Noam Chomsky correctly put it (paraphrasing): You are either for free speech or you are against it. There is no meaningful middle ground. Everyone is for free speech that they agree with. Even Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels agreed with that. The meaningful test is whether you are for speech that you disagree with. Blogger Brian Stokes wants to remove racist blogs. Therefore he is against free speech that he disagrees with; he is against free speech.
Should Google honor his wishes? Clearly they have a right and a reason not to. If you claim to be for free speech you must support their freedom to keep the blogs.
There is a simple rationale why the basic right of free speech has a public benefit in this case... giving the bloggers enough rope to hang themselves. If their opinions are so poisonous, they should be publicly aired so that everyone can see for themselves how pathetic and disgusting they truly are.
As there's a pretty good chance that the industrialized world will have passed peak oil production in the next twenty years, I doubt there'll be any cars flying through the neighbourhoods of anyone reading this site. We'll be doing well to afford a flight on an "ordinary" passenger jet given how much aviation fuel will soon cost.
"if they think that they can raise the price on me just because I don't buy full CDs anymore, they've got another
thing coming"
Not another thing coming! It's another think coming. It's a colloquialism that means (obviously) that they will have to re-think their position. Reference
Argh. I'm sorry if this it nit-picky, but really. I'm so frustrated at the poor writing I see on Slashdot and other sites. Let's all just try a little harder, hmm? With a little bit of work writing good english is not so difficult.
Wanna get rid of the blind spot? Make driving whilst using a cell phone illegal. I swear to god, the number of times I've been almost run-down by some bozo driver spacing out and not looking at the blind spot right in front of their car whilst talking on a cell phone. Well. I can't tell you, but it's a lot. And hands-free phones don't cut it either. It's not the hands that need to pay attention. It's the driver.
That's 'Paddy Wagon' meaning van driven by Irishmen, since in the 1930s many American policemen were Irish, and Paddy is a slang abbreviation for the common Irish name Patrick. But whatever. 'Pattywagon' if it makes you happy.
In my experience saying that Mac's don't operate well within a Windows environment is just a special case of a more general principal... Diverse heterogeneous environments are more trouble prone and less reliable than homoegenous ones. Any time you introduce to a production environment a new system that does the same things in a different way, you're gonna have headaches.
For me the greatest problems using Macs in a PC environment are not the big things like file sharing but the countless little things, like not being able to move fonts from one computer to another... Oh! that PNG file was created on a Mac, which uses a different font naming scheme from Windows. If you open it on your computer you gonna have to change all the fonts over. If you save it and then send it back to the Mac, you'll have to change them all back again. You have *all* your fonts for both platforms right? In that case, let me look into the cost of re-licensing all our fonts for another platform.
Or how about, my samba/smb file shares don't have Mac resource forks, so now my Macs are going to splurge Desktop folders all over the windows file shares. That makes organizing files a pain for the windows users, who have no idea what all these Desktop folders are supposed to be.
Re:This is why we need that Martian Nuclear PP
on
Network Blackout
·
· Score: 2, Funny
You're off by a factor of at least 100. The minimum distance between Earth and Mars is about 1,500 million extension cords (assuming 50m cords). Right now the two planets are pretty close, but later we'll need as many as 7,500 million cords, plus a few extra so we can swing the cable over the sun.
Good points. But did you have to use the word "incentivized"? Euch!
How about saying "Cops have no incentive to reduce the amount of crime", or "Cops don't have any incentive to reduce the number of crimes committed" instead?
I get sick and tired of people bashing to US. No we aren't perfect, yes we have a lot of problems that need to be solved. But damn, we can't be perfect
Oooh, diddums. Did someone touch a sore spot? Feeling a bit defensive about the shortcomings of your lovely homeland? I suggest you poke your head up for a second or two and see what's going on in the rest of the world.
