of it, but those seemed to sum it up pretty well.
The content and special features aren't the message, they're included in the message. It's a small, but crucial, distinction. Just because that's the only part of the message we really care about doesn't mean it's the entire thing. The player is the recipient because it is (supposedly) the only party able to decrypt the message and (again, supposedly) it places strict rules on what you can and can't do with the portion of the message that it relays to you. The publishers have, in fact, decided that they don't want you to be the recipient, because that is the only way that they can enforce DRM. If they wanted us to be recipients, then there wouldn't be a problem.
Well, since I don't work in mainstream IT, gladly.
That said, you're still assuming that the future will be just like the present. For all we know, by the time most of these kids are old enough to be in that situation, Windows will be a relic of the past and specialists in it will simply be maintaining legacy systems not yet needing to be rolled over onto... who knows what.
How about next time YOU walk into an interview for an IT job you tell them that you're completely unfamiliar with anything other than Windows and MS Office, but that's an advantage because there's no possible reason that they could ever want to run something else. If they hire you, it's a perfect fit, thanks for taking one for the team.
Speaking of IT work, what's the pay rate for a solid astroturfer these days? I'm pretty good at trolling around and posting, so I thought maybe I'd get into it professionally. Know anyone I could talk to?
Considering his actual words, as quoted repeatedly in response to this question elsewhere in the discussion, I think not. It's pretty clear that he wants the debate to be public domain OR Creative Commons Attribution because those are the most appropriate licenses for them, not because he doesn't grasp that copyright is involved.
Considering the fact that Obama is a lawyer, and also that he has many supporters with backgrounds in mass media (David Geffen), I find it highly unlikely that he is completely unfamiliar with the differences between PD, CC, OS, etc.
Some people even go so far as to hope that the opposing party will pick a weak candidate with no good ideas so that theirs is more likely to win... of course, then it backfires and you get where we are today.
Two months ago they were held back by an agreement with AOL that they wouldn't make any major releases as part of a trademark suit. A couple of weeks ago they announced that the project's name was changing, that AOL was getting off their back, and that they would resume non-beta updates. Lo and behold, they've released one.
No, I'm not Amish. I do have a great deal of respect for their decision, however, and I have considered finding a Society of Friends Meeting to look into it as a possible place to find others with beliefs similar to mine.
Posting. Though I suppose if I'm not Amish this isn't nearly so surprising. Although my understanding is that the Amish require members of a certain age to live outside of that community for a period with the intent that their way of life is of little value to those who haven't made a conscious decision to join it, if I were Amish, I could be of such an age and simply be living in the modern world while I make that decision. A bit off-topic, I know, but it interests me and I don't mind going a bit OT from time to time.
Really, wow, what a revelation, thanks for explaining the basic mechanics of a gun. Somehow I'd managed to obtain a decent familiarity with both firearms and gun culture, yet had no idea what they were or how they function, my life is now complete.
Ignoring your "atheist" (back when I was an atheist, it was considered proper demarcation to put quotes around that word when used to describe one who lacks the logic or tact to back their disbelief, relying instead on being an asshat) snarkiness that seems to presume I am a member of an organized religion (which I am not) and believe in something other than a personal deity (which I do not) and that it is somehow completely invalid, pointless, and lacking in objective philosophical benefits in any case (which it isn't), the answer is: not specifically; all of those items are lack the disturbing ease of killing that accomodates modern firearms, I'd being willing to except muskets and other such archaic firearms that are not nearly so efficient, rapid, or impersonal at killing as modern ones.
I'm class restricted to weapons that ensure I either really mean to kill or are effectively non-lethal. Killing someone with a melee weapon is incredibly personal and very difficult to do without really meaning to do it, tasing someone is unlikely to cause them any real long-term harm and deaths from it are incredibly rare; guns kill from a distance, they are instantly lethal, and it only takes a split-second lapse in judgment to make a mistake that will dramatically affect everyone involved for the rest of their lives (however short or long they might be). Frankly, I don't see where anyone can get off criticizing me for that.
