Nice UID! I got mine while trying to get the fabled UID=1,000,000. Not sure who ended up getting that prize.
Just a reminder, comp.misc on Usenet is being used as a temporary discussion forum. Usenet access is available through eternal-sepetember.org
Let's hope Dice reverse their decision and cancel plans for Beta. If they don't, though, this is as good a time as any for people to break away from slashdot as a group. Good luck to everyone in the slashcott.
A lot of trust has been lost between users and management. And the first problem with a discussion site staying successful is keeping enough users. So, the question as to whether technocrat.net will succeed hinges on whether enough trust has been lost at slashdot to prompt enough people to move.
Assuming enough users do move, the second problem will be running the site. Editorship at slashdot, jokes aside, is a full-time job. So, another question is, will there be enough editor-hours to keep the machine running.
Will enough slashdot readers leave? I'm really not sure. There are a lot of upset readers, but the one thing that will really cause a big exodus, a forced switch to the new interface, won't happen for months. So, users who leave would have to leave a slashdot that is still, on the surface at least, passably acceptable.
Personally, I would like to see a few-month trial of technocrat.net. If things get moving, good; if not, then there will still be some time before slashdot becomes unusuable, and so some time to work with.
Why? We want to take our current content and all the stuff that matters to this community and deliver it on a site that still speaks to the interests and habits of our current audience, but that is, at the same time, more accessible and shareable by a wider audience. We want to give our current audience the space where they are comfortable. And we want a platform where we can experiment with different views of both comments and stories
A few points.
- What exactly do you mean by 'make content more sharaeble'? I can already link to individual comments; there's even a 'share' link below each comment. I've never used it, but surely that would be the place to start if your goal is to make content more shareable. - If your goal was to make content more shareable, then why, at this late stage in the game, is it still impossible to link to single comments in Beta? - Nothing is stopping you from experimenting with the current layout
Incremental change is how the current slashdot was built. Taco, Hemos, et al slowly added pieces and tweaks together, according to the needs of the day, to create what we now know as the moderation system and the classic comment layout. Over fifteen years of design thought have gone into the current system.
You can accomplish all the goals you have laid out by continuing in the same, incremental-improvement spirit. Throwing out all of that work and starting fresh is unnecessary, wasteful, and pretty much bound to fail.
Please post this to new articles if it hasn't been posted yet.
On February 5, 2014, Slashdot announced through a javascript popup that they are starting to "move in to" the new Slashdot Beta design.
Slashdot Beta is a trend-following attempt to give Slashdot a fresh look, an approach that has led to less space for text and an abandonment of the traditional Slashdot look. Much worse than that, Slashdot Beta fundamentally breaks the classic Slashdot discussion and moderation system. If you haven't seen Slashdot Beta already, open this in a new tab. After seeing that, click here to return to classic Slashdot.
We should boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta until Dice abandons the project.
We should boycott slashdot entirely during the week of Feb 10 to Feb 17 as part of the wider slashcott
Moderators - only spend mod points on comments that discuss Beta Commentors - only discuss Beta http://slashdot.org/recent [slashdot.org] - Vote up the Fuck Beta stories
Keep this up for a few days and we may finally get the PHBs attention. Links of note:
Please post this to new articles if it hasn't been posted yet.
On February 5, 2014, Slashdot announced through a javascript popup that they are starting to "move in to" the new Slashdot Beta design.
Slashdot Beta is a trend-following attempt to give Slashdot a fresh look, an approach that has led to less space for text and an abandonment of the traditional Slashdot look. Much worse than that, Slashdot Beta fundamentally breaks the classic Slashdot discussion and moderation system.
If you haven't seen Slashdot Beta already, open this in a new tab. After seeing that, click here to return to classic Slashdot.
We should boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta until Dice abandons the project. We should boycott slashdot entirely during the week of Feb 10 to Feb 17 as part of the wider slashcott
Moderators - only spend mod points on comments that discuss Beta Commentors - only discuss Beta http://slashdot.org/recent [slashdot.org] - Vote up the Fuck Beta stories
Keep this up for a few days and we may finally get the PHBs attention.
