I hope he doesn't answer this, now that I've seen his error-plagued, annoying site. My worst nightmare is that he'll make a suggestion that gets implemented.
Who says we have to wait for the public to start using our term? Let me be the first to propose that we form a coalition of l33t cr@x0rs and break into Oxford's dictionary archives and change the terms to the correct usage.
It is pragmatically possible to create perfect software. The space shuttle time releases approximately 500k lines of code every release, and in the last 11 releases has had 17 bugs - TOTAL. In the last 4 releases it has had 3 bugs. If software companies spent half as much time as the shuttle software engineers designing, documenting their code, testing, and perfecting their process, all software could be nearly perfect. Buggy software is not an option for the 21st century.
So, while your suggestion that we audit their processes is a good one, it does not go far enough. Good processes can produce bug-free software, for any purpose, with any group of (qualified) people.
After all, Slashdot will report on the retraction as well. More hits, more ad revenue, no journalistic credibility lost. (There's nowhere to go but up anyway.)
This is the kind of irrensponsible journalism that has led to the mantra "We're just giving the public what they want" in traditional media. The argument being that people WANT to see crime and death and human misery, since that's what they seem to be watching. The truth is, people watch it because a) they're not given any choice, and b) they feel socially and morally obligated to watch it. We live in a society where it can be embarrassing to not know what's going on in the news, while everyone else is talking about it. We also feel the need to know what the "dangers" of the real world are so we can protect our loved ones from them - the dangers having been generated and hyped by the media.
My point is, this is the same kind of thing./.ers feel socially and morally obligated to read this troll article so they can intelligently and accurately flame them for being such asses. They know it, so they're capitalizing on it. We feel a need to protect our "community" so we read about the "danger" facing it--namely Irresponsible Journalism.
If I didn't believe that people (like Carnage4Life) were intelligent enough to see through most of this BS, this might be enough to make me reconsider my position on the 1st Amendment. Fortunately, I think we're all smart enough that the ass who wrote the original piece isn't demagogue enough to actually sway anyone's opinions.
An anonymous spokesman for the RIAA had this to say: "We can't just come right out and say it, but we LOVE Napster. Heck, our sales went up last year, what was it, $1.5 billion? $1.5 trillion? Something like that. Think that's a coincidence? We sure as heck don't--why do you think we put so much time and effort into generating free publicity for what we refer to around here as the 'Nappy Cash Cow'.
"We can't have Metallica cutting into those profits. We're suing them on the grounds that their actions will reduce the popularity of their music and may even make it more difficult to distribute Metallia MP3's, which in turn would drastically cut into our Metallica profits from new listeners. Let's face it, Metallica hasn't made a great album in quite a while, so the only money we get out of them lately is people listening to their OLD stuff and deciding to buy it."
Also at issue in the suit are about a dozen songs released by Metallica that, according to the RIAA's legal team, "really suck." These include "Whiskey in the Jar" among others.
It's really 42, right? You weren't just pulling our legs about that? Some of us have a lot of time and effort invested into that little number, it'd be a shame if the man with the secrets of the universe was just messing with our heads.
From now on, can we just assume that someone says "what about overclocking?" whenever there's an article about a CPU? That way we don't have to read it every time.
$600 sounds very reasonable. Heck, it's safer than a regular radio AND plays mp3s? If it delivers as promised it might be the first sound system that actually tempts me to get rid of my AM/FM.
While I agree with you in principle, an alternative definition of mental illness would put them ALL in that category. Isn't it crazy to go on a rampage killing? Whether or not the courts found them to be crazy is merely a legal definition.
If you accept that then you must ask what caused the insanity? There IS a cause - whether it's in the genome and turned on at birth, or caused by bad parenting, or turned on by video games. This study didn't find any statistically significant evidence that video games were the cause, but simply saying "killers are crazy" doesn't address the question of "why??"