Frankly the US press has filled Americans' heads with so much crap about what it means to be American, and so little information about anything else thats happening on this planet that I utterly despair for the idea that Americans have some democratic responsibility for their own government. With a bit less jingoism and a bit more education, you might realize that the US government is not yet the responsible international citizen that most Americans apparently believe it to be.
"The Americans were all for an international space station, until they realized that 'international' doesn't just mean Americans abroad". -- Star Cops
When I heard that IBM four patents in it's countersuit, I thought *only four*?! Immediately I thought of this article. The famous IBM patent infringement shakedown. When you're a big technology company, patents aren't for making money, they're for 'leverage' against unruly competitors wanting to upset the status quo.
Clearly this situation is unacceptable. In order to remedy the situation you need to negotiate with the management of your organization.
As with any negotiations, before you meet you should have a concrete description of (1) what you want, (2) what you can tolerate, and (3) what you cannot tolerate. If the company can only offer you compromises that you cannot tolerate, you need to quit. You should make this clear to the management during your negotiation, so that they know where they stand. Your positions may be stated in terms of number of hours per week (for example can tolerate 50 hrs/wk; cannot tolerate 60 hrs/wk), or you could ask for other benefits - future pay raise, bonuses on completion, company stock.
Probably you will need to communicate through your immediate supervisor in the first case. However you can perhaps escalate the process up to the managers/decision makers, especially if you can band together with other employees who are also being asked to work overtime. In that case you will have to decide your negotiating positions together. This will strengthen your position.
If you get a deal, write it down and get it signed by the management. If you are making a deal to work overtime, make sure that there is a limit on the length of time you are expected to work overtime... since the project undoubtedly will not in fact be completed on schedule.
I recently bought some equipment at CompUSA and only when I got to the register I realized that the advertized price was after the mail-in rebate... in other words I had to pay more than I thought. I figured though that at that point I'd spent so long chosing that I'd go ahead and make the purchase anyway. It turned out that I had about $30 of rebate coupons. When I got home I started filling in the coupons, but stopped to think about it before mailing them in. I came to a startling conclusion, which was that I would rather let them keep the $30 and stay off the mailing lists. The amount of aggravation that having my name on potentially countless mailing lists and receiving catalogue after catalogue for perhaps years on end made it a better deal to give up the money. Of course if someone said 'pay me $30 or I'll put you on a bunch of mailing lists' I sue them for extortion. But based purely on the merit of the two cases, without the moral question of which decision results in the best social consequence, I figured that staying off a bunch of mailing lists is probably worth about $30 bucks to me.
That's rather enlightening information... in the future when someone asks for my address, I shall consider first: are they giving me something in return that I think is worth about $30. If not I shall decline to give my address.
To be fair I think that Tcl championed the embeddable scripting language long before Python came along. At least I don't remember Python being around 10 years ago. One of the original ideas behind Tcl was that it should be embedded in applications like word processors to make them more powerful. You were supposed to be able to bring up a Tcl prompt in your application, and just start customizing. This model leads to the approach of separating mechanism from policy. Mechanism is the low level primitives of your code, and that gets written in a low-level, optimized, compiled language (e.g. C, C++). Policy is how your program works, its interface and tools. That goes in a high level, interpreted, scripting language (e.g. Tcl, perl, Python, etc.) that can make calls on the low level primitives. I guess this is all pretty standard today, but I remember it seeming rather impressive in 1992. I think one of my main complaints with Java is that it doesn't provide a high-level, fast and loose scripting environment suitable for writing policy and interface code.
Anyhoo, not to complicate the argument too much. If Python has taken the embeddable mantle of Tcl, it may be largely because Python embraced OO and threads more completely.
The way to remove the corporate control and bribery of American politicians is not mysterious. The changes that need to be made are well understood by those who are willing to look clearly at the corruption of the current system. Ralph Nader for example has identified eight reforms that would make politicians accountable to the electorate and end the corruption of the current system. He lays them out here.