Please post this to new articles if it hasn't been posted yet.
On February 5, 2014, Slashdot announced through a javascript popup that they are starting to "move in to" the new Slashdot Beta design.
Slashdot Beta is a trend-following attempt to give Slashdot a fresh look, an approach that has led to less space for text and an abandonment of the traditional Slashdot look. Much worse than that, Slashdot Beta fundamentally breaks the classic Slashdot discussion and moderation system.
If you haven't seen Slashdot Beta already, open this in a new tab. After seeing that, click here to return to classic Slashdot.
We should boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta until Dice abandons the project. We should boycott slashdot entirely during the week of Feb 10 to Feb 17 as part of the wider slashcott
Moderators - only spend mod points on comments that discuss Beta Commentors - only discuss Beta http://slashdot.org/recent - Vote up the Fuck Beta stories
Keep this up for a few days and we may finally get the PHBs attention.
On February 5, 2014, Slashdot announced through a javascript popup that they are starting to "move in to" the new Slashdot Beta design.
Slashdot Beta is a trend-following attempt to give Slashdot a fresh look, an approach that has led to less space for text and an abandonment of the traditional Slashdot look. Much worse than that, Slashdot Beta fundamentally breaks the classic Slashdot discussion and moderation system.
If you haven't seen Slashdot Beta already, open this in a new tab. After seeing that, click here to return to classic Slashdot.
I propose that we boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta until Dice abandons the project.
Moderators - only spend mod points on comments that discuss Beta Commentors - only discuss Beta
Keep this up for a few days and we may finally get the PHBs attention.
I propose that we boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta. Moderators - only spend mod points on comments that discuss Beta Commentors - only discuss Beta Keep this up for a few days and we may finally get the PHBs attention.
- The old (Malda-era) layout is fine - One area that does need improvement is the mobile version of the site; something like El Reg's layout would be greatly appreciated.
Those emissions are going to be concentrated around airports, not distributed evenly amongst the population. Also, a tiny amount of lead can lead to drops in IQ and long-term problems.
The question you need to answer is whether the amount of lead being released is safe or not; the proportions don't matter:
According to one 2003 estimate, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, blood lead levels below the supposedly âoesafeâ limit of 10 micrograms per deciliter still produced a reduction in IQ of around 7 points. (Approximately 1 in 50 American children has lead levels above that threshold.)
After taking account of factors likely to influence the results, they found that blood lead levels at 30 months showed significant associations with educational achievement, antisocial behaviour and hyperactivity scores five years later. With lead levels up to five microgrammes per decilitre, there was no obvious effect. But lead levels between five and 10 microgrammes per decilitre were associated with significantly poorer scores for reading ( 49% lower) and writing (51% lower). A doubling in lead blood levels to 10 microgrammes per decilitre was associated with a drop of a third of a grade in their Scholastic Assessment Tests (SATs).
5 mcg/dl is 50 ppb, if I'm not mistaken. Intuitively, do you think that the people working around airports who are exposed to aircraft exhaust would get levels above that? Remember, too, that lead persists in the environment, collects in dirt, is kicked up in dust, etc.
And the effects are truly felt throughout life. Indeed, there is convincing evidence that the crime wave of the 80s was due to lead in cars:
We now have studies at the international level, the national level, the state level, the city level, and even the individual level. Groups of children have been followed from the womb to adulthood, and higher childhood blood lead levels are consistently associated with higher adult arrest rates for violent crimes [19]. All of these studies tell the same story: Gasoline lead is responsible for a good share of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century.
Proprietary software developers have the advantage of money; free software developers need to make advantages for each other. Using the ordinary GPL for a library gives free software developers an advantage over proprietary developers: a library that they can use, while proprietary developers cannot use it....
This is why we used the Lesser GPL for the GNU C library. After all, there are plenty of other C libraries; using the GPL for ours would have driven proprietary software developers to use anotherâ"no problem for them, only for us.
