GNOME and KDE have very different philosophies. KDE is (well, was and will be soon) based on the idea that people should configure their desktop; GNOME is based on the idea that people should only be given those configuration options that are absolutely necessary. KDE makes big leaps in its releases; GNOME makes incremental changes.
Personally, I like the idea of a Qt port of GNOME, since I feel that Qt is somewhat superior to GTK, both in terms of development and in terms of use. Others will undoubtedly disagree with that.
And if that is truly the case, then it shows Obama's true colors. This bill does not introduce a vital new tool or method for law enforcement to track down the "bad guys." It only removes restrictions on existing methods, and so now we have even fewer protections from our government. If this is the goal Obama really sought, then he is not promoting the sort of "change" that I am really interested in. This is the compromise: Obama wants to loosen restrictions on how investigations will be performed, so he is willing to allow telecom companies to be immune from prosecution for their role in assisting the government in ignoring restrictions on how investigations may be performed.
Then my friends wonder why I am voting third party.
""We're going to balance the budget": Get ready to be taxed into starvation!"
I take issue with that; it sounds like an echo of Ronald Reagan. If taxes were raised now, we still wouldn't even come close to the tax rates of the 1950s; nobody was "taxes into starvation" then. The fact of the matter is, if we continue our current tax policy, we are going to run into increasingly serious problems, which will eventually result in programs that both Democrats and Republicans support having to be cut.
This applies to members of congress only, not to "the people." It does not apply to "the press." TFA is FUD, just another right wing extremist who thinks democrats are left wing extremists (nevermind that the Democrats line up behind the WTO just as quickly as Republicans, support industry-friendly policies [albeit for a different set of industries], and recently got on the wagon of pandering to the Christian Right).
And the reason why a website needs to have complex animations or applications is...
That's the sound of silence. There is absolutely no reason that the web should be turned into an application deployment platform, and doing so completely undermines the purpose and nature of the web. The reason that search engines work is that websites, as created with HTML, can easily be indexed and understood by computers. Hypertext is about linking documents -- DOCUMENTS -- together. Things like forms make sense in that context: a form is a document, right? CSS makes sense too: it formats documents. Documents sometimes have images in them; PNG or SVG make sense for that.
Now, where does Flash fit into that? Flash is an application runtime environment, and is really good for multimedia programs. Why would you ever want to embed an program in a document? An program is neither a document nor a part of a document. It doesn't make sense from the hypertext perspective, and that creates glaring problems. When a website is created using Flash, or Silverlight, or Java, or any other application runtime embedded in it, it becomes impossible to index, links stop making sense, sometimes the "back" button doesn't take you to the previous view of the application, sometimes it does, etc. It would make more sense if your Flash website had a hyperlink to a Flash program, which would be opened by the runtime in a separate window -- without a back button, a forward button, or an "up" button (as some browsers have), without the confusing and paradigm breaking nature of embedding applets.
Why then, at my school, are there books that are specifically marked "unreturnable" -- that is, the bookstore won't even buy the books back from students, even at the pathetic prices they are normally willing to buy books back? If there is no behind the scenes deal, then why are professors constantly requiring us to buy the latest edition of the book, even when nothing has really changed? Why was I required to also purchase a login for a publisher's website, to submit homework problems? I'm sorry, but this sort of behavior screams "behind the scenes" deal; perhaps I was hasty to say that there was a contract involved, but I fail to see any logic behind a professor forcing his students to enrich a single publisher.
For the record, the bookstore on my campus is not technically run by my school. It is operated by Barnes and Noble, last I checked. Not that it is really relevant, but it illustrates the sort of corporate takeover my school has seen (we are middle-tier, so it is not as simple as saying that we are a small or unheard of college that isn't able to gets it together). After seeing how my school has "arrangements" with software companies, "arrangements" with food companies, even "arrangements" regarding our washing machines (beyond the simple purchase of the machines), I have trouble believing that a school which contracted out the running of the bookstore wouldn't have an "arrangement" with textbook publishers as well. If that is truly the case, it would fly in the face of ethics, but that's what some people said about most of our other deals, and those still happened.
