Slashdot Mirror

How long until they figure out why Microsoft keeps kicking their collective asses?

(Btw, the answer is that providing an operating system for non-technical home users requires an extensive level of deal-making, coordination, and support, AND informing the public that your product exists. If you make one software package that has all of this taken care of, and it can be legally, openly copied, all investment in clearing those hurdles is wasted. That is why the FOSS community has failed to get its collective act together even to provide an option that qualifies as a competitor. No copyright, no funds to say to the world, HEY, WE EXIST, LOOK HOW AWESOME WE ARE compared to Windows, and look, we can do all your stuff. You know, the kind of thing that serious competitors like Apple do. But of course, I don't expect anyone to listen to me, cause i'm teh evilzorz.)

What the FUCK happened to the layout of the discussions? Hackers?

Troll accounts are extinct for a reason - they did not survive the onslaught of downmods. I never understood a discursive reason for preservation of a particular account with insightful comment ratios in the hundredths (like yours, for example). Just think what would be signal/noise impact of your account's karma trashing...

There might be other reasons to preserve certain accounts (point, laugh, etc.) but if you think only about useful discussions, there is no need to preserve accounts that have been moderated into oblivion.

IMHO, the benefits would be too concentrated on preservation of an individual account instead of perservation of the value of the slashdot community as a whole.

And if those troll accounts require too much deliberate upkeep from good-guy moderators, why bother? Let it go. We can thrive on other websites if we let the wrong accounts get trashed.

If you account cannot stand downmodding, let it go. Mature, or stop flagrantly trolling.

"Trolls" are overrated.

Computer viruses being redesigned to handle one known precaution against them, is indeed an example of evolution of a meme, Dawkins's generalization of the concept of a gene. Evolution does not merely work across self-replicating amino acid chains.

Thanks for making my point for me. People who tell the Linux community what it really needs to hear, get punished. Everyone with valuable insights gets the message: shut up. Just shut up. Even if you apologize for, god forbid, getting angry when you can't get into your computer despite extensive precautions. You're a TERRORIST for talking about it in the first place.

Good job, drone. You are doing what you're supposed to. Keep quiet about problems. Don't tell potential users what they need to hear. Don't let anyone know about the risk of melting your data. Don't help form better install instructions. Don't make Linux accessible. Just shut up.

I'm going to send you your cookie.

As for the name? Look, it's a name. An anonymous slashdot handle. They don't actually mean anything. I still use the same AIM name that I did ~ten years ago, which I picked based on the name of a Texas politician, whom no one cares about anymore. So what? So what if a handle represents a snapshot of a brief period of time with no significance anymore? Why change my name and take on an additional user ID digit, just because it offends some idiots?

How hard is it to sit down and run a simple test like the (excellent) one this guy did with his girlfriend for every release? ...Again, there is no logical reason why this hasn't been implemented before. The only explanation is therefore stupidity on the part of the developers The problem is also that when people like me do give you feedback, which shows you the ACTUAL NEWCOMER PERSPECTIVE, we get visciously modded down until we can't even respond.

And to pre-empt some replies: no, having a Live CD wouldn't help, because the Live CD was the install CD at the time (or so half of them say), so I had bootable media -- I just didn't take 50 unlisted precautions, just several unlisted ones (like trying to confine the install to a secondary hard drive which becomes pointless when it's HIGHLY RECOMMENDED that I install a flaky bootloader even though the hard drive is too big for it).

How hard can it possibly be to walk through the install process/instructions and check that it at least tells them to take a few precautions so they can be rescued in the case of failure? Notice the guy didn't even *bother* having his girlfriend try the install itself -- you know, the one thing that kept me from becoming a convert and bringing 10 other people with me and giving Linux that much more of a userbase?

So in 28 years, I can be like RMS? Yipeeeeee!