The only way to end the corruption of our political system is for the citizens to demand an overhaul of the democratic process, including specific reforms:
publicly financed campaigns - political campaigns are public institutions like libraries and schools
instant runoff voting - to remove the incentive to pick the lesser of two evils
open access to TV and radio - to allow dissenting opinions to be heard
proportional representation - to prevent hegemony of the largest minority and make the government a balanced representation of the people
I'm not saying "pay for access" is right, but on the other hand, who should politicians listen to? Someone who controls an industry and affects millions of people (like Microsoft) or Joe L33t who has no perspective beyond his own limited world?
Who should politicians listen too? How about citizens? That is after all who they are trusted to represent. Don't you think that politicians should be paying more attention to the letters they receive from their constituents than to the opinions of well-heeled corporate sponsors? I know that I would want my representatives to pay attention if they received a slew of constituent letters requesting their attention to a particular issue. It is after all the job of representatives to represent, to be the voice of the people in government, not to be bought and sold like some commodity.
My company provides web development services. I would love to switch to Linux. The problem is all my co-workers and clients use Windows software. For our company to start using Linux on the desktop we would need a gradual migration plan, which allows for some desktops to be running Linux and some running Windows. That means that we need interoperable versions of every application for which we might share data or documented processes. Documented processes in this case means how you use the application, including how to set up your application preferences, if that impacts how data will be presented.
When I say interoperable, I mean completely interoperable. Not just 'can read the same file format', but it must implement all the same functions, have the same scripting tools (we use a lot of automation features), read and write the same default format, connect to the same set of back-end data sources, use the same third party plugins.
A short list of the applications for which we would need interoperable versions: Microsoft Word, Excel, Access, Powerpoint Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat Macromedia Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash Quark eXpress The Cisco VPN dial-up client software Internet Explorer (necessary for testing web pages)
I would also need a Psion Revo synchronization program.
Some of these could be run under Windows emulation (Wine) or a virtual O/S layer, but for the applications that I use every day running a completely independent environment within my main desktop sounds like a big hassle.
The problem is that the workers in my company use a lot of windows tools, and we're quite productive. To be worth switching, Linux would have to make us more productive.
This could be a situation where you really don't start to get that bad until you pass like 10 points [...] So it doesn't look like it's that horribly anti-US biased, it just looks like it's tracking a number of things that we don't usually look at in terms of press-freedom.
Why are you trying to defend the U.S's placement on the list? Why not say instead, "The countries placed above us in the list don't enforce certain restrictions on the press that are considered reasonable here."
There's no shame in admitting room for improvement. Even the most restrictive countries will justify their own poor placement by saying that the standards that others use are not well-considered or relevant.
> Aren't corresponding IDE and SCSI drives mechanically identical, with different electronic > interfaces (which could account for the cost difference)?
They could be but they aren't. SCSI drives are generally marketted to the high reliability, high performance, high price server market. IDE drives are marketted to the desktop, low price market. Consequently the mechanical components of most SCSI drives are of higher quality than the similarly spec'd but lower priced IDE counterparts. The cost of the interface electronics is a small percentage of the difference in drive costs. SCSI drives do tend to be more reliable in a similar environment, because they are designed and priced to be so.
> I'm willing to sell Maxtor hard drives with five-year warranties if you're willing to pay me > $300 for each 40GB hard drive.
No thanks. A third party warranty has no value because it creates no financial disincentive to the manufacturer from producing shoddy products. I'm not paying for the warranty in order to get the money when the drive fails, I'm paying it because I know that the manufacturer that offers a longer warranty has a greater incentive to produce reliable products. No one other than the manufacturer can usefully sell a warranty for a product whose cost of failure is greater than its cost of replacement.
> Or, maybe these companies should look into selling their customers extended warranties > with the drive, or maybe even a 3rd party could get into that.
