Directors in many companies cast about 95% of the votes. Either individual shareholders don't bother to vote, or the fine print lets Directors vote unvoted shares, or any number of other dodges. As someone who owns some stock, I've watched these machinations for decades.
The title was also very misleading. It should have been: Google shareholders reject ANTI-censorship proposal.
The plain language version of what happened is that the Board of Directors wants to keep operating in profitable China. Since they effectively control the voting process, they've said they'll use as much censorship as it takes to do that.
The OpenMoko folks have a prototype Linux phone out to developers in some kind of alpha testing phase. They're planning a release to the rest of us some time in November(?) Be nice if someone with Sun's resources worked *with* the rest of the open source crowd. Or is this Sun thing so much better there was no point? Anyone know how they compare?
Uh, not to be a jerk about this or anything, but without solar power I'd be dead in a few days. Of course I use solar power. That choice gets the comment one of my English teachers wrote over all my stuff: "Awk. Rephrase."
As with the English teacher, I have no idea how to put it better.
To answer the actual question, I'm with the crowd: yes, I'd really want to use solar power in the sense that the poll means it.
SoundExchange (the RIAA) considers any digital performance of a song as falling under their compulsory license
Why stop at digital performances? Radio signals, including digital ones, travel forever. Charge the aliens on Gliese 581. Charge future generations who *may* build a faster than light ship, and *may* get ahead of the signal, and *may* listen to the thing all over again.
Yup. Me too. Took over four years (4!) for me to get just one account straightened out with Pay"pal". I'm not sure they ever did, actually. I stopped checking after the last time the vampire died because it bothered me too much to see the damn thing back at the old stand all the time.
Okay, time to come out of the closet. The hardware is a Sharp MP30 laptop and came with Linux pre-installed. The Emperor Linux people are the ones who made everything work (2 years ago, no less, when it was all pretty cutting edge). The kernel is even called "empkernel"-something-something. It's worked exactly as advertised, but those Emperor Linux laptops aren't cheap. Gorgeous, light, and the whole nine yards, but not cheap. Hence the need to pace myself.;-}
Graphics cards usually don't require a particular driver until you startup your X server. Interesting you should say that. That's exactly where the boot process craps out whenever I try any other distro.
I keep telling myself that I'm spending more time worrying about it than it would take me to just carefully follow directions and try some of the stuff that feels so adventurous. And who knows, one of these days I just may get off my procrastinating duff and do it.
Seconded! I also don't get the logic: Spam is a nuisance. It forces people to work to get rid of it. That makes the people a nuisance. Dump on the people.
I feel for CSRs. They get to listen to people after the bad music, company ads, and all the other drivel. By that time, I'm already right round the bend. And I start out irritated because I wouldn't be calling if there was no problem. I can't even tune the drivel out. I hear a voice break into the bad music, I think "Ah!" and then it's some perky twit saying, "Visit our website at jelloforbrains.com! There's a big support section! It answers your questions! See new features! Order new products! Jelloforbrains.com!"
Apparently, it never occurs to the jelloheads who put these things together that you've just come off an extremely frustrating couple of hours on a badly designed website.
By the time the poor first-line CSR gets someone like me, I'm loaded for bear and ready to kill. I try to be polite. Honest, I do. At the other end, it probably feels like a merry-go-round on a minefield.
So here's an idea for corporations: STOP WASTING MY TIME. If you have to put me on hold, just send out a slow, pleasant, monotone beep every ten seconds or so to let me know the connection is working. No music, no ads, no drivel. Let me get on with my life till the rep shows up.
If there's some useful information you can put at the beginning, by all means do it before the slow beep starts. But remember, I'm talking about useful to *me*, not you. For instance, the "real" support requests probably center around real faults in the product, and (hopefully!) that's a limited list. The top three real issues could be enumerated, possibly with extensions to go to a pool of CSRs used to dealing with that issue.
I know. Users are idiots and the system will never work. People will just push buttons. Sure, I've done it on occasion myself in fits of berserk fury. The reason it happens is because the goddamn choices are goddamn useless. Psych 101 will tell you that people tend to behave according to other people's expectations of them. So, just maybe, if companies stopped treating users like idiots, at least some of them would stop behaving that way. If it worked on only 25%, that would still save a lot of money.