"Also, our school has quite a lot of restrictions against professors using their own textbooks for courses, so that might have something to do with it."
I might just transfer. I wish my school had those restrictions. I've heard professors actually brag about the royalties they are getting from the books they require in a course...to the students in the course!
No offense to you, but students are already suffering. We are routinely charged for books that are simply rearranged copies of older editions, just so that we cannot buy used copies (professors often assign problem sets from the book, and if the problems are in the wrong place and in the wrong order, or have modified details, it becomes impossible to do the homework). We are charged as much for the rearranged edition as if it were a book containing brand new material.
I'm sorry, I know your job depends on the publishers being able to rip us off, but most of us don't have jobs. I've been able to land decent summer jobs because of my skills and major, but the majority of my friends are either unemployed or will not make enough money this summer to completely cover the cost of their books. This expense is added to the price of tuition, which some of my friends can barely afford. If the new American dream is to go to college, get a degree, and make lots of money, these publishers are pushing more and more people out of that dream.
I'm not exaggerating, by the way. A lot of people have trouble coming up with the money for textbooks. A single $100+ book would be manageable, but when it is a matter of 6 or 7 such books every few months, it becomes a problem. It flies in the face of copyright law (pre-DMCA), but I can see why people would turn to torrents to get their textbooks.
There is sometimes more going on behind the scenes than that. This isn't like elementary school, where the teacher put the best interest of the students first (at least when it came to school supplies). Universities sign various deals with vendors of all sorts, including textbook publishers, and those deals usually impose requirements on the university. For example, my school's freshman engineering courses used a CAD tool that nobody had heard of, because the school had a deal with the company that marketed that tool that involved requiring its use in introductory engineering classes. I wouldn't doubt that in schools where the latest edition of the textbook is used for the course, the schools made a deal with the books' publishers that imposed such a requirement on the school.
No, really, why was the parent modded funny? It is true: textbook publishers routinely release "new editions" of books where only practice problems and page numbers have been changed, to try and force students to buy new books instead of used books. I've seen error that persist in edition after edition, or books where the problems themselves weren't even changed -- just the order and numbering of the problems. It is a disgrace, especially when professors go along with it (sometimes the professors are even collecting royalties from the books in question).
Why is this a surprise? College students are already known to be some of the heaviest P2P users, and frequently only look at their textbooks for a single, 4 month long course, and never again afterward. It makes no sense to spend hundreds of dollars on textbooks that are never used again after than period, and selling the books back rarely makes up the cost of the book.
The worst are courses where the books are updated year-by-year so that the practice problems will be different (I've even seen cases where the same mistakes persist in edition after edition, despite the books being updated), which makes buying the book from another student impossible and sometimes even getting the book from the library impossible, if the library does not have the budget to replace undamaged books every year. It makes some of the RIAA tactics seem reasonable by comparison.
First of all, I strongly doubt that these companies felt that they were "helping out after 9/11." This companies were told, by the NSA, that the government had an interest in installing secret equipment in switching stations, and rather than stand their ground, they allowed wiretapping equipment to be installed. Second of all, this kid did not commit a wiretapping offense, he tampered with public records (assuming he went to a public school), and he hijacked some else' equipment. The punishment does not fit the crime in the either case.
"Also, doesn't anyone else find it ironic that those folks are supposed to be fighting for freedom and the American way?"
I didn't realize that censorship, surveillance, union busting, and silencing political parties had become un-American; let me pull out the champagne, this calls for a celebration. Our government has been slowly but steadily stepping it up on all of the above fronts, but in countries like Iraq they just happen to have an advantage: there is no existing legal framework standing in the way, so they are free to re-create society in a manner that suits them.
Yes. In the US, movies are usually shown in theaters, then released on DVD, then after a few months shown on TV. No particular reason is given for this, but presumably someone at the MPAA thought that it would allow them to milk the most money from the movie.