I wasn't involved, and I certainly sympathize with your loss of someone close to you, and I think it's a raw deal to dump someone after one meeting, but people need to take responsibility for themselves. Let's face it - your Cheryl needed to take responsibility for herself, and if she couldn't, her family and the people who loved her should have helped. icee doesn't count. He didn't love her. I say this not to place blame - hindsight is always 20/20 - but as a guideline. Take responsibility for yourself. Getting dumped isn't an excuse to take the easy way out, any more than it is the cause for someone doing so.
BTW, the fact that the situation was similar to one I was in was merely a coincidence. I wasn't trying to make a point with that.
I don't give a fuck about icee, mafiaboy, 2600 or any of this, but your comments I had to respond to. You're calling this guy a predator because of a failed romantic relationship. Grow up. Relationships fail in the real world with just as much regularity as they do on IRC. Nobody's a predator - I've had my heart broken in almost exactly the manner you describe above, and I've broken at least one heart, as has almost every adult alive. I'm a stronger, more complete person because of it - all of it. I've never been "preyed" on or "preyed" on anyone else.
Because selling licenses is fundamentally flawed
on
Why Do Open Source?
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· Score: 2
First let me talk about why we USE free software. I can see the reasons for the OSS movement as an expression of some of the laws of physics. OSS is the path of least resistance. Attempting to sell packages of software - of knowledge - which can be copied freely is a path of GREAT resistance. I don't just mean piracy. When someone has the choice to use free software instead of commercial software to perform the same function, she needs GREAT incentives to use the pay software. Therein lies the resistance. The commercial software has to have important features that the free software doesn't have. The answer to the question: then why isn't almost EVERYONE using free software? --is that most people don't have the choice to do so yet. Using Linux requires some technical expertise that isn't required of a windows user, and in the absence of that technical expertise, the user has no choice but to buy Windows.
Now, why do people WRITE free software? Put aside for the moment the issue of community auditing of code -- after all, not all free software has to be open. Free software has utility to the end-user, and is the path of least resistance, as above. People who write free software do so partially for the joy of coding, but mostly for the utility of the end product. That utility, to the coder, is threefold.
1 The software itself. Software generally performs some function, whether it's calculating results and displaying them in a spreadsheet or providing entertainment. The coder probably wrote it to provide utility that wasn't present in any of the software he already owns.
2 The prestige and the clout that comes from having written it. This runs the gamut from 'net cred' to resume-stuffing.
3 The ability to make money off of it.
I can hear you saying "huh?" from the last one. But if you accept my statement that "selling licenses is fundamentally flawed", you had better hope there are ways to make money off of free software or software writing may cease altogether. After all, #1 and #2 can be powerful reasons, but they don't pay rent. How, then do you make money? I suspect we'll start moving to service-based companies. Witness the rise of ASPs, the massively multiplayer online games (few of which are free), and the (admittedly dubious, but widely publicized) success of some of these Internet startups selling everything from bill pay to food delivery. Software will be written to give service providers a service to sell, not for its own sake.
In conclusion, there are very few new ideas in software programming these days. There are some, and I wish there were more, but the vast majority of software products compete on features and implementation, not originality. Features and implementation are what service industries are all about. It seems to me a natural move for software companies to stop trying to sell their software for what it IS, when most commercial software consists of a reorganization of other peoples' ideas, and start selling it for what it can DO.
My first response was: Well, we have a bad habit of over-protecting our kids, but this seems benign enough. Then I thought about it a little more. I still think the idea of this law is benign, but the law is poorly designed, and poorly designed laws are inherently problematic if for no other reason than they're a waste of taxpayer money and law-enforcement time.
Here's the design problem: As the poster pointed out, if you don't target your site at the under-13 crowd, and if you simply fail to ask the respondant's age, you don' hafta do nothin'. Well, that should be OK, right? After all, if you don't know their age, you lose one of the most important pieces of marketing information, and therefore you can't really use your nefarious marketing tactics on their impressionable little minds.