ATI Radeon Mobility 7500. I may be wrong on this, but I have the impression that custom drivers were written for some of the hardware I've got and the kernel was compiled with those modules. Does that make any sense? I don't know if I'm saying it right. What I mean is that I have the impression everything depends on everything, and if I pull one thread, the whole thing might unravel.
Yeah, I know FC3 is no longer supported. (Why do you think I read/. ? I have to find these things out somewhere!) I've tried live CDs of FCsomething (don't remember which one) and CentOS, none of which would deal with my hardware. So, I'd probably be kind of dumb to set up automatic updates, no? Or are they smart enough not to touch things that would break? I've used yum (command line), and synaptics+apt-get, but the real problem, as folks have pointed out, is that FC3 and its repositories are dead letters at this point.
I *think* my problem is mainly nonstandard video/graphics stuff, but figuring out drivers, dealing with modules, and recompiling kernels freaks me right out. The good news is that -- crosses fingers hopefully -- so far everything works, and next year there's a new laptop in the budget.
I've actually been using Kubuntu on another computer for a while now (since late Breezy days), which is the reason I wish I could get it running on my main machine. I'm waiting for Feisty with bated breath in the hope that it might work on my hardware. Thanks for the link to scientificlinux. Looks interesting. Thanks too for the command line tips. Useful. I do have madwifi on my system. So now I'm wondering how vulnerable I really am. In order to hack into the wireless, wouldn't the hacker need to be within wireless range? I live in a working class neighborhood with lots of 60" plasma displays for watching football, and no other computers. (We've got six, or is it seven?, to even up the balance.)
Um, "Joe Linux" here, chiming in. I run Fedora, which was pre-installed on oddball hardware. If Fedora has automatic updates like Ubuntu, and if they just work, I sure as hell haven't heard about them. The Fedora repository is about 10% of the way to useful. 15%, when I'm feeling charitable. I'm on Core 3 because I haven't found a distro that can deal with my system, and, since I'm a biology geek not a computer geek, I have no idea what to do or the time to spend finding out.
It gets worse. I don't even know if I'm running a madwifi driver or not. I looked at the running processes, but there's nothing obvious there. I don't know if madwifi is called something else in the process list. I do know I have a Atheros chip.
The point I'm trying to make is more than just displaying ignorance. The point is that it may be hard for those of you who are close to the subject to realize just how opaque it is to those of us who aren't. If you're in the know, share their knowledge. It's kind of frustrating, from my perspective, to hear, "It's all automatic, and if it's not, you're just too hopeless to deal with."
(All that said, you're quite right that when updates are applied automatically and effectively, both the clueless and the clued benefit. That's why I'm getting my next system with Ubuntu on it!)
Formally known as "argumentum ad autoritatem" or argument based on authority. In this case, the school is saying Wikipedia has no authority, therefore all it's information is drivel. This is logically equivalent to saying "Einstein is an authority, therefore what he has to say about restaurant management is necessarily correct."
The only logically valid approach is to argue based on the evidence, in other words by evaluating any given article in Wikipedia on its own merits. Of course, that would involve some actual thinking and scholarship, which the school principal is evidently not interested in.
Other people have commented brilliantly on the censorship irony, so I won't even get started on that, but, I mean, Jeeeeeeeeee-sus.
Yeah. That worries me too. The future doesn't look much brighter either. The Buntus have already had a "Hoary Hedgehog" release. So this next one will be, what? Hyper? Looking down the line, I see Impish Iguana, Jaunty Jellyfish, Keen Katydid, Lucid Loon, and God only knows what further blows to my self-image. My lifelong quest for respectability, which started after all the kids on the playground laughed at my pocket protector, will go forever unfulfilled.
Be nice if it was just the first step to implementing all that stuff. You know: no poverty, competent government, no wars (except with Klingons and such, of course).
Bug us about piracy, they could say, and we'll throw the government's weight behind Linux and OSS. Blackmail, of a sort, but I wonder how long it would take for Microsoft's minions to swarm all over Washington DC, insisting everyone leave China alone?
I like this idea. One of the really neat things about Slashdot is being able to set you browsing level. I set mine high, so I miss lots of good stuff (including my own priceless contributions) but I don't have to slog through a bunch of highschoolers getting their jollies either. Blogs without lots of readers can't employ Slashdot's system entirely, since it relies on the wisdom of crowds, but just downgrading anonymous comments would solve the problem of having to read the occasional real drivel. And it would do it without censorship.