No, really, computers are useful for business purposes, and illegal drug purveyors are running a business. Did people really think that computers would only ever be used for legal businesses? It is like an article that says, "New report on drug dealers using drinking water to prevent death by dehydration!"
They probably won't be using brute force, but some sort of elliptic sieve technique, probably a variant of the generalize number factor sieve, which is the most efficient prime factorization technique currently known.
That's because none of the expensive development tools out there really justify their own cost. The features in UNA, from looking at that article, are cool...but none of them do much in the way of improving the quality of my code, and frankly, I didn't see much that would have decreased the development time in any significant way. IDEs go a lot further in decreasing development time, but only because they bring together more than just source editing tools: they also bring in tools that help in the design process, and the debugging process. Productivity is vastly improved with a good design, even if the actual tools used don't go much further than vi/gcc/gdb.
Of course, design is a costly step, and often gets neglected as well, because most software doesn't have to be perfect to make a company money. In fact, there is an effect of decreasing marginal utility with each bug that is removed or not present before a product ships. The reason software is so bad is that people are willing to accept poor quality software; if we were more adamant in demanding fewer bugs, that dynamic would change and companies would have no choice but to spend more in developing their software.
In all likelihood, the implementation will only allow one instance of the registered game to be played at a given time. Well, that would be the theoretically correct way to go about things; in practice, it will be horribly botched and Atari's call centers will have to be trained in renewing a key when someone upgrades. Or, Atari will do nothing, and consumers will just have to deal with it (especially if other vendors start using this technique).
More likely, "You are breaking the law by watching those DVDs using royalty free software, so we will seize your computer and fine you more than you can afford to make an example of you. Oh yeah, and we are bowing to American business interests in the process."
If it has nothing to do with secrecy, then why are they trying to get it removed from wikileaks? Bear in mind that it is atypical for a religion to use copyrights, which are intended to promote the business of content creation. The mainstream Christian bible is not copyrighted, and anyone may distribute it as they see fit, with or without modifications (not that I am a Christian).
My question is: what business a religious institution has copyrighting its materials? Why would a religious institution require a copyright over any of its material or doctrines? Why would it use that copyright to prevent people from spreading information about the inner workings of the religion? No offense to any Mormons who are reading this, but it raises warning flags in my mind when a religious institution insists upon secrecy, and then uses the legal framework of its host country to enforce that secrecy (think Scientology).
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GNOME and KDE have very different philosophies. KDE is (well, was and will be soon) based on the idea that people should configure their desktop; GNOME is based on the idea that people should only be given those configuration options that are absolutely necessary. KDE makes big leaps in its releases; GNOME makes incremental changes.
Personally, I like the idea of a Qt port of GNOME, since I feel that Qt is somewhat superior to GTK, both in terms of development and in terms of use. Others will undoubtedly disagree with that.
I take it that you don't like GNOME? (For the record, I am a long time KDE user, and I am kicking myself for not sticking with KDE 3 a bit longer).
And if that is truly the case, then it shows Obama's true colors. This bill does not introduce a vital new tool or method for law enforcement to track down the "bad guys." It only removes restrictions on existing methods, and so now we have even fewer protections from our government. If this is the goal Obama really sought, then he is not promoting the sort of "change" that I am really interested in. This is the compromise: Obama wants to loosen restrictions on how investigations will be performed, so he is willing to allow telecom companies to be immune from prosecution for their role in assisting the government in ignoring restrictions on how investigations may be performed.
Then my friends wonder why I am voting third party.
""We're going to balance the budget": Get ready to be taxed into starvation!"
I take issue with that; it sounds like an echo of Ronald Reagan. If taxes were raised now, we still wouldn't even come close to the tax rates of the 1950s; nobody was "taxes into starvation" then. The fact of the matter is, if we continue our current tax policy, we are going to run into increasingly serious problems, which will eventually result in programs that both Democrats and Republicans support having to be cut.