No. Third party warranties are completely different. The point of the warranty isn't that I want my money back when the drive fails. The value of the data on the drive is always greater than the value of the drive. The point is to penalize the manufacturer for producing shoddy goods. It's there to provide a disincentive for manufacturers from reducing costs by reducing product quality. Consumers demand warranties (or should if they had any brains) because its a guarantee that the manufacturer will suffer financial losses in the event that their product has sub-par reliability, a situation which any profit making organization will attempt to avoid. A third party warranty provides no disincentive to the manufacturer and so is of little value to the consumer. Hard drive consumers who don't want to lose their data should demand long warranties.
Slashdot Mirror
Noam Chomsky correctly put it (paraphrasing): You are either for free speech or you are against it. There is no meaningful middle ground. Everyone is for free speech that they agree with. Even Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels agreed with that. The meaningful test is whether you are for speech that you disagree with. Blogger Brian Stokes wants to remove racist blogs. Therefore he is against free speech that he disagrees with; he is against free speech.
... giving the bloggers enough rope to hang themselves. If their opinions are so poisonous, they should be publicly aired so that everyone can see for themselves how pathetic and disgusting they truly are.
Should Google honor his wishes? Clearly they have a right and a reason not to. If you claim to be for free speech you must support their freedom to keep the blogs.
There is a simple rationale why the basic right of free speech has a public benefit in this case
These questions are too hard. Does anyone know of any better Xmas quizzes? How about some that would be good for a mixed UK and US audience?
Peace,
Aleph
As there's a pretty good chance that the industrialized world will have passed peak oil production in the next twenty years, I doubt there'll be any cars flying through the neighbourhoods of anyone reading this site. We'll be doing well to afford a flight on an "ordinary" passenger jet given how much aviation fuel will soon cost.
Argh. I'm sorry if this it nit-picky, but really. I'm so frustrated at the poor writing I see on Slashdot and other sites. Let's all just try a little harder, hmm? With a little bit of work writing good english is not so difficult.
Wanna get rid of the blind spot? Make driving whilst using a cell phone illegal. I swear to god, the number of times I've been almost run-down by some bozo driver spacing out and not looking at the blind spot right in front of their car whilst talking on a cell phone. Well. I can't tell you, but it's a lot. And hands-free phones don't cut it either. It's not the hands that need to pay attention. It's the driver.
That's 'Paddy Wagon' meaning van driven by Irishmen, since in the 1930s many American policemen were Irish, and Paddy is a slang abbreviation for the common Irish name Patrick. But whatever. 'Pattywagon' if it makes you happy.
In my experience saying that Mac's don't operate well within a Windows environment is just a special case of a more general principal ... Diverse heterogeneous environments are more trouble prone and less reliable than homoegenous ones. Any time you introduce to a production environment a new system that does the same things in a different way, you're gonna have headaches.
... Oh! that PNG file was created on a Mac, which uses a different font naming scheme from Windows. If you open it on your computer you gonna have to change all the fonts over. If you save it and then send it back to the Mac, you'll have to change them all back again. You have *all* your fonts for both platforms right? In that case, let me look into the cost of re-licensing all our fonts for another platform.
For me the greatest problems using Macs in a PC environment are not the big things like file sharing but the countless little things, like not being able to move fonts from one computer to another
Or how about, my samba/smb file shares don't have Mac resource forks, so now my Macs are going to splurge Desktop folders all over the windows file shares. That makes organizing files a pain for the windows users, who have no idea what all these Desktop folders are supposed to be.
You're off by a factor of at least 100. The minimum distance between Earth and Mars is about 1,500 million extension cords (assuming 50m cords). Right now the two planets are pretty close, but later we'll need as many as 7,500 million cords, plus a few extra so we can swing the cable over the sun.
> Only people who would even consider option b are computer engineers.
I think what you meant was "only computer engineers would even consider option b".
What you wrote means "all computer engineers would consider option b", which is untrue.
Good points. But did you have to use the word "incentivized"? Euch!
