Well, you seem to be lumping the FSF's campaign in with astroturfing, but I think the former is a response to the latter. If people didn't see companies like Microsoft warping standards processes, they probably wouldn't feel compelled to write in. No one who's been in this business any length of time blindly trusts any standards body to put the quality of the standard ahead of corporate influence. It's pretty reasonable to write in and say "I'm watching. If you shill, the world will know, and your reputation will suffer." Which is not to disagree that people can and should do better than copy and paste. But if you are correct that form letters have a negligible effect, then that is an indictment against the recipient, not the sender: the fact that someone put even the most minimal effort into expressing their opinion should count for something.
Where does that leave the 6,500 missing comments? It is rather hard to decipher, but it seems the 3500 comments given to ECMA are a subset of the 10,000 submitted to ISO? Perhaps only 3500 had substantive issues for ECMA to respond to? On the other hand, this article says ISO doesn't allow anyone to view comments, whereas groklaw includes them in a zip file, so maybe they aren't even the same comments?
Putting this document in PDF adds nothing over disseminating it in plain text or html. You are arguing "the inconvenience is minimal." I would argue "why add any unecessary inconvenience?" Also, don't forget that some people browse on mobiles and other devices that don't necessarily have a wide range of pdf viewers available, if any.
There are documents where the extra formatting and printability of pdf make it a reasonable choice, but this really isn't one of them.
our choices are limited to list A of sycophants or list B of sycophants If everyone I've heard say that were to write in the person they truly believe would make the best president, well, it might or might not change the outcome of that election, but I guarantee it would have a positive effect on the next one.
We must be living in perpendicular universes. What you're saying isn't even consistent with the link you yourself posted, which starts out
I've been doing a lot of work trying to figure out why after loading a lot of pages much of your memory seems to disappear. I've never bothered to file a bug report because this is a well known problem. Literally every person I've talked to about Firefox has complained about it. It happens on every computer I use. If I have any more useful information to supply, I will file a bug report, but for now, all I'd have to say is "Yes, what almost everybody else has experienced, I also experience."
Wow, you're absolutely right, because no one in this country is obliged to work for a company at all -- they're perfectly free to starve to death instead! That's why the government should never step in to prevent companies from discriminating on the basis of race, religion, or gender. Those silly non-white people don't have to work at an office, after all -- they could wash white people's windshields at traffic lights. And women can always just be housewives! And as for me personally, sure I drag my ass into work every day to make money for some slimeball thousands of miles away because... I WANT TO! It's totally, totally voluntary!
I'm sure glad you opened my eyes to how "freedom" doesn't apply at work at all. I think I'll go in today and ask my boss if he has any more ridiculous conditions I can sign, like maybe giving away all the intellectual property that my descendants might create.
[OK, this is where you say "But you could quit your job if you really wanted to...." And then you pretend like there's so much work opportunity in this world that anyone who wants to can easily find a job that just exactly suits them. Or that anyone in America who's willing to put in the effort can start out sweeping chimneys and end up owning a huge business empire. Oh, sorry, I'm putting words in your mouth -- if you're not as completely, utterly, universally stupid as your original post led me to believe, I apologize.]
Second, there is no sign of any "memory gobbling bug" that I can see... I guess you never use Firefox, then. I keep up to date with the latest version, and I have to close and reopen it several times a day to free up memory. And everyone I've ever talked to about it has the same issue.
...just a few little leaks here and there and some memory fragmentation i.e., memory gobbling bug. And when you say "some" that should read "a massive amount of."
Don't get me wrong, I much prefer Firefox to any other browser I've tried (and I've tried more than most people). But that's no reason to pretend it doesn't eat up all your computer's memory, when in fact it does.
ease-of-use matters. For example, GnuPG is a way to protect your privacy through encryption, but it only has a CLI. A lot of us consider a CLI easier to use.
the technical elite.... have the cure for cancer but refuse to give it to us because we don't have the time or desire to learn Perl. Perl? Perl? That's your idea of elite? Perl will get you maybe the cure for hiccups. You want us to let you in on the cancer vaccine, you better start studying Lisp.
You're right. It would be much better if the car just sat in your driveway for half an hour while asking you whether you want to pay for 50 types of crapware, then forced you to call in with your social security number because your new air freshener doesn't match the one their database says was installed when you registered, and when it finally got going, crashed into another car because the botnet virus on your car is at war with the botnet virus on the other one. Thanks, but let's keep the phrase "blue screen of death" a metaphor.
First -- apologies for the overly harsh tone of my earlier reply. Sometimes my rhetoric gets the better of me.