Your post advocates a/n:

( ) text-recognition- ( ) object-recognition- ( ) word-problem- (x) registration-

based test for keeping out spambots. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work:

( ) It would force users to strain too hard to pass.
( ) Most humans wouldn't pass.
( ) It can be farmed out to India.
( ) It would violate the ADA or accessibility standards.
( ) It requires immediate cooperation from everyone.
(x) It doesn't actually differentiate humans from spammers.

Specifically, your plan fails to account for:

( ) The inability of humans to distinguish across abitrarily-small differences.
( ) Non-native speakers trying to use the site.
( ) Requirement to continually update the database.
( ) This recent advance in AI: _______
( ) The possibility of someone passing the test questions right on down to a human wanting access to a different restricted area.
(x) Botnets with more computational power than the world's top ten supercomputers put together.

Additionally, the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Why should I have to learn esoteric cultural knowledge to make a post?
( ) Why should I have to give you my email address to post?
(x) Why should we have to go along with your registration system?
( ) Blurry images suck.

Finally, here is what I think of you:

(x) Nice try, but probably won't work.
( ) dddod dydodud dldidkded drdedadddidndgd dtdhdidsd,d dadsdsdhdodlded?

They won't allow that one until at least 1 million Japanese agree to start pronouncing the final vowel sound in "desu".

And how did the West get repaid for taking that stance and helping to liberate China? A fair point, but remember, China =/= mainland China. There's another "China" that we know as "Taiwan", and *that* China is quite thankful that the US saved their butts -- just ask anyone old enough to have parents in WWII, or lived in WWII. Their diplomatic policies are faithful to that stance.

Btw, I hate life, even more than I hate Breezy Badger.

What about the fact THAT I WOULDN'T HAVE BEEN LOCKED OUT OF MY COMPUTER IN THE FIRST PLACE if I hadn't followed UBUNTU'S instruction to put grub on my PRIMARY HARD DRIVE'S mbr? Remember? How that was HIGHLY RECOMMENDED? Even though the whole point of installing to a secondary hard drive was to be able to get to Windows despite an Ubuntu install failure?

Can I at least blame *that* on Ubuntu? You know ... vindicating 2 years of whining?

Great! Now, I want you to fill in the blank here.

The newbies you expect to install Ubuntu are supposed to discover the "trivial" fix for this problem are supposed to have the appropriate tools to do it and find out how to do it, by _______________.

Oh, and real quick, point to where the January '06 install instructions say to have the tools you think I'd need.

And for the record, you can always use a windows boot disk or cd and either use fdisk with the /mbr switch, or the recovery console to fix the master bot record. I've had to do it a few times. It used to happen a lot more frequently back in the LILO days. Great!

Now, please list for me:

--Where the install instructions in January '06 (or now) say to have those things ready, and drives capable of using them. (Not all people have floppy disk drives.)
--Where the install instructions in January '06 (or now) explain to do this in the situation I had.
--Why the hell newbies are supposed to know that.
--Why no one in the forum mentioned that.

Oh, that info wasn't listed in the install instructions? And it still isn't?

And I still haven't gotten a gold-plated apology?

Hm, I seem to have no problem apologizing for rudeness, yet all the psychoanalysts can't seem to admit any errors on their part whatsoever. Funny how that works out.

Read the journal, read the links.

-Followed install instructions EXACTLY AS WRITTEN.
-That included DISABLING THE SAFETY PRECAUTION I planned to use, namely, only changing the secondary hard drives so that no matter what, I could get into Windows.
-Much much later others told me it happened because the secondary hard drive was too large, which the install process had to have known, and which nothing I could have done *BASED ON THE INFORMATION GIVEN* would have changed that.
-Failed attempts at rationalizing why it was completely my fault include:

--I didn't exercise due care. (Except for having a secondard computer on hand, setting aside a few days when I wouldn't need the computer, only installing the OS to secondary hard drives so I'd always be able to access windows, reading all install instructions posted, googling for extra info.)
--I went into some fancy menu and messed with stuff. (Yeah, menus I didn't know existed...)
--The burn failed. (Nope, checked that.)
--The download failed. (HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ignoring the checksum for a moment, you have to actually believe somehow, that every single file I have ever downloaded was without any error whatsoever, but somehow, when I downloaded this specific file, the download erred in just *precisely* the right way to make EVERYTHING go exactly as it is supposed to ... except a few bits in a bootloader.)
--You didn't take [precaution mentioned nowhere]. (It if's an OS for newbies, why aren't those precautions listed? How much expertise do you expect newbies to have?)

spun: First, ditch the whiny tone.

I probably did exactly what you did, "clicking" (or hitting return or whatever) through all the screens. The difference is just that you didn't get GRUB error 25 at State 1.5.

Put simply, you got lucky. Not getting error 25 in your cases, is not the same as "no one gets error 25 and they're stupid if they do even though I wouldn't have known what to do to fix it or regain access to the machine".

Hey, I was convinced to install it. Unfortunately, I was also convinced (by that HIGH RECOMMENDATION) to unnecessarily put GRUB over the primary HD's MBR, instead of just the secondary hard drive that Ubuntu was installed to, making the failure cascade to my entire system, and locking me out of it.

Yes, I was a dick to the forum. Doesn't mean the install CD/instructions combination are in order.

Hm, can I still say "I just torrent all my stuff" whenever someone tries to provoke a fruitful discussion of pricing and distribution models for digital works?

I think that's the point of rotating the images. At least it adds the difficulty of having to check a bunch of rotations first.

Then they'll add squiggles, so you'll have to do a Monte Carlo weighted scattershot sample of pixels on various rotations, then they'll increase the picture database, then they'll have more spammers working on it...

I think we need to put together a "your post advocates ..." form for CAPTCHAs. I'll kick it off. Add entries as desired.

Your post advocates a/n:

( ) text-recognition- ( ) object-recognition ( ) word-problem- ( ) registration-

based test for keeping out spambots. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work:

( ) It would force users to strain too hard to pass.
( ) Most humans wouldn't pass.
( ) It can be farmed out to India.
( ) It would violate the ADA or accessibility standards.

Specifically, your plan fails to account for:

( ) The inability of humans to distinguish across abitrarily-small differences.
( ) Non-native speakers trying to use the forum.
( ) Requirement to continually update the database.
( ) This recent advance in AI: _______
( ) The possibility of someone passing the test questions right on down to a human wanting access to a different restricted area.
( ) Botnets with more computational power than the world's top ten supercomputers put together.

Additionally, the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Why should I have to learn esoteric cultural knowledge to make a post?
( ) Why should I have to give you my email address to post?
( ) Blurry images suck.

Finally, here is what I think of you:

( ) Nice try, but probably won't work.
( ) dddod dydodud dldidkded drdedadddidndgd dtdhdidsd,d dadsdsdhdodlded?

The whole point of this exercise has been to show that, within the contract based, libertarian, free market system, people can create a system that is just as restrictive as any other, and therefore libertarianism fails in its attempt at creating or expanding human freedom. Aw, MAN, we have yet ANOTHER abuse of the term "therefore".

A direct democracy can start up the gas chambers. A dictatorship or monarchy can dictate precisely those laws that you do deem to create/expand human freedom. It's just not very likely. The question is, which is more likely to do so, and if this is your analysis, it fails, because you just admitted that the likelihood hinges on whether people will attach, and libertarian courts will recognize, such long-term, undying, restrictive cessions of rights.

I am not claiming any kind of moral high ground, HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Anyone can create a duplicate of our system within a libertarian framework in such a way that no one can have any moral objection to it. Sure, and in that case no libertarian would object to it, and with good reason: in that specific context, it would be a pareto-improvement (ultra-complicated term beyond your ability for "some win, no one loses"), whereas no actual historical occurance of such was.