You're stretching. Guns are one of the few tools with purely destructive purposes, they serve no purpose other than to kill, while killing is sometimes a necessary evil, it is never really good. That is, in fact the primary difference between guns and cars; namely, cars move people and things to be where they need to be, they serve a functional and apparent good... guns kill stuff, and that's all they can do. Framing the issue as "cars kill more people than guns, so if we're going to ban guns we should ban cars too" is just a red herring.
I say this as a gun control opponent AND pacifist whose religious convictions prevent so much as handling firearms. To be more specific, I'm OK with background checks (sorry convicted felons, but no, I don't think you should be carrying), registration, safety course requirements, safe storage requirements, and such, but I don't agree with prohibiting concealed carry across the board (though I would almost prefer unconcealed carry... I don't really understand the point of hiding them if they're legal), or with prohibiting certain classes and types of firearms across the board (civilians need to be able to own fully automatic weapons, because on the off chance we need to overthrow our government we cannot afford to be that outgunned... the AWB is just absurd, as are bans on.50 rifles), or with prohibiting or restricting the customization of legal firearms.
I read that response, I think the point the other guy was trying to make is that you aren't the intended receiver, your hardware is, and your hardware is only telling you certain pieces of information as it sees fit.
To put into the context of this discussion: you buy an HD-DVD, you insert it into your player, and you watch the movie. The disc constitutes the totality of the message, the sender is the manufacturer, and the recipient is your player. Within the larger message is contained the movie, and the message itself instructs your player to show you the movie if, and only if, certain conditions are met. The inaccurate part of your.sig is not that we are not a recipient, it's that we aren't the recipient of the message we think we're receiving.
The real weakness in DRM is that there is an approximately infinite number of potential attackers spending an approximately infinite amount of time and using an approximately infinite number of discrete messages attempting to break the code, and that furthermore these attackers ALREADY KNOW what the decoded message is supposed to look like, AND have unlimited unmonitored access to an approximately infinite number of valid recipients. It follows that the encryption WILL be compromised no matter how good it is, because the attackers have so much access to all but one party in the scheme (the sender) that it can never be good enough.
But it's not... you see, the only real reason to keep using one OS over another is inertia, and by introducing these kids to *nix, they are going to have inertia in that direction. Things won't stay the way they are forever, we can be sure of that because they never do, and the future is always shaped by the children, not the adults.
They'll keep using whatever they want to use, just like we'll keep using whatever we want to use; the difference being that they'll be alive well after we're dead and in the ground (or shot into space, or in an urn, or cryogenically frozen, or whatever).
But what if they all have reality distortion fields!?! Too many Steves and the space-time continuum as we know it could be rent asunder by the BS! Dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
I vote for a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Apple's main campus, just to be on the safe side.
There is something to be said for learning from one's own mistakes. There's also something to be said for learning from the mistakes of others.
For example, I happen to know that a good cuber (what butchers use to turn otherwise unpalatably tough meat into unpalatably bizarre cube steaks, among other uses) can crush bones and spit out a cube arm if you're a big enough idiot to let it catch one of your fingers when you're feeding meat through it; I know this because a butcher I used to work with saw it happen to a guy 30 years ago when he was first learning how to be a butcher.
You're quite right. My point isn't that Apple's products are "bad", it's that Apple's products are not universally and unequivocally superior to all others. I don't have have any problem with Apple or their products, just with the iFans.
And at that point in history, the poor were often left to die, and most people were, as the GP put it, country folks unaware of their place in the larger picture.
And no, the Founding Fathers were not predominantly what we would describe as libertarian; some of them were to be sure, but they came from many diverse philosophical, political and religious backgrounds espousing a wide variety of ideas on how things should be done. The current idea that was least in evidence was probably socialism, but then again, modern socialism hadn't really been invented yet by the time most of the Founding Fathers were dead; I have no doubt that if it had been, it would have had representation.
There was a time when American politics consisted of something other than polemic and reactionism, when the point was to get the best minds together and come up with an idea that mostly works for mostly everyone. It wasn't always about using parliamentary tactics to force your party's policy through against the wishes of the opposition as an exercise in proving how much stronger and better you are than they are.