That said, please explain why the guillotine example is "specious." You can't dismiss an argument just because some moron disagreed with it. I think it's a very good example. A person manufacturing guillotines knows exactly what use they will be put to. If you believe there is a moral weight to capital punishment, then there is a moral weight to the manufacture of guillotines. Hard to get a more clear-cut example (heh heh).
The same logic applies to GPS systems. I believe there is a moral weight to the act of spying on people. This is especially true when carried out by a repressive government, but in my opinion, it's true even when carried out by a well-intentioned parent. People who make items that include GPS know that they are peddling a technology that enables spying. One of two things is going to happen: as a society, we are going to impress on them that they need to build privacy safeguards into their products, or we will be spied upon. A lot.
The "technology is neutral" mantra is just a cop out promoted by people who don't want to be held responsible for the bad things they have contributed to.
Wow. My sentiments exactly. This is an extremely confused screed you've got going here. Let's try to step through this and apply a little rational thought, shall we?
If the car tells dad you spent the night at your girlfriend's house instead of at boy scouts, or tells the department of homeland security you stopped by the mosque, it's broken and should not have been released. Yet more of the attitude "the user is too dumb to make moral decisions on their own, so we have to make them for him". Who exactly is "the user" here? The mosque visitor has no scope to apply a "moral decision" to not be tracked and thus profiled. Technology affects people beyond those who pay for it, thus free-market libertarianist bullshit doesn't really shed any light on this issue.
And you wonder why the government illegally seizes power in the name of a higher cause. No. I don't wonder that. That's very clear to me. What I wonder is why so many people help them do it. Thus my original post.
Your guillotine example is overly contrived Why, because it makes my point, which you don't like? It's not contrived at all -- it's taken from history. If you want an overly contrived example, here's one: suppose I invented a robot that identifies people's race by genetic analysis and pinches white people really, really hard in the ass. That would be technology, wouldn't it? Would it be "neutral?" Is it possible that (gasp) some technology might not be neutral?
Imagine if, in your ideal world, the guillotine had never been invented, or deployed, because anyone capable of inventing it thought like you. The french revolutionaries would have simply hanged/axed 'offenders'. Or maybe the madness would have ended a little more quickly because fewer people would have been willing to swing the axe than pull a lever. Probably not, but who knows? (Hint: not you.)
And you would have to contrive an argument suggesting that the only useful purpose of a length of rope or an axe is for killing people. Umm, no. Now you are arguing entirely with some imaginary strawman.
Nice troll. I would honestly like to know what makes you say my post is a troll. I laid out my arguments and backed them up with examples and analogies. Where is the troll part? Just that I disagree with you?
Technology itself is neutral Thanks for wasting everyone's time by mindlessly quoting a cliche. Now go sit somewhere and think (if you remember how) about that for half and hour and then come back and tell us if you still believe it. A guillotine is not neutral. It has one purpose: public execution. A gasoline engine requires gasoline, with a set of results that may not have been predictable at the time of invention, but certainly are not "neutral."
True, the morality of something like a GPS is much harder to weigh than, say, a flamethrower. But that is a reason to be more careful, not less. We pretty much accept that when people develop a new piece of hardware, they have a responsibility to make sure it won't explode in your face (unless it's, you know, a face-exploder, which I'm sure someone is working on in God's great US of A). When your bank put's up a new web site, we all presume they have spent a lot of time making sure it's secure. It's about time we started holding technology companies just as responsible for thinking through privacy issues before releasing something.
If the mp3 player catches fire in your pants, it's broken and should not have been released. If the website lets hackers get your bank account number, it's broken and should not have been released. If the car tells dad you spent the night at your girlfriend's house instead of at boy scouts, or tells the department of homeland security you stopped by the mosque, it's broken and should not have been released.
You know, if you're trying to make a reasonable argument, you should try not to lose all your credibility by suggesting that going to live somewhere on a different planet is "the only logical outcome." Just so you know, it's not even a remote possibility. You can gaze up at the sky all day, but come nightfall, you'll be herded back into the barn like the rest of us. Some of us ARE planning a stampede, and your escapist stargazing is not helping.
"they aren't marketing this thing to you".
Obviously, they have struck a chord with many other people out there. Well, someone has struck a chord, but the question is "Did Apple strike a chord with the public because of their great product design? Or did they just do a stellar job manipulating the media into making a huge fuss over it?" There's no point in arguing this, because there's really no way to know. But I do think it's a fascinating question. As one of those people who simply doesn't find Apple's interfaces intuitive, I can't help but feel the whole thing's a sham, although I freely admit the possibility that I'm just retarded for not immediately grokking how to use a freaking circle to fast forward, change playlists, and adjust my volume. (wtf!?!) On the whole, my take is that Apple is trying harder than almost everyone else, design-wise, but I still think they're coming up short. They probably can't see their own faults, though, since so many people are kissing their corporate ass all the time.