That's right. They are. And all four hours you're flying over land (it can be more, say from Seattle to Rio), they can be yapping. You may be a patient sort, but I'd get homicidal a lot faster than four hours.
I'd turn into a crowd of one if I had to listen to someone yapping for hours on the 6 to >10 hour flights I'm usually on. Some people can yell about nothing forEVER.
Given that the yelling is caused by a lack of sidetone, shouldn't there be an easy technical fix? Just put in a circuit that amplifies the caller's voice, and presumably they'd quiet right down. Why haven't the cell phone makers done this?
- the peptide has to be injected within hours of -- or even before -- the infection. That means it's only likely to be useful in a hospital setting.
- anything that boosts immune response in a non-specific way runs the risk of causing over-reaction, at least in some people. (Think about the six healthy volunteers in England who nearly died because of an unexpected immune response to the drug they were testing.) Again, that means it'll likely only be usable in a closely supervised, hospital setting.
- since the publication is appearing in one of the Nature journals, you can be pretty sure this does exactly what it says it does, and really is a breakthrough for the particular immune response in question.
- re the commenter earlier who said there was no evidence of antibiotic resistance appearing except due to hospital misuse: total claptrap. Just one example: antibiotic resistance has been documented developing in chickens and cattle due to antibiotics in the feed. Those bacteria can pass to humans. Sometimes they cause symptoms, sometimes they don't. But even when they don't, bacteria are capable of passing bits of DNA back and forth, and genes for antibiotic resistance are -- for obvious reasons -- among the likeliest to persist in bacterial populations. So, if you eat a tainted hamburger, say, or spinach, the disease-causing bacteria on that item can mix it up with the other bacteria in your gut, and there you are. Fun, huh?
Slashdot Mirror
Directors in many companies cast about 95% of the votes. Either individual shareholders don't bother to vote, or the fine print lets Directors vote unvoted shares, or any number of other dodges. As someone who owns some stock, I've watched these machinations for decades.
The title was also very misleading. It should have been: Google shareholders reject ANTI-censorship proposal.
The plain language version of what happened is that the Board of Directors wants to keep operating in profitable China. Since they effectively control the voting process, they've said they'll use as much censorship as it takes to do that.
Hmph. Me too. I guess they expect me to actually click on the links and figure it out. Sheesh.
The OpenMoko folks have a prototype Linux phone out to developers in some kind of alpha testing phase. They're planning a release to the rest of us some time in November(?) Be nice if someone with Sun's resources worked *with* the rest of the open source crowd. Or is this Sun thing so much better there was no point? Anyone know how they compare?
Uh, not to be a jerk about this or anything, but without solar power I'd be dead in a few days. Of course I use solar power. That choice gets the comment one of my English teachers wrote over all my stuff: "Awk. Rephrase."
As with the English teacher, I have no idea how to put it better.
To answer the actual question, I'm with the crowd: yes, I'd really want to use solar power in the sense that the poll means it.
always persecute the *same* thing. (Unmatched socks coming out of the dryer, when MATCHED ONES WENT IN.) Makes everything much simpler.
SoundExchange (the RIAA) considers any digital performance of a song as falling under their compulsory license
Why stop at digital performances? Radio signals, including digital ones, travel forever. Charge the aliens on Gliese 581. Charge future generations who *may* build a faster than light ship, and *may* get ahead of the signal, and *may* listen to the thing all over again.
Can't have that. It would be stealing.
Yup. Me too. Took over four years (4!) for me to get just one account straightened out with Pay"pal". I'm not sure they ever did, actually. I stopped checking after the last time the vampire died because it bothered me too much to see the damn thing back at the old stand all the time.
I like your idea of choices even better. Me, I'd listen to the top 10 issues, and then go for silence.
Okay, time to come out of the closet. The hardware is a Sharp MP30 laptop and came with Linux pre-installed. The Emperor Linux people are the ones who made everything work (2 years ago, no less, when it was all pretty cutting edge). The kernel is even called "empkernel"-something-something. It's worked exactly as advertised, but those Emperor Linux laptops aren't cheap. Gorgeous, light, and the whole nine yards, but not cheap. Hence the need to pace myself. ;-}
Graphics cards usually don't require a particular driver until you startup your X server. Interesting you should say that. That's exactly where the boot process craps out whenever I try any other distro.