However, when a library provides a significant unique capability, like GNU Readline, that's a horse of a different color. The Readline library implements input editing and history for interactive programs, and that's a facility not generally available elsewhere. Releasing it under the GPL and limiting its use to free programs gives our community a real boost. At least one application program is free software today specifically because that was necessary for using Readline.
Just as free software is not a religion, proprietary developers do not have a freedom to use libraries created by free software developers. Where did you get that idea from?
Developers in general have a right to use software under the license it was released, and RMS is suggesting that free software developers use the license that best promotes the adoption of free software.
Indeed, this is one issue where he clearly shows pragmatism, by suggesting that commonly-available libraries be released under the lesser GPL. Yet you turn this around and claim that, by doing so, he is going 'to great lengths to compromise on freedom in order to push his free software religion'.
Both are arrested, but there is no physical evidence.
They are put into separate rooms and each offered a deal: 1 year in prison for you, and 10 years for your partner, if you admit to the crime first
If either of them admits to it, they both go to jail - because they both took part in the crime. If they both stay silent, they both go free. However, each has a strong incentive to admit to the crime, because the other person might admit to it first.
In this case, however, only one person might be guilty. If that's the case, the innocent party has no incentive to rat the guilty one out. The essence of the prisoner's dilemma is lost.
I'm not up on the subtlties of this law, but as a layman:
'Protected Computers' should include those machines that store personal information. Many machines do that, some store personal information over the long term, others over the sort term, so it is difficult to express exactly what should and what shouldn't fit that definition.
Further to that, the definition of 'computer' is getting harrier all the time. Where does one start and another begin?
So maybe it makes more sense to define protected information on computer systems.
Maybe make accessing systems you do not have the authority to access a petty crime, with penalties equal to trespass.
Then, make accessing private, secret, or financial data that you don't have the authority to access a more serious crime.
So, if you break into someone's laptop but just sit at the command line, you get fined $50. If you read their private files, you get prison time.
You're safer with a gun because so many others have guns. If there were fewer guns, there would be less reason to have one to protect yourself. I'll admit the situation in the US is hard, because there are so many guns out there, but I don't think the solution to guns is more guns.
Time does not start when the attack starts. People who rely on police for protection do not rely on them only when their house is invaded, they rely on them to keep the crime rate low and put criminals in jail, where they pose no threat.
Partisans fought the Nazis by and large with guns they got after the war started. And, with the possible exception of Yugoslavia, the most they did was hinder, not evict, the occupier. In WW2, like in any other war I can think of, partisans were able to mount a fight because they possessed two things: the will to fight and outside support.
Don't nit-pick. I didn't confuse 'can't' with 'isn't allowed to', my word choice was perfectly valid. You would have a point if I had said 'one person is unable to attack another', but that would be silly.
It is a truism that the state fails at its protection every day, but perfection is an impossible test outside of math. The better test is whether a given type of weapon improves or harms individual security. Do the liberal gun laws in the US make people in general safer? Are armed people safer more or less likely to be victims of crime, or more or less likely to be harmed in a crime, than unarmed people? These are the kind of questions you should ask.
The fantasy of the armed patriots rising up against a facist new order is a silly argument to use unless you also advocate for personal ownership of RPGs, landmines, tanks, nukes, and other heavy weapons. Practically speaking, if such a totalitarian state ever takes over the US government, then there will likely by defections from the armed forces which will join the regular people in the fight against the government. That is usually what happens - see Libya and Syria recently, for example. You might point to Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, but to that I'd just say that a plurality voted for Hitler and Russians seem to return to the strong state model often, implying they like that sort of thing, or at least it's the best model given their human geography.
No, it's a basis for Western political theory. Though the GP should have said State not Government. There's nothing sinister implied by it. It simply means that only the state can condone violence. One state can attack another (a war), one person can't attack another (a fistfight or worse).
As with all rights, though, with this right the state is burdened with obligations. The most salient is the obligation to protect its own citizens. So, the state must supply a police force (to protect against people) and a military (to protect against other states).