Once they've planted the idea in the public's head that child pornographers hide kiddie porn in innocent images, then they can start embedding child porn in all sorts of things, so that when they feel like arresting you, there's a good chance there will be child porn on your computer and your ISP will have server logs of you downloading it.
Or maybe I'm just being paranoid.
Can't we put the blame here where it belongs: on the idiots who keep foisting Daylight Saving Time nonsense on us? For god's sake, people, if you think there's some benefit in waking up at a different time of day, then change your freaking alarm time, not the time time.
You got it exactly backwards. Apple just gave a lot of people much more incentive to install a new OS on their iPod. (Including Windows users who don't like iTunes -- not just Linux users.)
I generally agree with you, but one part of the OP that unobtrusive javascript doesn't address is the tendency for large, script-heavy pages to freak out your cpu and ultimately fail to load. I run into this more and more often. On slashdot, for instance, I generally use the new comment engine, but if I browse to a page with 500 comments, I end up having to kill and restart my browser.
Except the first time he wasn't actually elected, and the second time he was "elected" via electronic voting machines. I don't think there's adequate evidence to call the majority of Americans idiots. When you add the 35-40% of those eligible to vote who simply failed to show up (http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/voti ng.html), to the 30-35% who actually voted for Bush, I think we've established majority stupidity.
NUNS DON'T FIGHT. No, they nurse their malice in secret, brooding in silence for decades if necessary, until the perfect opportunity presents itself. Then, they spring into action...
There are hundreds of thousands of people using unpriveleged user accounts every single day. That's how things run in the enterprise, kid. Sure, just as millions of people use ATMs every day without having any reason to install new software on them. But it should have been clear that my post was about my experience trying to use a computer for what I use it for. Which is not data entry in some cube at a Fortune 500.
Just because you don't know how to use Windows doesn't mean it can't do something. I never claimed there was anything it can't do. I pointed out that it makes it unnecessarily difficult and annoying to do some things.
Take a few classes, learn what you are talking about. The people who complain the loudest about Windows are the ones who know the least about it. I'm no Windows expert, but I definitely am not among those who "know least about it." I've never taken a class on using an operating system -- the whole concept strikes me as bizarre -- if I need a class to use an operating system, there is something seriously wrong with that operating system.
Are you stupid? No, by anyone's standard.
Do you know how much trouble an unpriveleged user can cause by screwing with file associations? Exactly none, unless your operating system is drastically flawed. A file association is merely a way to invoke a program. It should only work if a user already has the right to invoke that program. Therefore, it should be impossible that changing a file association could cause any serious trouble.
Not to mention how easy it would be to circumvent any kind of security restriction. If you have the policy limiting what.exe files they can run, they could just invent their own file extension, and associate it with explorer.exe or cmd.exe. This makes no sense whatsoever. Any policy designed to restrict a user from invoking an executable should work no matter how the user tries to invoke it. If this is not the case, you have bigger problems.
Try taking a security class, kid. You seem to have a lot of faith in classes. Try working in the industry for a while, kid.
Right click, select "Run As...", and enter the information about which user account you want it to run under.
Learn how to use Windows: it really helps out when you, ya know, use Windows. As I pointed out elsewhere in this thread, this cuts the inane bullshit necessary to change your file extensions by half. 50% of bullshit is still bullshit. Others have pointed out how inadequate Run As is for other tasks.
Your problem lies between the chair and the keyboard. I don't have a problem. I have used Windows with an admin account for many years and have never had a virus or any other type of privilege-related problem that I'm aware of. I just like to do things as safely and securely as possible, and therefore tried out the Windows unprivileged user. As I said in my OP, I found it unusable.
That's why I said your solution cuts the password problem in half. If I use "Run As..." (which I did not know about, so thanks for the information), I don't have to log off, but I still have to enter my admin password repeatedly (which is about equivalent effort to "logging on"). I'm not trying to change the story, just highlight the relevant part. In your initial response, you ignored the most important part of my complaint: that the Windows privilege system seems arbitrary and interferes far too much with a user who's just trying to go about their daily business. By contrast, I very rarely resort to sudo or su on my desktop at home (though I do use sudo a lot on machines where my function is basically administration).