I keep telling myself that I'm spending more time worrying about it than it would take me to just carefully follow directions and try some of the stuff that feels so adventurous. And who knows, one of these days I just may get off my procrastinating duff and do it.
Seconded! I also don't get the logic: Spam is a nuisance. It forces people to work to get rid of it. That makes the people a nuisance. Dump on the people.
Judges with spam-for-brains.
I feel for CSRs. They get to listen to people after the bad music, company ads, and all the other drivel. By that time, I'm already right round the bend. And I start out irritated because I wouldn't be calling if there was no problem. I can't even tune the drivel out. I hear a voice break into the bad music, I think "Ah!" and then it's some perky twit saying, "Visit our website at jelloforbrains.com! There's a big support section! It answers your questions! See new features! Order new products! Jelloforbrains.com!"
Apparently, it never occurs to the jelloheads who put these things together that you've just come off an extremely frustrating couple of hours on a badly designed website.
By the time the poor first-line CSR gets someone like me, I'm loaded for bear and ready to kill. I try to be polite. Honest, I do. At the other end, it probably feels like a merry-go-round on a minefield.
So here's an idea for corporations: STOP WASTING MY TIME. If you have to put me on hold, just send out a slow, pleasant, monotone beep every ten seconds or so to let me know the connection is working. No music, no ads, no drivel. Let me get on with my life till the rep shows up.
If there's some useful information you can put at the beginning, by all means do it before the slow beep starts. But remember, I'm talking about useful to *me*, not you. For instance, the "real" support requests probably center around real faults in the product, and (hopefully!) that's a limited list. The top three real issues could be enumerated, possibly with extensions to go to a pool of CSRs used to dealing with that issue.
I know. Users are idiots and the system will never work. People will just push buttons. Sure, I've done it on occasion myself in fits of berserk fury. The reason it happens is because the goddamn choices are goddamn useless. Psych 101 will tell you that people tend to behave according to other people's expectations of them. So, just maybe, if companies stopped treating users like idiots, at least some of them would stop behaving that way. If it worked on only 25%, that would still save a lot of money.
ATI Radeon Mobility 7500. I may be wrong on this, but I have the impression that custom drivers were written for some of the hardware I've got and the kernel was compiled with those modules. Does that make any sense? I don't know if I'm saying it right. What I mean is that I have the impression everything depends on everything, and if I pull one thread, the whole thing might unravel.
Yeah, I know FC3 is no longer supported. (Why do you think I read /. ? I have to find these things out somewhere!) I've tried live CDs of FCsomething (don't remember which one) and CentOS, none of which would deal with my hardware. So, I'd probably be kind of dumb to set up automatic updates, no? Or are they smart enough not to touch things that would break? I've used yum (command line), and synaptics+apt-get, but the real problem, as folks have pointed out, is that FC3 and its repositories are dead letters at this point.
I *think* my problem is mainly nonstandard video/graphics stuff, but figuring out drivers, dealing with modules, and recompiling kernels freaks me right out. The good news is that -- crosses fingers hopefully -- so far everything works, and next year there's a new laptop in the budget.
I've actually been using Kubuntu on another computer for a while now (since late Breezy days), which is the reason I wish I could get it running on my main machine. I'm waiting for Feisty with bated breath in the hope that it might work on my hardware. Thanks for the link to scientificlinux. Looks interesting. Thanks too for the command line tips. Useful. I do have madwifi on my system. So now I'm wondering how vulnerable I really am. In order to hack into the wireless, wouldn't the hacker need to be within wireless range? I live in a working class neighborhood with lots of 60" plasma displays for watching football, and no other computers. (We've got six, or is it seven?, to even up the balance.)
It's about time this got said! I have a dream ... where we all stop pigeonholing each other ....
Um, "Joe Linux" here, chiming in. I run Fedora, which was pre-installed on oddball hardware. If Fedora has automatic updates like Ubuntu, and if they just work, I sure as hell haven't heard about them. The Fedora repository is about 10% of the way to useful. 15%, when I'm feeling charitable. I'm on Core 3 because I haven't found a distro that can deal with my system, and, since I'm a biology geek not a computer geek, I have no idea what to do or the time to spend finding out.