Although, if you were to read previous comments before posting, you'd see that only a few comments above yours he specifically stated that he submitted it without an apostrophe, and CmdrTaco must have inserted one post-submission.
One problem though, I used it to watch attack of the clones, hoping to see some Natalie Portman hawtness, and was instead rendered impotent by Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen.
Turns out, the key only works for actors, and does nothing for actresses.
Yeah, and unlike those pussies in the Olympics, OUR top shooters are so good they can hold the gun sideways and ignore the sights. Only losers aim, or shoot at things more than 15' away.
So, who, exactly, has an expectation of privacy when they're in public? Yeah, yeah, surveillance bad, privacy good, rah rah rah, but seriously, if you don't want your business to be public, then keep it in private.
Either that, or talk about incredibly private things that are virtually guaranteed to make whatever poor schlub is reading the transcripts incredibly uncomfortable. Or say things that are so unbelievably suspicious that they'll have no choice to investigate, and when it turns out to be complete fabrication remind them it was their ill-conceived idea to read your lips in the first place.
On the contrary, well written software will give you the option to install it either way, so that only admins can install apps for every user, but every user can install their own settings and/or plugins in their sandbox. Multi-user machines will still require competent administrators, and single user machines will be better protected from malicious code making the machine completely unusable.
Slashdot Mirror
I asked the RDF search engine, and that's what it told me. Maybe if we ask it the right question it could come up with an answer to do that. Now if only we could devise a machine powerful enough to tell us what that question would be...
"Why dont you use it and try to develop your own opinions objectively rather than believing everything you read on an enourmously biased website?"
Because he doesn't really have $300+ lying around to buy a new OS he apparently isn't too interested in using? Because installing a brand new OS just because you can serves no real purpose? Because he might read sites other than Slashdot? Because personal, objective opinions are both virtually impossible to have and very frequently of no use? I could keep going with reasons that your suggestion serves no purpose other than to say he should be a good Microsoft customer just for the hell of it, but those seemed to sum it up pretty well.
I think you missed my point...
The content and special features aren't the message, they're included in the message. It's a small, but crucial, distinction. Just because that's the only part of the message we really care about doesn't mean it's the entire thing. The player is the recipient because it is (supposedly) the only party able to decrypt the message and (again, supposedly) it places strict rules on what you can and can't do with the portion of the message that it relays to you. The publishers have, in fact, decided that they don't want you to be the recipient, because that is the only way that they can enforce DRM. If they wanted us to be recipients, then there wouldn't be a problem.
Well, since I don't work in mainstream IT, gladly.
That said, you're still assuming that the future will be just like the present. For all we know, by the time most of these kids are old enough to be in that situation, Windows will be a relic of the past and specialists in it will simply be maintaining legacy systems not yet needing to be rolled over onto... who knows what.
How about next time YOU walk into an interview for an IT job you tell them that you're completely unfamiliar with anything other than Windows and MS Office, but that's an advantage because there's no possible reason that they could ever want to run something else. If they hire you, it's a perfect fit, thanks for taking one for the team.
Speaking of IT work, what's the pay rate for a solid astroturfer these days? I'm pretty good at trolling around and posting, so I thought maybe I'd get into it professionally. Know anyone I could talk to?
Considering his actual words, as quoted repeatedly in response to this question elsewhere in the discussion, I think not. It's pretty clear that he wants the debate to be public domain OR Creative Commons Attribution because those are the most appropriate licenses for them, not because he doesn't grasp that copyright is involved.
Considering the fact that Obama is a lawyer, and also that he has many supporters with backgrounds in mass media (David Geffen), I find it highly unlikely that he is completely unfamiliar with the differences between PD, CC, OS, etc.
Well, unless he's a fiscal conservative, and not a social conservative. You know that's possible, right?
Sadly, yes.
Some people even go so far as to hope that the opposing party will pick a weak candidate with no good ideas so that theirs is more likely to win... of course, then it backfires and you get where we are today.