So yeah, maybe people who are more familiar with Windows know ways to make it more livable, but I work with a lot of serious hardcore Windows vets, and they all use admin accounts as their main logon. By contrast, only one guy here regularly gets a root shell on unix (and the rest of us strongly disapprove).
Me: The tasks requiring privilege are arbitrary and I have to "log on" (i.e., put in my administrator password) too much.
You: You don't know enough to comment! You can use "Run As..." to cut the arbitrary password BS in half!
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you seem to be lumping the FSF's campaign in with astroturfing, but I think the former is a response to the latter. If people didn't see companies like Microsoft warping standards processes, they probably wouldn't feel compelled to write in. No one who's been in this business any length of time blindly trusts any standards body to put the quality of the standard ahead of corporate influence. It's pretty reasonable to write in and say "I'm watching. If you shill, the world will know, and your reputation will suffer." Which is not to disagree that people can and should do better than copy and paste. But if you are correct that form letters have a negligible effect, then that is an indictment against the recipient, not the sender: the fact that someone put even the most minimal effort into expressing their opinion should count for something.
Dude, the Potter books explicitly state that you can't make food with magic. Someone please kill me for knowing this.
Putting this document in PDF adds nothing over disseminating it in plain text or html. You are arguing "the inconvenience is minimal." I would argue "why add any unecessary inconvenience?" Also, don't forget that some people browse on mobiles and other devices that don't necessarily have a wide range of pdf viewers available, if any.
There are documents where the extra formatting and printability of pdf make it a reasonable choice, but this really isn't one of them.
Wow, you're absolutely right, because no one in this country is obliged to work for a company at all -- they're perfectly free to starve to death instead! That's why the government should never step in to prevent companies from discriminating on the basis of race, religion, or gender. Those silly non-white people don't have to work at an office, after all -- they could wash white people's windshields at traffic lights. And women can always just be housewives! And as for me personally, sure I drag my ass into work every day to make money for some slimeball thousands of miles away because ... I WANT TO! It's totally, totally voluntary!
I'm sure glad you opened my eyes to how "freedom" doesn't apply at work at all. I think I'll go in today and ask my boss if he has any more ridiculous conditions I can sign, like maybe giving away all the intellectual property that my descendants might create.
[OK, this is where you say "But you could quit your job if you really wanted to...." And then you pretend like there's so much work opportunity in this world that anyone who wants to can easily find a job that just exactly suits them. Or that anyone in America who's willing to put in the effort can start out sweeping chimneys and end up owning a huge business empire. Oh, sorry, I'm putting words in your mouth -- if you're not as completely, utterly, universally stupid as your original post led me to believe, I apologize.]
...just a few little leaks here and there and some memory fragmentation i.e., memory gobbling bug. And when you say "some" that should read "a massive amount of."Don't get me wrong, I much prefer Firefox to any other browser I've tried (and I've tried more than most people). But that's no reason to pretend it doesn't eat up all your computer's memory, when in fact it does.
the technical elite
You're right. It would be much better if the car just sat in your driveway for half an hour while asking you whether you want to pay for 50 types of crapware, then forced you to call in with your social security number because your new air freshener doesn't match the one their database says was installed when you registered, and when it finally got going, crashed into another car because the botnet virus on your car is at war with the botnet virus on the other one. Thanks, but let's keep the phrase "blue screen of death" a metaphor.
Send me your address, I want to beat you up.
First -- apologies for the overly harsh tone of my earlier reply. Sometimes my rhetoric gets the better of me.
That said, please explain why the guillotine example is "specious." You can't dismiss an argument just because some moron disagreed with it. I think it's a very good example. A person manufacturing guillotines knows exactly what use they will be put to. If you believe there is a moral weight to capital punishment, then there is a moral weight to the manufacture of guillotines. Hard to get a more clear-cut example (heh heh).
The same logic applies to GPS systems. I believe there is a moral weight to the act of spying on people. This is especially true when carried out by a repressive government, but in my opinion, it's true even when carried out by a well-intentioned parent. People who make items that include GPS know that they are peddling a technology that enables spying. One of two things is going to happen: as a society, we are going to impress on them that they need to build privacy safeguards into their products, or we will be spied upon. A lot.
The "technology is neutral" mantra is just a cop out promoted by people who don't want to be held responsible for the bad things they have contributed to.
If the car tells dad you spent the night at your girlfriend's house instead of at boy scouts, or tells the department of homeland security you stopped by the mosque, it's broken and should not have been released. Yet more of the attitude "the user is too dumb to make moral decisions on their own, so we have to make them for him". Who exactly is "the user" here? The mosque visitor has no scope to apply a "moral decision" to not be tracked and thus profiled. Technology affects people beyond those who pay for it, thus free-market libertarianist bullshit doesn't really shed any light on this issue.