Unfortunately, wrong. The purpose of all those demographic studies is to find out what people in a certain group like to buy and what characteristics they have, but you can surely reverse those demographics to find out, given a set of characteristics, what age group they are in. Ask them a relatively few "key" questions scattered in with the rest of the form ("What's your favorite possession? a) car b) home c) pokemon cards") and you will know what market segment you are interviewing. Then the rest is buttah - you can collect their data with just as much (if not more) certainty that they actually are the age you believe them to be. After all, anyone can lie to a direct age question; but you may not realize someone is asking your age when they ask you about your favorite possession.
Well . . . kind of the POINT of this whole exercise is to take the ability to perform referenceable benchmarks out of the hands of the interested parties (those who make money from them). Closed-source, commercial benchmarks are inherently flawed for some of the same reasons closed-source, commercial security is flawed. The difference is that those interested in finding and exploiting these flaws aren't crackers, but hardware companies.
So to answer your question: Tom's Hardware, and other reputable benchmarking authorities, would use it. TH has rapidly become one of the highest-integrity, best-respected hardware/computing sites around, even (indeed especially) for the Windows crowd. (After, Win32 is still the dominant gaming platform.) If such a thing as open benching became popular, then commercial entities would be FORCED to use the open benchmarks or be accused of marketing skewed numbers, whether those accusations had merit or not.
Let me get this straight... Bill Gates donated ONE MILLION DOLLARS PER STUDENT for tuition, room, and board? Methinks Mr. Fat Cat is a little more out-of-touch with reality than even I thought.
And although he dismissed the breach of contract claim, he granted Ticketmaster permission to file an amended complaint with facts showing that its "terms and conditions" created an enforceable contract, seen and agreed to by Tickets.com.
This has come up before, and there is a strong argument against contracts that you agree to by having seen them. Could I create a contract that said:
By viewing this text you agree to be bound by the terms and conditions of this contract. This contract stipulates that you may not view this post with moderator points remaining without moderating the post up 1 point.
Well, you'd better hope not. Ticketmaster.com is saying they had contracts on display on the site, and that by using the site you're agreeing to those contracts. Sure . . . and hey, when I change the non-read-only license agreement on Sun's software download pages to "I 0wn j00 Sun Software", that creates a legally binding contract too . . .
Science fiction writers and humanity in general seem to believe that emotion, consciousness, spitefulness and the rest of the human mindstate naturally go with any advanced AI. Science fiction has since its inception postulated intelligent machines, and virtually without exception these machines have been burdened with the thoughtfulness that humans are also burdened with.
In my studies in psychology I took a look at some neural net systems and came to the conclusion that there was no need for any machine which is designed to serve a specific purpose to think about what it is doing, or get emotional about it. Human brains have been trained to produce emotions because, as a generalized survival mechanism, they is useful. The same can be said of consciousness. Conversely, a machine that only needs to, say guide a blind man from his door to the train station safely, would have no use for consciousness and therefore wouldn't possess any.
Nevertheless, I think it's possible to give machines the appearance of consciousness and feelings, and perhaps, as it is with humans, there is no difference between "the appearance of" and the real thing. My question, finally: Do you think it's inevitable that machines will be given consciousness to help them perform their tasks? Or is consciousness merely a distraction for the tasks we would use AIs for in the conceivable future?
I'm not sure whether this is legal or not, but I think the guy who wanted to buy the stolen watch would be a little confused when you handed him the gun. Or is this like a do-it-yourself stolen watch kit?
Slashdot Mirror
I hope he doesn't answer this, now that I've seen his error-plagued, annoying site. My worst nightmare is that he'll make a suggestion that gets implemented.
On our long-overdue bloody geek overthrow of the corporatist, closed-source system! My chess club is still only half armed :-(
Let's not forget that Microsoft BROKE Kerberos. This guy is proposing a change that allows existing TCP to continue working, unaffected.