How about saying "Cops have no incentive to reduce the amount of crime", or "Cops don't have any incentive to reduce the number of crimes committed" instead?
That's "oversight" not "oversite".
Oooh, diddums. Did someone touch a sore spot? Feeling a bit defensive about the shortcomings of your lovely homeland? I suggest you poke your head up for a second or two and see what's going on in the rest of the world.
Frankly the US press has filled Americans' heads with so much crap about what it means to be American, and so little information about anything else thats happening on this planet that I utterly despair for the idea that Americans have some democratic responsibility for their own government. With a bit less jingoism and a bit more education, you might realize that the US government is not yet the responsible international citizen that most Americans apparently believe it to be.
"The Americans were all for an international space station, until they realized that 'international' doesn't just mean Americans abroad". -- Star Cops
When I heard that IBM four patents in it's countersuit, I thought *only four*?! Immediately I thought of this article. The famous IBM patent infringement shakedown. When you're a big technology company, patents aren't for making money, they're for 'leverage' against unruly competitors wanting to upset the status quo.
Good heavens, there's still someone on the planet who considers it appropriate to use the word "gay" perjoratively. How very quaint and schoolboyish.
Clearly this situation is unacceptable. In order to remedy the situation you need to negotiate with the management of your organization.
... since the project undoubtedly will not in fact be completed on schedule.
As with any negotiations, before you meet you should have a concrete description of (1) what you want, (2) what you can tolerate, and (3) what you cannot tolerate. If the company can only offer you compromises that you cannot tolerate, you need to quit. You should make this clear to the management during your negotiation, so that they know where they stand. Your positions may be stated in terms of number of hours per week (for example can tolerate 50 hrs/wk; cannot tolerate 60 hrs/wk), or you could ask for other benefits - future pay raise, bonuses on completion, company stock.
Probably you will need to communicate through your immediate supervisor in the first case. However you can perhaps escalate the process up to the managers/decision makers, especially if you can band together with other employees who are also being asked to work overtime. In that case you will have to decide your negotiating positions together. This will strengthen your position.
If you get a deal, write it down and get it signed by the management. If you are making a deal to work overtime, make sure that there is a limit on the length of time you are expected to work overtime
I recently bought some equipment at CompUSA and only when I got to the register I realized that the advertized price was after the mail-in rebate ... in other words I had to pay more than I thought. I figured though that at that point I'd spent so long chosing that I'd go ahead and make the purchase anyway. It turned out that I had about $30 of rebate coupons. When I got home I started filling in the coupons, but stopped to think about it before mailing them in. I came to a startling conclusion, which was that I would rather let them keep the $30 and stay off the mailing lists. The amount of aggravation that having my name on potentially countless mailing lists and receiving catalogue after catalogue for perhaps years on end made it a better deal to give up the money. Of course if someone said 'pay me $30 or I'll put you on a bunch of mailing lists' I sue them for extortion. But based purely on the merit of the two cases, without the moral question of which decision results in the best social consequence, I figured that staying off a bunch of mailing lists is probably worth about $30 bucks to me.
... in the future when someone asks for my address, I shall consider first: are they giving me something in return that I think is worth about $30. If not I shall decline to give my address.
That's rather enlightening information
To be fair I think that Tcl championed the embeddable scripting language long before Python came along. At least I don't remember Python being around 10 years ago. One of the original ideas behind Tcl was that it should be embedded in applications like word processors to make them more powerful. You were supposed to be able to bring up a Tcl prompt in your application, and just start customizing. This model leads to the approach of separating mechanism from policy. Mechanism is the low level primitives of your code, and that gets written in a low-level, optimized, compiled language (e.g. C, C++). Policy is how your program works, its interface and tools. That goes in a high level, interpreted, scripting language (e.g. Tcl, perl, Python, etc.) that can make calls on the low level primitives. I guess this is all pretty standard today, but I remember it seeming rather impressive in 1992. I think one of my main complaints with Java is that it doesn't provide a high-level, fast and loose scripting environment suitable for writing policy and interface code.