Perhaps your mind immediately jumped to the worst-case scenario: a totalitarian, Nazi-like government that infringes on the rights of the people. In that case, the state would be in violation of its obligations, and would lose its right to a monopoly on violence.
The Falcon 9 has a 75% success rate and a 25% partial success/partial failure rate after 4 launches.
The Ariane 5 has a 94% success rate, a 3% partial success/partial failure rate, and a 3% failure rate, after 66 launches.
Everything I've read says the Falcon series is likely to be very reliable, but the proof of the success is in the launching - and the Ariane 5 has more launches under its belt. I hope Musk succeeds and lowers launch costs for everyone, but he hasn't proven anything yet.
It was aesthetically pleasing, fit well with the themes of the site, and was a clever and equally valid way of writing the official logo (after all, it was just a translation from one encoding scheme to another).
The mystery didn't hurt either, even if I was too thick to figure it out:)
Very interesting - thanks for posting. I had no idea that sun-syncronous orbits existed, let alone how they worked (wiki helped with that). It sounds like it would be a great orbit to be in if you were a space tourist - the view you'd get riding the terminator would be very dramatic.
Re: the weather satellites, if things get really bad, maybe NOAA can take over that spy sat that DOD donated to NASA (as I heard it, NASA got a late-model spy sat to use for astronomy but doesn't have the cash to launch it). (ref)
Exactly. This is why the 'notability' thing pisses me off: why not let there be an article for every tiny, minor thing? Where is the harm?
If I care enough about a the history of a the street I grew up on to write an article about it, and do a decent job of it (eg back it up with sources and do a neutral job of it), Wikipedia should be glad to have the info. And once you let in all the small things, and the minor historical figures, all the little battles and sub-sub-sub fields of philosophy, you get many more than 4 million articles.
The switch from Mozilla Suite to Seamonkey was made against a cacophony of support for Firefox. Firefox then was like Chrome now - lean, mean, the future, in a word: cool.
People bitched and moaned about how the Mozilla Suite (and, by extension, Seamonkey) was burdened by bundling its mail, news, chat, and html edit programs together; people wanted a lean-and-mean browser.
The tables are turned now, though. By avoiding all the pointless cool chrome (to use an expression), Seamonkey has managed to stay feeling light and purposeful.
Add to that the fact that - the UI is stable - the version numbers are sane (and the release schedule is sane, unlike what the current top post on this story says - maybe one minor release per month. very manageable) - the prefs don't talk down to you - it has mail and chat attached by default (I like that!) - it has a single address/search bar - it uses Gecko, so under-the-hood it's up-to-date - when you spawn a new tab, the new tab appears at the extreme right, instead of displacing the existing tabs by spawning to the immediate right of your current tab - the new-tab button is fixed in the extreme left of the tab bar, and doesn't jump around depending on how many tabs you have open atm
There are probably other things I could list. But in general, it _is_ a browser for people who know what they want: a browser that has a perfectly workable UI and does not change based on fashion. And a browser that has a modern HTML engine.
Unless and until the HTML engine becomes stale, I see no reason to change. I like my menu bars, I like spending a few extra horizontal pixels up to have back, forward, reload and stop buttons, I like having an attached mail client. Good design is good design no matter what decade it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice UID! I got mine while trying to get the fabled UID=1,000,000. Not sure who ended up getting that prize.
Just a reminder, comp.misc on Usenet is being used as a temporary discussion forum. Usenet access is available through eternal-sepetember.org
Let's hope Dice reverse their decision and cancel plans for Beta. If they don't, though, this is as good a time as any for people to break away from slashdot as a group. Good luck to everyone in the slashcott.
A lot of trust has been lost between users and management. And the first problem with a discussion site staying successful is keeping enough users. So, the question as to whether technocrat.net will succeed hinges on whether enough trust has been lost at slashdot to prompt enough people to move.
Assuming enough users do move, the second problem will be running the site. Editorship at slashdot, jokes aside, is a full-time job. So, another question is, will there be enough editor-hours to keep the machine running.