And you wonder why the government illegally seizes power in the name of a higher cause. No. I don't wonder that. That's very clear to me. What I wonder is why so many people help them do it. Thus my original post.
Your guillotine example is overly contrived Why, because it makes my point, which you don't like? It's not contrived at all -- it's taken from history. If you want an overly contrived example, here's one: suppose I invented a robot that identifies people's race by genetic analysis and pinches white people really, really hard in the ass. That would be technology, wouldn't it? Would it be "neutral?" Is it possible that (gasp) some technology might not be neutral?
Imagine if, in your ideal world, the guillotine had never been invented, or deployed, because anyone capable of inventing it thought like you. The french revolutionaries would have simply hanged/axed 'offenders'. Or maybe the madness would have ended a little more quickly because fewer people would have been willing to swing the axe than pull a lever. Probably not, but who knows? (Hint: not you.)
And you would have to contrive an argument suggesting that the only useful purpose of a length of rope or an axe is for killing people. Umm, no. Now you are arguing entirely with some imaginary strawman.
Nice troll. I would honestly like to know what makes you say my post is a troll. I laid out my arguments and backed them up with examples and analogies. Where is the troll part? Just that I disagree with you?
True, the morality of something like a GPS is much harder to weigh than, say, a flamethrower. But that is a reason to be more careful, not less. We pretty much accept that when people develop a new piece of hardware, they have a responsibility to make sure it won't explode in your face (unless it's, you know, a face-exploder, which I'm sure someone is working on in God's great US of A). When your bank put's up a new web site, we all presume they have spent a lot of time making sure it's secure. It's about time we started holding technology companies just as responsible for thinking through privacy issues before releasing something.
If the mp3 player catches fire in your pants, it's broken and should not have been released. If the website lets hackers get your bank account number, it's broken and should not have been released. If the car tells dad you spent the night at your girlfriend's house instead of at boy scouts, or tells the department of homeland security you stopped by the mosque, it's broken and should not have been released.
You know, if you're trying to make a reasonable argument, you should try not to lose all your credibility by suggesting that going to live somewhere on a different planet is "the only logical outcome." Just so you know, it's not even a remote possibility. You can gaze up at the sky all day, but come nightfall, you'll be herded back into the barn like the rest of us. Some of us ARE planning a stampede, and your escapist stargazing is not helping.
Once they've planted the idea in the public's head that child pornographers hide kiddie porn in innocent images, then they can start embedding child porn in all sorts of things, so that when they feel like arresting you, there's a good chance there will be child porn on your computer and your ISP will have server logs of you downloading it. Or maybe I'm just being paranoid.
Can't we put the blame here where it belongs: on the idiots who keep foisting Daylight Saving Time nonsense on us? For god's sake, people, if you think there's some benefit in waking up at a different time of day, then change your freaking alarm time, not the time time.
You got it exactly backwards. Apple just gave a lot of people much more incentive to install a new OS on their iPod. (Including Windows users who don't like iTunes -- not just Linux users.)
I generally agree with you, but one part of the OP that unobtrusive javascript doesn't address is the tendency for large, script-heavy pages to freak out your cpu and ultimately fail to load. I run into this more and more often. On slashdot, for instance, I generally use the new comment engine, but if I browse to a page with 500 comments, I end up having to kill and restart my browser.
That's why I said your solution cuts the password problem in half. If I use "Run As..." (which I did not know about, so thanks for the information), I don't have to log off, but I still have to enter my admin password repeatedly (which is about equivalent effort to "logging on"). I'm not trying to change the story, just highlight the relevant part. In your initial response, you ignored the most important part of my complaint: that the Windows privilege system seems arbitrary and interferes far too much with a user who's just trying to go about their daily business. By contrast, I very rarely resort to sudo or su on my desktop at home (though I do use sudo a lot on machines where my function is basically administration).
So yeah, maybe people who are more familiar with Windows know ways to make it more livable, but I work with a lot of serious hardcore Windows vets, and they all use admin accounts as their main logon. By contrast, only one guy here regularly gets a root shell on unix (and the rest of us strongly disapprove).
Me: The tasks requiring privilege are arbitrary and I have to "log on" (i.e., put in my administrator password) too much.
You: You don't know enough to comment! You can use "Run As..." to cut the arbitrary password BS in half!
Sorry, still not sold.