As for labor laws,...there is no valid moral argument that it is wrong or oppressive. Sure there is: the one you just made in the context of land:

-You accept that I have the right not to employ anyone.
-You accept that in doing so, I am basically telling some poor soul to go fuck himself, and that is totally, 100% okay, 100% spun-endorsed.
-You accept that I have the right to hire someone, whilst attaching a whole host of so-called "bennies".
-You *do not accept* that I have the right to hire some with a *low* level of so-called "bennies.

Yet that last one is superior, from every immediate party's perspective, to something you already do accept!

The majority have agreed that we should have labor laws, and thus we do. If you want to try to change them, fine. If you want to start your own country where there are none, fine. I wouldn't live there, and I wouldn't transact business with a place like that, but maybe someone would. The majority have agreed that we should have Nuremburg Laws, and thus we do. If you want to try to change them, fine. If you want to start your own country where there are none, fine. I wouldn't live there, and I wouldn't transact business with a place like that, but maybe someone would.

The Jews never agreed to anything the Nazis did, so once again, your analogy fails miserably. Sure they did, under your expansive definition of what counts as "agreeing".

Alright, cool, now you're back to the first position. Now your angle is, I have to accept, without legitimate complaint, the things I *agreed to* by buying the land, which means that at one point some owner, somewhere, inserted the "pay taxes, blah blah blah" condition. Aha! So the government DID at one point own the land and put these restrictions.

But ... wait, now golly, I'm confused, you already said that's not your position.

So, let's see, when I buy land, I have to adhere to what I agreed to. Check. So, I agreed to obey the government. Check. So at some point, someone inserted the "hey, you gotta obey the government" condition before selling. Check. And that was ... the government? No. Hm, guess we're stuck.

But one thing you're SURE on is that if someone has a right not to do X (like, I don't know, sell his land), then by golly he has the right to attach any condition before agreeing to do X, and whoever he contracts with, has to adhere to it.

Hey ... wait a second ... everyone has the right not to become an employer! Right??? So ... OMG! That means you've dropped all support of labor laws! Because if I have the right not to employ you, that means I have the right to employ you on the condition that you:

-Don't join a union.
-Don't get minimum wage.
-Don't get health insurance benefits (or "bennies" as people with your grade of brain call them).

But ... I thought you *did* support labor laws.

Btw, it's interesting that you mock my morality as childish (almost as interesting as how you managed to drop the normal, "but I'm not talking about morality [just something isomorphic to it]!" line) considering that you feel the same way about certain Jews who one day didn't like the terms of the land they had OMG AGREED TO when they bought or rented...

(I know, I know, "Godwin's Law" ... but he has to support that to maintain consistency.)

Why don't you stick to the sophomore girls?

Okay, I apologize for attributing more consistency to your position than there actually was. Your argument was that owners of land have the right to attach restrictions to its sale, and people don't have the right to unilaterally change those restrictions (or complain about them) once they buy the land; therefore, when people buy land in the US, they don't have the right to unilaterally change its restrictions (or complain).

I originally assumed (because this would be the most consistent and defensible) that your "therefore" was because the government *also* "owned the land" in a sense. However, now you deny this. So, the only similarity left was that both buyers (of the bizarre cat house, or of land in the US) "knew the restrictions when buying".

But so what? This still falls prey to the argument I made before (known as a "reductio" and here, used properly by me and predictably misunderstood by you) that this would apply just the same to buying land in a high-crime area. Just as someone "knew in advance" the cat-care restrictions, and "knew in advance" the US taxes in advance, one also "knew in advance" that there was crime in the ghetto where they bought the land.

Therefore, by your ridiculous reasoning, I don't have the right to complain about the level of crime in the ghetto (even and especially if I fall victim to it!), nor unilaterally try to reduce it. All because -- hey, precisely like in the other cases, because this is the only similarity between all three, and between the two you initially claimed were analogous -- I "knew in advance" what land there was like.