This applies to members of congress only, not to "the people." It does not apply to "the press." TFA is FUD, just another right wing extremist who thinks democrats are left wing extremists (nevermind that the Democrats line up behind the WTO just as quickly as Republicans, support industry-friendly policies [albeit for a different set of industries], and recently got on the wagon of pandering to the Christian Right).
And the reason why a website needs to have complex animations or applications is...
That's the sound of silence. There is absolutely no reason that the web should be turned into an application deployment platform, and doing so completely undermines the purpose and nature of the web. The reason that search engines work is that websites, as created with HTML, can easily be indexed and understood by computers. Hypertext is about linking documents -- DOCUMENTS -- together. Things like forms make sense in that context: a form is a document, right? CSS makes sense too: it formats documents. Documents sometimes have images in them; PNG or SVG make sense for that.
Now, where does Flash fit into that? Flash is an application runtime environment, and is really good for multimedia programs. Why would you ever want to embed an program in a document? An program is neither a document nor a part of a document. It doesn't make sense from the hypertext perspective, and that creates glaring problems. When a website is created using Flash, or Silverlight, or Java, or any other application runtime embedded in it, it becomes impossible to index, links stop making sense, sometimes the "back" button doesn't take you to the previous view of the application, sometimes it does, etc. It would make more sense if your Flash website had a hyperlink to a Flash program, which would be opened by the runtime in a separate window -- without a back button, a forward button, or an "up" button (as some browsers have), without the confusing and paradigm breaking nature of embedding applets.
I'm just going out on a limb here...but maybe it is because KDE4 is a complete rewrite? KDE3 was extremely stable; I suppose you never tried it?
Or you could be an AC troll. I'll go with that one.
Why then, at my school, are there books that are specifically marked "unreturnable" -- that is, the bookstore won't even buy the books back from students, even at the pathetic prices they are normally willing to buy books back? If there is no behind the scenes deal, then why are professors constantly requiring us to buy the latest edition of the book, even when nothing has really changed? Why was I required to also purchase a login for a publisher's website, to submit homework problems? I'm sorry, but this sort of behavior screams "behind the scenes" deal; perhaps I was hasty to say that there was a contract involved, but I fail to see any logic behind a professor forcing his students to enrich a single publisher.
For the record, the bookstore on my campus is not technically run by my school. It is operated by Barnes and Noble, last I checked. Not that it is really relevant, but it illustrates the sort of corporate takeover my school has seen (we are middle-tier, so it is not as simple as saying that we are a small or unheard of college that isn't able to gets it together). After seeing how my school has "arrangements" with software companies, "arrangements" with food companies, even "arrangements" regarding our washing machines (beyond the simple purchase of the machines), I have trouble believing that a school which contracted out the running of the bookstore wouldn't have an "arrangement" with textbook publishers as well. If that is truly the case, it would fly in the face of ethics, but that's what some people said about most of our other deals, and those still happened.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I might just transfer. I wish my school had those restrictions. I've heard professors actually brag about the royalties they are getting from the books they require in a course...to the students in the course!
I'm sorry, I know your job depends on the publishers being able to rip us off, but most of us don't have jobs. I've been able to land decent summer jobs because of my skills and major, but the majority of my friends are either unemployed or will not make enough money this summer to completely cover the cost of their books. This expense is added to the price of tuition, which some of my friends can barely afford. If the new American dream is to go to college, get a degree, and make lots of money, these publishers are pushing more and more people out of that dream.
I'm not exaggerating, by the way. A lot of people have trouble coming up with the money for textbooks. A single $100+ book would be manageable, but when it is a matter of 6 or 7 such books every few months, it becomes a problem. It flies in the face of copyright law (pre-DMCA), but I can see why people would turn to torrents to get their textbooks.