It gets worse. I don't even know if I'm running a madwifi driver or not. I looked at the running processes, but there's nothing obvious there. I don't know if madwifi is called something else in the process list. I do know I have a Atheros chip.
The point I'm trying to make is more than just displaying ignorance. The point is that it may be hard for those of you who are close to the subject to realize just how opaque it is to those of us who aren't. If you're in the know, share their knowledge. It's kind of frustrating, from my perspective, to hear, "It's all automatic, and if it's not, you're just too hopeless to deal with."
(All that said, you're quite right that when updates are applied automatically and effectively, both the clueless and the clued benefit. That's why I'm getting my next system with Ubuntu on it!)
Formally known as "argumentum ad autoritatem" or argument based on authority. In this case, the school is saying Wikipedia has no authority, therefore all it's information is drivel. This is logically equivalent to saying "Einstein is an authority, therefore what he has to say about restaurant management is necessarily correct."
The only logically valid approach is to argue based on the evidence, in other words by evaluating any given article in Wikipedia on its own merits. Of course, that would involve some actual thinking and scholarship, which the school principal is evidently not interested in.
Other people have commented brilliantly on the censorship irony, so I won't even get started on that, but, I mean, Jeeeeeeeeee-sus.
Yeah. That worries me too. The future doesn't look much brighter either. The Buntus have already had a "Hoary Hedgehog" release. So this next one will be, what? Hyper? Looking down the line, I see Impish Iguana, Jaunty Jellyfish, Keen Katydid, Lucid Loon, and God only knows what further blows to my self-image. My lifelong quest for respectability, which started after all the kids on the playground laughed at my pocket protector, will go forever unfulfilled.
Be nice if it was just the first step to implementing all that stuff. You know: no poverty, competent government, no wars (except with Klingons and such, of course).
Bug us about piracy, they could say, and we'll throw the government's weight behind Linux and OSS. Blackmail, of a sort, but I wonder how long it would take for Microsoft's minions to swarm all over Washington DC, insisting everyone leave China alone?
I like this idea. One of the really neat things about Slashdot is being able to set you browsing level. I set mine high, so I miss lots of good stuff (including my own priceless contributions) but I don't have to slog through a bunch of highschoolers getting their jollies either. Blogs without lots of readers can't employ Slashdot's system entirely, since it relies on the wisdom of crowds, but just downgrading anonymous comments would solve the problem of having to read the occasional real drivel. And it would do it without censorship.
Yeah. I'll bet all the pessimists are right. Crap.
That's right. They are. And all four hours you're flying over land (it can be more, say from Seattle to Rio), they can be yapping. You may be a patient sort, but I'd get homicidal a lot faster than four hours.
I'd turn into a crowd of one if I had to listen to someone yapping for hours on the 6 to >10 hour flights I'm usually on. Some people can yell about nothing forEVER.
Given that the yelling is caused by a lack of sidetone, shouldn't there be an easy technical fix? Just put in a circuit that amplifies the caller's voice, and presumably they'd quiet right down. Why haven't the cell phone makers done this?
They'll be REALLY pissed when the meter runs backward, while we're still on the grid, and THET have to pay US. I can't wait.
- the peptide has to be injected within hours of -- or even before -- the infection. That means it's only likely to be useful in a hospital setting.
- anything that boosts immune response in a non-specific way runs the risk of causing over-reaction, at least in some people. (Think about the six healthy volunteers in England who nearly died because of an unexpected immune response to the drug they were testing.) Again, that means it'll likely only be usable in a closely supervised, hospital setting.
- since the publication is appearing in one of the Nature journals, you can be pretty sure this does exactly what it says it does, and really is a breakthrough for the particular immune response in question.
- re the commenter earlier who said there was no evidence of antibiotic resistance appearing except due to hospital misuse: total claptrap. Just one example: antibiotic resistance has been documented developing in chickens and cattle due to antibiotics in the feed. Those bacteria can pass to humans. Sometimes they cause symptoms, sometimes they don't. But even when they don't, bacteria are capable of passing bits of DNA back and forth, and genes for antibiotic resistance are -- for obvious reasons -- among the likeliest to persist in bacterial populations. So, if you eat a tainted hamburger, say, or spinach, the disease-causing bacteria on that item can mix it up with the other bacteria in your gut, and there you are. Fun, huh?