Will enough slashdot readers leave? I'm really not sure. There are a lot of upset readers, but the one thing that will really cause a big exodus, a forced switch to the new interface, won't happen for months. So, users who leave would have to leave a slashdot that is still, on the surface at least, passably acceptable.
Personally, I would like to see a few-month trial of technocrat.net. If things get moving, good; if not, then there will still be some time before slashdot becomes unusuable, and so some time to work with.
Either way, thank you for looking into this.
Regards
Why? We want to take our current content and all the stuff that matters to this community and deliver it on a site that still speaks to the interests and habits of our current audience, but that is, at the same time, more accessible and shareable by a wider audience. We want to give our current audience the space where they are comfortable. And we want a platform where we can experiment with different views of both comments and stories
A few points.
- What exactly do you mean by 'make content more sharaeble'? I can already link to individual comments; there's even a 'share' link below each comment. I've never used it, but surely that would be the place to start if your goal is to make content more shareable.
- If your goal was to make content more shareable, then why, at this late stage in the game, is it still impossible to link to single comments in Beta?
- Nothing is stopping you from experimenting with the current layout
Incremental change is how the current slashdot was built. Taco, Hemos, et al slowly added pieces and tweaks together, according to the needs of the day, to create what we now know as the moderation system and the classic comment layout. Over fifteen years of design thought have gone into the current system.
You can accomplish all the goals you have laid out by continuing in the same, incremental-improvement spirit. Throwing out all of that work and starting fresh is unnecessary, wasteful, and pretty much bound to fail.
Please post this to new articles if it hasn't been posted yet.
On February 5, 2014, Slashdot announced through a javascript popup that they are starting to "move in to" the new Slashdot Beta design.
Slashdot Beta is a trend-following attempt to give Slashdot a fresh look, an approach that has led to less space for text and an abandonment of the traditional Slashdot look. Much worse than that, Slashdot Beta fundamentally breaks the classic Slashdot discussion and moderation system. If you haven't seen Slashdot Beta already, open this in a new tab. After seeing that, click here to return to classic Slashdot.
We should boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta until Dice abandons the project.
We should boycott slashdot entirely during the week of Feb 10 to Feb 17 as part of the wider slashcott
Moderators - only spend mod points on comments that discuss Beta
Commentors - only discuss Beta
http://slashdot.org/recent [slashdot.org] - Vote up the Fuck Beta stories
Keep this up for a few days and we may finally get the PHBs attention. Links of note:
Discussion of Beta: http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=56395415
Discussion of where to go if Beta goes live: http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&type=submission&id=3321441
Alternative Slashdot: altslashdot.org
IRC Discussion: freenode #slashdot-refugees
IRC Discussion: slashnet.org #slashdot
Marked-up text of this comment: http://pastebin.com/mc2rhHBh
Please post this to new articles if it hasn't been posted yet.
On February 5, 2014, Slashdot announced through a javascript popup that they are starting to "move in to" the new Slashdot Beta design.
Slashdot Beta is a trend-following attempt to give Slashdot a fresh look, an approach that has led to less space for text and an abandonment of the traditional Slashdot look. Much worse than that, Slashdot Beta fundamentally breaks the classic Slashdot discussion and moderation system.
If you haven't seen Slashdot Beta already, open this in a new tab. After seeing that, click here to return to classic Slashdot.
We should boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta until Dice abandons the project.
We should boycott slashdot entirely during the week of Feb 10 to Feb 17 as part of the wider slashcott
Moderators - only spend mod points on comments that discuss Beta
Commentors - only discuss Beta http://slashdot.org/recent [slashdot.org] - Vote up the Fuck Beta stories
Keep this up for a few days and we may finally get the PHBs attention.
Discussion of Beta: http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=56395415
Discussion of where to go if Beta goes live: http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&type=submission&id=3321441
Alternative Slashdot: altslashdot.org
Please post this to new articles if it hasn't been posted yet.
On February 5, 2014, Slashdot announced through a javascript popup that they are starting to "move in to" the new Slashdot Beta design.