But hey, I guess I deserve this, because I "knew what I was getting into" by responding to trolls who present bizarre, rarely-used arguments mainly useful for dazzling sophomore girls long enough to bed them.

I never said you don't have the right to complain, of course you can! What you can't do is unilaterally change the rules, or claim some kind of moral right to have things be different just because you want it that way.

Yep, exactly, you don't have the moral right to a crime-free ghetto.

Because I was talking about stipulations placed on the land by the original owner, and you are talking about a circumstance external to the owner.

Yep, you argued that the government, as the original owner, has the right to place those restrictions, while others don't consider the government to be the original owner, and don't agree it meets the conditions you claimed suffice for it to be the original owner, or claim that others meet the conditions more thoroughly.

You further justified the (moral) legitmacy the the government's restrictions on the grounds that it is the genesis of some neato benefits that spring from the land. This is saying, "the land has this value because of this other guy's influence, so you don't have the right to buy it and have other conditions." Oopsie! The "other guy" can be the ghetto criminals too!

Now, try again, and this time try to come up with something both novel AND consistent with your other beliefs!

This is /., not an attempt to impress a sophomore girl long enough to get her in bed.

Oh, look honey, it's spun trying to sound smart by putting forth an argument most people haven't heard!

Response #1:

Say someone offers to sell you land in the ghetto. But the land comes with stipulations. Say you have to risk being a victim of violence in such a high-crime area, and anyone you sell the land to also has to risk being a victim of violence in such a high-crime area.

You might not want to buy land with strings like that attached, but I'm sure you'd agree that it would be morally within that land owner's rights to attempt to sell such land. You wouldn't go around claiming he had no right to put such stipulations on, if you didn't like it, you wouldn't buy it. And you wouldn't go buying it and ignoring the stipulations, would you?

The thing is, everyone who has bought land in the the ghetto has bought land with such stipulations on it. They freely chose to do so. You could buy the land from them, but not without the stipulations.

The criminals in that area are not an unrelated third party. They just like the government, do other stuff that impacts the value of the land.

Implicit conclusion: you have no right to complain whatsoever when you become the victim of any criminal act either.

Reponse #2:

The government has the right to add these stipulations by virtue of being the one that defends and enforces it?

a) So if someone offers alternate protection services (i.e., the mafia), can I pay them instead?
b) Am I only obligated to pay the costs of these specific services? Great!!!! I didn't know I was only really morally obligated to pay 1/100th of the tax I currently pay!

So your upset that Monsanto wants to lie about milk I'm upset that Monsanto wants others to stop making truthful statements about those others' products on the grounds that Monsanto deems such information irrelevant to wise decision-making.

but you think it's perfectly fine for them to force farmers who have spent their entire lives saving seed (we call this old school bio-engineering) to destroy their lives work because Monsanto's poison contaminated their fields I think it's perfectly fine to target farmers who deliberately save superior seed that came from Monsanto; accidentally grabbing it for the next run, I don't support suing them for, and Monsanto doesn't do that.

What on earth does Kosher food have to do with this? Precisely what I said it does. Again:

-Some people want to say their product [doesn't use Monsanto stuff/adheres to Jewish food handling protocols].
-That statement is truthful.
-Whether that statement is relevant to whether a given customer should buy it, is debatable.
-I believe making truthful statements about your product (whether that it doesn't use Monsanto stuff, or is kosher), should be legal, even if it's irrational to differentiate products based on that factor.

If you still can't see what kosher certification has to do with this, you lack the capacity for abstract thought, which is not my problem.

A patent is a monopoly. By granting a patent the government is giving a limited monopoly on what was patented. A property right is a monopoly in that one person is given a monopoly on the use of some item or space. By logging and declaring intent to enforce, the government is giving a (use-)limited monopoly on that item.

Rationalization for how property rights aren't really monopolies because of some reason that basically amounts to "I like them" in 3...2...