Who says we have to wait for the public to start using our term? Let me be the first to propose that we form a coalition of l33t cr@x0rs and break into Oxford's dictionary archives and change the terms to the correct usage.
So, while your suggestion that we audit their processes is a good one, it does not go far enough. Good processes can produce bug-free software, for any purpose, with any group of (qualified) people.
This is the kind of irrensponsible journalism that has led to the mantra "We're just giving the public what they want" in traditional media. The argument being that people WANT to see crime and death and human misery, since that's what they seem to be watching. The truth is, people watch it because a) they're not given any choice, and b) they feel socially and morally obligated to watch it. We live in a society where it can be embarrassing to not know what's going on in the news, while everyone else is talking about it. We also feel the need to know what the "dangers" of the real world are so we can protect our loved ones from them - the dangers having been generated and hyped by the media.
My point is, this is the same kind of thing. /.ers feel socially and morally obligated to read this troll article so they can intelligently and accurately flame them for being such asses. They know it, so they're capitalizing on it. We feel a need to protect our "community" so we read about the "danger" facing it--namely Irresponsible Journalism.
If I didn't believe that people (like Carnage4Life) were intelligent enough to see through most of this BS, this might be enough to make me reconsider my position on the 1st Amendment. Fortunately, I think we're all smart enough that the ass who wrote the original piece isn't demagogue enough to actually sway anyone's opinions.
"We can't have Metallica cutting into those profits. We're suing them on the grounds that their actions will reduce the popularity of their music and may even make it more difficult to distribute Metallia MP3's, which in turn would drastically cut into our Metallica profits from new listeners. Let's face it, Metallica hasn't made a great album in quite a while, so the only money we get out of them lately is people listening to their OLD stuff and deciding to buy it."
Also at issue in the suit are about a dozen songs released by Metallica that, according to the RIAA's legal team, "really suck." These include "Whiskey in the Jar" among others.
It's really 42, right? You weren't just pulling our legs about that? Some of us have a lot of time and effort invested into that little number, it'd be a shame if the man with the secrets of the universe was just messing with our heads.
Congratulations. This sort of thing will help give Slashdot back its cred.
From now on, can we just assume that someone says "what about overclocking?" whenever there's an article about a CPU? That way we don't have to read it every time.
$600 sounds very reasonable. Heck, it's safer than a regular radio AND plays mp3s? If it delivers as promised it might be the first sound system that actually tempts me to get rid of my AM/FM.
If you accept that then you must ask what caused the insanity? There IS a cause - whether it's in the genome and turned on at birth, or caused by bad parenting, or turned on by video games. This study didn't find any statistically significant evidence that video games were the cause, but simply saying "killers are crazy" doesn't address the question of "why??"
I'm wondering because I'm trying to imagine pushing anything that large 19 miles on Earth, and I can't.
BTW, the fact that the situation was similar to one I was in was merely a coincidence. I wasn't trying to make a point with that.
I don't give a fuck about icee, mafiaboy, 2600 or any of this, but your comments I had to respond to. You're calling this guy a predator because of a failed romantic relationship. Grow up. Relationships fail in the real world with just as much regularity as they do on IRC. Nobody's a predator - I've had my heart broken in almost exactly the manner you describe above, and I've broken at least one heart, as has almost every adult alive. I'm a stronger, more complete person because of it - all of it. I've never been "preyed" on or "preyed" on anyone else.
Now, why do people WRITE free software? Put aside for the moment the issue of community auditing of code -- after all, not all free software has to be open. Free software has utility to the end-user, and is the path of least resistance, as above. People who write free software do so partially for the joy of coding, but mostly for the utility of the end product. That utility, to the coder, is threefold.