Slashdot Beta is a trend-following attempt to give Slashdot a fresh look, an approach that has led to less space for text and an abandonment of the traditional Slashdot look. Much worse than that, Slashdot Beta fundamentally breaks the classic Slashdot discussion and moderation system.
If you haven't seen Slashdot Beta already, open this in a new tab. After seeing that, click here to return to classic Slashdot.
We should boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta until Dice abandons the project.
We should boycott slashdot entirely during the week of Feb 10 to Feb 17 as part of the wider slashcott
Moderators - only spend mod points on comments that discuss Beta
Commentors - only discuss Beta
http://slashdot.org/recent - Vote up the Fuck Beta stories
Keep this up for a few days and we may finally get the PHBs attention.
Captcha: fuckbeta
http://developers.slashdot.org...
http://developers.slashdot.org...
http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...
http://science.slashdot.org/co...
On February 5, 2014, Slashdot announced through a javascript popup that they are starting to "move in to" the new Slashdot Beta design.
Slashdot Beta is a trend-following attempt to give Slashdot a fresh look, an approach that has led to less space for text and an abandonment of the traditional Slashdot look. Much worse than that, Slashdot Beta fundamentally breaks the classic Slashdot discussion and moderation system.
If you haven't seen Slashdot Beta already, open this in a new tab. After seeing that, click here to return to classic Slashdot.
I propose that we boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta until Dice abandons the project.
Moderators - only spend mod points on comments that discuss Beta
Commentors - only discuss Beta
Keep this up for a few days and we may finally get the PHBs attention.
I propose that we boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta.
Moderators - only spend mod points on comments that discuss Beta
Commentors - only discuss Beta
Keep this up for a few days and we may finally get the PHBs attention.
Captcha: fuckbeta
Beta must die
If they follow through on their threats that might be it.
Who knows, maybe a mass exodus to Kuro5hin will revive that old refuge just as Slashdot dies.
I forgot to say:
- The old (Malda-era) layout is fine
- One area that does need improvement is the mobile version of the site; something like El Reg's layout would be greatly appreciated.
Am I the only one seeing this?
When I clicked on the story link, I got redirected to
http://beta.slashdot.org/story/195783
which looks like
http://imgur.com/uVnwWHl
I do not want to browse 'Latest Tech Jobs' whilst browsing slashdot.
If you need more money to run the site, ask for donations. You'll probably get them.
PS - I can't post anonymously! That totally goes against my cowardly nature! I protest in the strongest terms!
Those emissions are going to be concentrated around airports, not distributed evenly amongst the population. Also, a tiny amount of lead can lead to drops in IQ and long-term problems.
The question you need to answer is whether the amount of lead being released is safe or not; the proportions don't matter:
According to one 2003 estimate, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, blood lead levels below the supposedly âoesafeâ limit of 10 micrograms per deciliter still produced a reduction in IQ of around 7 points. (Approximately 1 in 50 American children has lead levels above that threshold.)
(Wired)
Others are saying the same thing:
After taking account of factors likely to influence the results, they found that blood lead levels at 30 months showed significant associations with educational achievement, antisocial behaviour and hyperactivity scores five years later.
With lead levels up to five microgrammes per decilitre, there was no obvious effect.
But lead levels between five and 10 microgrammes per decilitre were associated with significantly poorer scores for reading ( 49% lower) and writing (51% lower). A doubling in lead blood levels to 10 microgrammes per decilitre was associated with a drop of a third of a grade in their Scholastic Assessment Tests (SATs).
(BBC)
5 mcg/dl is 50 ppb, if I'm not mistaken. Intuitively, do you think that the people working around airports who are exposed to aircraft exhaust would get levels above that? Remember, too, that lead persists in the environment, collects in dirt, is kicked up in dust, etc.
And the effects are truly felt throughout life. Indeed, there is convincing evidence that the crime wave of the 80s was due to lead in cars:
We now have studies at the international level, the national level, the state level, the city level, and even the individual level. Groups of children have been followed from the womb to adulthood, and higher childhood blood lead levels are consistently associated with higher adult arrest rates for violent crimes [19]. All of these studies tell the same story: Gasoline lead is responsible for a good share of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century.