Two months ago they were held back by an agreement with AOL that they wouldn't make any major releases as part of a trademark suit. A couple of weeks ago they announced that the project's name was changing, that AOL was getting off their back, and that they would resume non-beta updates. Lo and behold, they've released one.
Allow me to adress each of your concerns:
No, I'm not Amish. I do have a great deal of respect for their decision, however, and I have considered finding a Society of Friends Meeting to look into it as a possible place to find others with beliefs similar to mine.
Posting. Though I suppose if I'm not Amish this isn't nearly so surprising. Although my understanding is that the Amish require members of a certain age to live outside of that community for a period with the intent that their way of life is of little value to those who haven't made a conscious decision to join it, if I were Amish, I could be of such an age and simply be living in the modern world while I make that decision. A bit off-topic, I know, but it interests me and I don't mind going a bit OT from time to time.
Really, wow, what a revelation, thanks for explaining the basic mechanics of a gun. Somehow I'd managed to obtain a decent familiarity with both firearms and gun culture, yet had no idea what they were or how they function, my life is now complete.
Ignoring your "atheist" (back when I was an atheist, it was considered proper demarcation to put quotes around that word when used to describe one who lacks the logic or tact to back their disbelief, relying instead on being an asshat) snarkiness that seems to presume I am a member of an organized religion (which I am not) and believe in something other than a personal deity (which I do not) and that it is somehow completely invalid, pointless, and lacking in objective philosophical benefits in any case (which it isn't), the answer is: not specifically; all of those items are lack the disturbing ease of killing that accomodates modern firearms, I'd being willing to except muskets and other such archaic firearms that are not nearly so efficient, rapid, or impersonal at killing as modern ones.
I'm class restricted to weapons that ensure I either really mean to kill or are effectively non-lethal. Killing someone with a melee weapon is incredibly personal and very difficult to do without really meaning to do it, tasing someone is unlikely to cause them any real long-term harm and deaths from it are incredibly rare; guns kill from a distance, they are instantly lethal, and it only takes a split-second lapse in judgment to make a mistake that will dramatically affect everyone involved for the rest of their lives (however short or long they might be). Frankly, I don't see where anyone can get off criticizing me for that.
Oh, and go fuck yourself.
You're stretching. Guns are one of the few tools with purely destructive purposes, they serve no purpose other than to kill, while killing is sometimes a necessary evil, it is never really good. That is, in fact the primary difference between guns and cars; namely, cars move people and things to be where they need to be, they serve a functional and apparent good... guns kill stuff, and that's all they can do. Framing the issue as "cars kill more people than guns, so if we're going to ban guns we should ban cars too" is just a red herring.
.50 rifles), or with prohibiting or restricting the customization of legal firearms.
I say this as a gun control opponent AND pacifist whose religious convictions prevent so much as handling firearms. To be more specific, I'm OK with background checks (sorry convicted felons, but no, I don't think you should be carrying), registration, safety course requirements, safe storage requirements, and such, but I don't agree with prohibiting concealed carry across the board (though I would almost prefer unconcealed carry... I don't really understand the point of hiding them if they're legal), or with prohibiting certain classes and types of firearms across the board (civilians need to be able to own fully automatic weapons, because on the off chance we need to overthrow our government we cannot afford to be that outgunned... the AWB is just absurd, as are bans on
Probably the state, Massachusetts is the same way. There is, however, no nationwide age-limit on lighters, it's a state-by-state thing.
I read that response, I think the point the other guy was trying to make is that you aren't the intended receiver, your hardware is, and your hardware is only telling you certain pieces of information as it sees fit.
.sig is not that we are not a recipient, it's that we aren't the recipient of the message we think we're receiving.
To put into the context of this discussion: you buy an HD-DVD, you insert it into your player, and you watch the movie. The disc constitutes the totality of the message, the sender is the manufacturer, and the recipient is your player. Within the larger message is contained the movie, and the message itself instructs your player to show you the movie if, and only if, certain conditions are met. The inaccurate part of your
The real weakness in DRM is that there is an approximately infinite number of potential attackers spending an approximately infinite amount of time and using an approximately infinite number of discrete messages attempting to break the code, and that furthermore these attackers ALREADY KNOW what the decoded message is supposed to look like, AND have unlimited unmonitored access to an approximately infinite number of valid recipients. It follows that the encryption WILL be compromised no matter how good it is, because the attackers have so much access to all but one party in the scheme (the sender) that it can never be good enough.