There is sometimes more going on behind the scenes than that. This isn't like elementary school, where the teacher put the best interest of the students first (at least when it came to school supplies). Universities sign various deals with vendors of all sorts, including textbook publishers, and those deals usually impose requirements on the university. For example, my school's freshman engineering courses used a CAD tool that nobody had heard of, because the school had a deal with the company that marketed that tool that involved requiring its use in introductory engineering classes. I wouldn't doubt that in schools where the latest edition of the textbook is used for the course, the schools made a deal with the books' publishers that imposed such a requirement on the school.
No, really, why was the parent modded funny? It is true: textbook publishers routinely release "new editions" of books where only practice problems and page numbers have been changed, to try and force students to buy new books instead of used books. I've seen error that persist in edition after edition, or books where the problems themselves weren't even changed -- just the order and numbering of the problems. It is a disgrace, especially when professors go along with it (sometimes the professors are even collecting royalties from the books in question).
The worst are courses where the books are updated year-by-year so that the practice problems will be different (I've even seen cases where the same mistakes persist in edition after edition, despite the books being updated), which makes buying the book from another student impossible and sometimes even getting the book from the library impossible, if the library does not have the budget to replace undamaged books every year. It makes some of the RIAA tactics seem reasonable by comparison.
First of all, I strongly doubt that these companies felt that they were "helping out after 9/11." This companies were told, by the NSA, that the government had an interest in installing secret equipment in switching stations, and rather than stand their ground, they allowed wiretapping equipment to be installed. Second of all, this kid did not commit a wiretapping offense, he tampered with public records (assuming he went to a public school), and he hijacked some else' equipment. The punishment does not fit the crime in the either case.
I didn't realize that censorship, surveillance, union busting, and silencing political parties had become un-American; let me pull out the champagne, this calls for a celebration. Our government has been slowly but steadily stepping it up on all of the above fronts, but in countries like Iraq they just happen to have an advantage: there is no existing legal framework standing in the way, so they are free to re-create society in a manner that suits them.
Yes. In the US, movies are usually shown in theaters, then released on DVD, then after a few months shown on TV. No particular reason is given for this, but presumably someone at the MPAA thought that it would allow them to milk the most money from the movie.
These guys aren't necessarily selling counterfeits. It could very well be the actual drug, obtained in an illicit manner (prescription farming).
No, really, computers are useful for business purposes, and illegal drug purveyors are running a business. Did people really think that computers would only ever be used for legal businesses? It is like an article that says, "New report on drug dealers using drinking water to prevent death by dehydration!"
They probably won't be using brute force, but some sort of elliptic sieve technique, probably a variant of the generalize number factor sieve, which is the most efficient prime factorization technique currently known.
Of course, design is a costly step, and often gets neglected as well, because most software doesn't have to be perfect to make a company money. In fact, there is an effect of decreasing marginal utility with each bug that is removed or not present before a product ships. The reason software is so bad is that people are willing to accept poor quality software; if we were more adamant in demanding fewer bugs, that dynamic would change and companies would have no choice but to spend more in developing their software.
In all likelihood, the implementation will only allow one instance of the registered game to be played at a given time. Well, that would be the theoretically correct way to go about things; in practice, it will be horribly botched and Atari's call centers will have to be trained in renewing a key when someone upgrades. Or, Atari will do nothing, and consumers will just have to deal with it (especially if other vendors start using this technique).
More likely, "You are breaking the law by watching those DVDs using royalty free software, so we will seize your computer and fine you more than you can afford to make an example of you. Oh yeah, and we are bowing to American business interests in the process."
If it has nothing to do with secrecy, then why are they trying to get it removed from wikileaks? Bear in mind that it is atypical for a religion to use copyrights, which are intended to promote the business of content creation. The mainstream Christian bible is not copyrighted, and anyone may distribute it as they see fit, with or without modifications (not that I am a Christian).
My question is: what business a religious institution has copyrighting its materials? Why would a religious institution require a copyright over any of its material or doctrines? Why would it use that copyright to prevent people from spreading information about the inner workings of the religion? No offense to any Mormons who are reading this, but it raises warning flags in my mind when a religious institution insists upon secrecy, and then uses the legal framework of its host country to enforce that secrecy (think Scientology).