(Mother Jones)
He specifically says
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html
Proprietary software developers have the advantage of money; free software developers need to make advantages for each other. Using the ordinary GPL for a library gives free software developers an advantage over proprietary developers: a library that they can use, while proprietary developers cannot use it. ...
This is why we used the Lesser GPL for the GNU C library. After all, there are plenty of other C libraries; using the GPL for ours would have driven proprietary software developers to use anotherâ"no problem for them, only for us.
However, when a library provides a significant unique capability, like GNU Readline, that's a horse of a different color. The Readline library implements input editing and history for interactive programs, and that's a facility not generally available elsewhere. Releasing it under the GPL and limiting its use to free programs gives our community a real boost. At least one application program is free software today specifically because that was necessary for using Readline.
Just as free software is not a religion, proprietary developers do not have a freedom to use libraries created by free software developers. Where did you get that idea from?
Developers in general have a right to use software under the license it was released, and RMS is suggesting that free software developers use the license that best promotes the adoption of free software.
Indeed, this is one issue where he clearly shows pragmatism, by suggesting that commonly-available libraries be released under the lesser GPL. Yet you turn this around and claim that, by doing so, he is going 'to great lengths to compromise on freedom in order to push his free software religion'.
This is the prisoner's dilemma:
Two people commit a crime.
Both are arrested, but there is no physical evidence.
They are put into separate rooms and each offered a deal:
1 year in prison for you, and 10 years for your partner, if you admit to the crime first
If either of them admits to it, they both go to jail - because they both took part in the crime. If they both stay silent, they both go free. However, each has a strong incentive to admit to the crime, because the other person might admit to it first.
In this case, however, only one person might be guilty. If that's the case, the innocent party has no incentive to rat the guilty one out. The essence of the prisoner's dilemma is lost.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but to find dinosaurs you just start digging in mesozoic-aged sedimentary rock, correct? Do you focus on alluvial deposits?
I'm not up on the subtlties of this law, but as a layman:
'Protected Computers' should include those machines that store personal information. Many machines do that, some store personal information over the long term, others over the sort term, so it is difficult to express exactly what should and what shouldn't fit that definition.
Further to that, the definition of 'computer' is getting harrier all the time. Where does one start and another begin?
So maybe it makes more sense to define protected information on computer systems.
Maybe make accessing systems you do not have the authority to access a petty crime, with penalties equal to trespass.
Then, make accessing private, secret, or financial data that you don't have the authority to access a more serious crime.
So, if you break into someone's laptop but just sit at the command line, you get fined $50. If you read their private files, you get prison time.
You're safer with a gun because so many others have guns. If there were fewer guns, there would be less reason to have one to protect yourself. I'll admit the situation in the US is hard, because there are so many guns out there, but I don't think the solution to guns is more guns.
Time does not start when the attack starts. People who rely on police for protection do not rely on them only when their house is invaded, they rely on them to keep the crime rate low and put criminals in jail, where they pose no threat.
Partisans fought the Nazis by and large with guns they got after the war started. And, with the possible exception of Yugoslavia, the most they did was hinder, not evict, the occupier. In WW2, like in any other war I can think of, partisans were able to mount a fight because they possessed two things: the will to fight and outside support.
Don't nit-pick. I didn't confuse 'can't' with 'isn't allowed to', my word choice was perfectly valid. You would have a point if I had said 'one person is unable to attack another', but that would be silly.
It is a truism that the state fails at its protection every day, but perfection is an impossible test outside of math. The better test is whether a given type of weapon improves or harms individual security. Do the liberal gun laws in the US make people in general safer? Are armed people safer more or less likely to be victims of crime, or more or less likely to be harmed in a crime, than unarmed people? These are the kind of questions you should ask.