I can hear you saying "huh?" from the last one. But if you accept my statement that "selling licenses is fundamentally flawed", you had better hope there are ways to make money off of free software or software writing may cease altogether. After all, #1 and #2 can be powerful reasons, but they don't pay rent. How, then do you make money? I suspect we'll start moving to service-based companies. Witness the rise of ASPs, the massively multiplayer online games (few of which are free), and the (admittedly dubious, but widely publicized) success of some of these Internet startups selling everything from bill pay to food delivery. Software will be written to give service providers a service to sell, not for its own sake.In conclusion, there are very few new ideas in software programming these days. There are some, and I wish there were more, but the vast majority of software products compete on features and implementation, not originality. Features and implementation are what service industries are all about. It seems to me a natural move for software companies to stop trying to sell their software for what it IS, when most commercial software consists of a reorganization of other peoples' ideas, and start selling it for what it can DO.
Here's the design problem: As the poster pointed out, if you don't target your site at the under-13 crowd, and if you simply fail to ask the respondant's age, you don' hafta do nothin'. Well, that should be OK, right? After all, if you don't know their age, you lose one of the most important pieces of marketing information, and therefore you can't really use your nefarious marketing tactics on their impressionable little minds.
Unfortunately, wrong. The purpose of all those demographic studies is to find out what people in a certain group like to buy and what characteristics they have, but you can surely reverse those demographics to find out, given a set of characteristics, what age group they are in. Ask them a relatively few "key" questions scattered in with the rest of the form ("What's your favorite possession? a) car b) home c) pokemon cards") and you will know what market segment you are interviewing. Then the rest is buttah - you can collect their data with just as much (if not more) certainty that they actually are the age you believe them to be. After all, anyone can lie to a direct age question; but you may not realize someone is asking your age when they ask you about your favorite possession.
Oops. Back to the drawing board, lawmakers.
Bub: Ouch! The meal that burns you twice. Ever try chicken kashmiri?
Well, no Bub, that sounds awfully kinky to me.
What are you going to do when the seed cash runs out and ask.com goes belly-up like the other internet "companies"?
So to answer your question: Tom's Hardware, and other reputable benchmarking authorities, would use it. TH has rapidly become one of the highest-integrity, best-respected hardware/computing sites around, even (indeed especially) for the Windows crowd. (After, Win32 is still the dominant gaming platform.) If such a thing as open benching became popular, then commercial entities would be FORCED to use the open benchmarks or be accused of marketing skewed numbers, whether those accusations had merit or not.
Let me get this straight... Bill Gates donated ONE MILLION DOLLARS PER STUDENT for tuition, room, and board? Methinks Mr. Fat Cat is a little more out-of-touch with reality than even I thought.
Hiking?
This has come up before, and there is a strong argument against contracts that you agree to by having seen them. Could I create a contract that said:
Well, you'd better hope not. Ticketmaster.com is saying they had contracts on display on the site, and that by using the site you're agreeing to those contracts. Sure . . . and hey, when I change the non-read-only license agreement on Sun's software download pages to "I 0wn j00 Sun Software", that creates a legally binding contract too . . .In my studies in psychology I took a look at some neural net systems and came to the conclusion that there was no need for any machine which is designed to serve a specific purpose to think about what it is doing, or get emotional about it. Human brains have been trained to produce emotions because, as a generalized survival mechanism, they is useful. The same can be said of consciousness. Conversely, a machine that only needs to, say guide a blind man from his door to the train station safely, would have no use for consciousness and therefore wouldn't possess any.
Nevertheless, I think it's possible to give machines the appearance of consciousness and feelings, and perhaps, as it is with humans, there is no difference between "the appearance of" and the real thing. My question, finally: Do you think it's inevitable that machines will be given consciousness to help them perform their tasks? Or is consciousness merely a distraction for the tasks we would use AIs for in the conceivable future?
I'm not sure whether this is legal or not, but I think the guy who wanted to buy the stolen watch would be a little confused when you handed him the gun. Or is this like a do-it-yourself stolen watch kit?