Anyhoo, not to complicate the argument too much. If Python has taken the embeddable mantle of Tcl, it may be largely because Python embraced OO and threads more completely.
Who should politicians listen too? How about citizens? That is after all who they are trusted to represent. Don't you think that politicians should be paying more attention to the letters they receive from their constituents than to the opinions of well-heeled corporate sponsors? I know that I would want my representatives to pay attention if they received a slew of constituent letters requesting their attention to a particular issue. It is after all the job of representatives to represent, to be the voice of the people in government, not to be bought and sold like some commodity.
My company provides web development services. I would love to switch to Linux. The problem is all my co-workers and clients use Windows software. For our company to start using Linux on the desktop we would need a gradual migration plan, which allows for some desktops to be running Linux and some running Windows. That means that we need interoperable versions of every application for which we might share data or documented processes. Documented processes in this case means how you use the application, including how to set up your application preferences, if that impacts how data will be presented.
When I say interoperable, I mean completely interoperable. Not just 'can read the same file format', but it must implement all the same functions, have the same scripting tools (we use a lot of automation features), read and write the same default format, connect to the same set of back-end data sources, use the same third party plugins.
A short list of the applications for which we would need interoperable versions:
Microsoft Word, Excel, Access, Powerpoint
Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat
Macromedia Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash
Quark eXpress
The Cisco VPN dial-up client software
Internet Explorer (necessary for testing web pages)
I would also need a Psion Revo synchronization program.
Some of these could be run under Windows emulation (Wine) or a virtual O/S layer, but for the applications that I use every day running a completely independent environment within my main desktop sounds like a big hassle.
The problem is that the workers in my company use a lot of windows tools, and we're quite productive. To be worth switching, Linux would have to make us more productive.
Why are you trying to defend the U.S's placement on the list? Why not say instead, "The countries placed above us in the list don't enforce certain restrictions on the press that are considered reasonable here."
There's no shame in admitting room for improvement. Even the most restrictive countries will justify their own poor placement by saying that the standards that others use are not well-considered or relevant.
> Aren't corresponding IDE and SCSI drives mechanically identical, with different electronic
> interfaces (which could account for the cost difference)?
They could be but they aren't. SCSI drives are generally marketted to the high reliability, high performance, high price server market. IDE drives are marketted to the desktop, low price market. Consequently the mechanical components of most SCSI drives are of higher quality than the similarly spec'd but lower priced IDE counterparts. The cost of the interface electronics is a small percentage of the difference in drive costs. SCSI drives do tend to be more reliable in a similar environment, because they are designed and priced to be so.
> I'm willing to sell Maxtor hard drives with five-year warranties if you're willing to pay me
> $300 for each 40GB hard drive.
No thanks. A third party warranty has no value because it creates no financial disincentive to the manufacturer from producing shoddy products. I'm not paying for the warranty in order to get the money when the drive fails, I'm paying it because I know that the manufacturer that offers a longer warranty has a greater incentive to produce reliable products. No one other than the manufacturer can usefully sell a warranty for a product whose cost of failure is greater than its cost of replacement.
> Or, maybe these companies should look into selling their customers extended warranties
> with the drive, or maybe even a 3rd party could get into that.
No. Third party warranties are completely different. The point of the warranty isn't that I want my money back when the drive fails. The value of the data on the drive is always greater than the value of the drive. The point is to penalize the manufacturer for producing shoddy goods. It's there to provide a disincentive for manufacturers from reducing costs by reducing product quality. Consumers demand warranties (or should if they had any brains) because its a guarantee that the manufacturer will suffer financial losses in the event that their product has sub-par reliability, a situation which any profit making organization will attempt to avoid. A third party warranty provides no disincentive to the manufacturer and so is of little value to the consumer. Hard drive consumers who don't want to lose their data should demand long warranties.