The fantasy of the armed patriots rising up against a facist new order is a silly argument to use unless you also advocate for personal ownership of RPGs, landmines, tanks, nukes, and other heavy weapons. Practically speaking, if such a totalitarian state ever takes over the US government, then there will likely by defections from the armed forces which will join the regular people in the fight against the government. That is usually what happens - see Libya and Syria recently, for example. You might point to Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, but to that I'd just say that a plurality voted for Hitler and Russians seem to return to the strong state model often, implying they like that sort of thing, or at least it's the best model given their human geography.
No, it's a basis for Western political theory. Though the GP should have said State not Government. There's nothing sinister implied by it. It simply means that only the state can condone violence. One state can attack another (a war), one person can't attack another (a fistfight or worse).
As with all rights, though, with this right the state is burdened with obligations. The most salient is the obligation to protect its own citizens. So, the state must supply a police force (to protect against people) and a military (to protect against other states).
Perhaps your mind immediately jumped to the worst-case scenario: a totalitarian, Nazi-like government that infringes on the rights of the people. In that case, the state would be in violation of its obligations, and would lose its right to a monopoly on violence.
The Falcon Heavy is still in development.
The Falcon 9 has a 75% success rate and a 25% partial success/partial failure rate after 4 launches.
The Ariane 5 has a 94% success rate, a 3% partial success/partial failure rate, and a 3% failure rate, after 66 launches.
Everything I've read says the Falcon series is likely to be very reliable, but the proof of the success is in the launching - and the Ariane 5 has more launches under its belt. I hope Musk succeeds and lowers launch costs for everyone, but he hasn't proven anything yet.
It was aesthetically pleasing, fit well with the themes of the site, and was a clever and equally valid way of writing the official logo (after all, it was just a translation from one encoding scheme to another).
The mystery didn't hurt either, even if I was too thick to figure it out :)
Very interesting - thanks for posting. I had no idea that sun-syncronous orbits existed, let alone how they worked (wiki helped with that). It sounds like it would be a great orbit to be in if you were a space tourist - the view you'd get riding the terminator would be very dramatic.
Re: the weather satellites, if things get really bad, maybe NOAA can take over that spy sat that DOD donated to NASA (as I heard it, NASA got a late-model spy sat to use for astronomy but doesn't have the cash to launch it). (ref)
Exactly. This is why the 'notability' thing pisses me off: why not let there be an article for every tiny, minor thing? Where is the harm?
If I care enough about a the history of a the street I grew up on to write an article about it, and do a decent job of it (eg back it up with sources and do a neutral job of it), Wikipedia should be glad to have the info. And once you let in all the small things, and the minor historical figures, all the little battles and sub-sub-sub fields of philosophy, you get many more than 4 million articles.
I never switched from Netscape, really -
Netscape
Mozilla Suite
Seamonkey
The switch from Mozilla Suite to Seamonkey was made against a cacophony of support for Firefox. Firefox then was like Chrome now - lean, mean, the future, in a word: cool.
People bitched and moaned about how the Mozilla Suite (and, by extension, Seamonkey) was burdened by bundling its mail, news, chat, and html edit programs together; people wanted a lean-and-mean browser.
The tables are turned now, though. By avoiding all the pointless cool chrome (to use an expression), Seamonkey has managed to stay feeling light and purposeful.
Add to that the fact that
- the UI is stable
- the version numbers are sane (and the release schedule is sane, unlike what the current top post on this story says - maybe one minor release per month. very manageable)
- the prefs don't talk down to you
- it has mail and chat attached by default (I like that!)
- it has a single address/search bar
- it uses Gecko, so under-the-hood it's up-to-date
- when you spawn a new tab, the new tab appears at the extreme right, instead of displacing the existing tabs by spawning to the immediate right of your current tab
- the new-tab button is fixed in the extreme left of the tab bar, and doesn't jump around depending on how many tabs you have open atm
There are probably other things I could list. But in general, it _is_ a browser for people who know what they want: a browser that has a perfectly workable UI and does not change based on fashion. And a browser that has a modern HTML engine.
Unless and until the HTML engine becomes stale, I see no reason to change. I like my menu bars, I like spending a few extra horizontal pixels up to have back, forward, reload and stop buttons, I like having an attached mail client. Good design is good design no matter what decade it is.