But it's not... you see, the only real reason to keep using one OS over another is inertia, and by introducing these kids to *nix, they are going to have inertia in that direction. Things won't stay the way they are forever, we can be sure of that because they never do, and the future is always shaped by the children, not the adults.
They'll keep using whatever they want to use, just like we'll keep using whatever we want to use; the difference being that they'll be alive well after we're dead and in the ground (or shot into space, or in an urn, or cryogenically frozen, or whatever).
But what if they all have reality distortion fields!?! Too many Steves and the space-time continuum as we know it could be rent asunder by the BS! Dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
I vote for a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Apple's main campus, just to be on the safe side.
There is something to be said for learning from one's own mistakes. There's also something to be said for learning from the mistakes of others.
For example, I happen to know that a good cuber (what butchers use to turn otherwise unpalatably tough meat into unpalatably bizarre cube steaks, among other uses) can crush bones and spit out a cube arm if you're a big enough idiot to let it catch one of your fingers when you're feeding meat through it; I know this because a butcher I used to work with saw it happen to a guy 30 years ago when he was first learning how to be a butcher.
You're quite right. My point isn't that Apple's products are "bad", it's that Apple's products are not universally and unequivocally superior to all others. I don't have have any problem with Apple or their products, just with the iFans.
And at that point in history, the poor were often left to die, and most people were, as the GP put it, country folks unaware of their place in the larger picture.
And no, the Founding Fathers were not predominantly what we would describe as libertarian; some of them were to be sure, but they came from many diverse philosophical, political and religious backgrounds espousing a wide variety of ideas on how things should be done. The current idea that was least in evidence was probably socialism, but then again, modern socialism hadn't really been invented yet by the time most of the Founding Fathers were dead; I have no doubt that if it had been, it would have had representation.
There was a time when American politics consisted of something other than polemic and reactionism, when the point was to get the best minds together and come up with an idea that mostly works for mostly everyone. It wasn't always about using parliamentary tactics to force your party's policy through against the wishes of the opposition as an exercise in proving how much stronger and better you are than they are.
For those of us who need to rehearse (you know, so that we can perform it in a theater), it's a necessary evil.
Also comes in handy when your reel has so many skips and gaps that the movie barely runs over 60 minutes and the movie breaks on a weekly basis.
Although, if you were to read previous comments before posting, you'd see that only a few comments above yours he specifically stated that he submitted it without an apostrophe, and CmdrTaco must have inserted one post-submission.
Nice alliteration, though.
It would be a lot easier if it were true.
Apple markets their products as clearly superior, but that doesn't actually mean they are.
Wow, it really works!
One problem though, I used it to watch attack of the clones, hoping to see some Natalie Portman hawtness, and was instead rendered impotent by Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen.
Turns out, the key only works for actors, and does nothing for actresses.
And somebody change the combination on my luggage!
Yeah, and unlike those pussies in the Olympics, OUR top shooters are so good they can hold the gun sideways and ignore the sights. Only losers aim, or shoot at things more than 15' away.
So, who, exactly, has an expectation of privacy when they're in public? Yeah, yeah, surveillance bad, privacy good, rah rah rah, but seriously, if you don't want your business to be public, then keep it in private.
Either that, or talk about incredibly private things that are virtually guaranteed to make whatever poor schlub is reading the transcripts incredibly uncomfortable. Or say things that are so unbelievably suspicious that they'll have no choice to investigate, and when it turns out to be complete fabrication remind them it was their ill-conceived idea to read your lips in the first place.
On the contrary, well written software will give you the option to install it either way, so that only admins can install apps for every user, but every user can install their own settings and/or plugins in their sandbox. Multi-user machines will still require competent administrators, and single user machines will be better protected from malicious code making the machine completely unusable.
Nice straw man, though.