Well, look at the group that is usually 'bothered' by it. Liberals / Democrats.
They have the mindset that they know what is best for you. They will dictate the rules that everyone but them has to follow.
Republicans have the exact same mindset, they just choose a different set of rules that you have to follow and they don't. How many Republican politicians have been caught in infidelity or gay sex scandals in the past five years?
Obviously you've never gotten into the middle of flamewar over various flavors of BSD. Those people are psychotic about there chosen variant, I tell ya. Claiming that and flavor of Unix is "dying" is flamebait around here, as is claiming that it will never be the year of the Linux desktop because Unix doesn't belong on desktops.
You are right about one thing - the post I linked to is too stupid to be insulting.
Honestly, I had a hard time deciding how to moderate this. Troll, flamebait, off-topic? It's all of them! Not to mention completely stupid. I wish that Slashdot would run a yearly poll to let us pick a new moderation option - the options available are insufficient to describe things at the level of detail I'd like.
Mod parent up...to +50 bazillion. If every programmer working on Linux or Linux apps understood this, it really could be the year of the Linux desktop!
Hehe, got around the lameness filter with HTML escape sequences! (Maybe the lameness filter needs some improvement?)
ME TOO!
</AOL>
I don't play WoW, either. I think it would be nice if they had included the ability to link to characters in other games, as well. Specifically, I think they should have included ability to link to characters in Kingdom of Loathing, since the game itself is essentially a giant, geeky, joke. However, they would have to limit to a single character link, otherwise we'd get people trying to play 50 different MMO games and link all their characters to get more achievements.
Not only do they exist, Wikipedia has a (probably incomplete) list of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_languages
I remember running across a reference to one additional language - IIRC, its name began with symbol used for the unit angstrom, and it was developed in one of the Scandinavian countries.
About as many times as we have heard "The network is the computer"...um, I mean, "thin clients"...no, that's it not, I think it was "client-server architecture". Or was it "AJAX and Web 2.0 will allow us to move more applications on to the web"? I'm so confused! (Or maybe I'm just getting old. Everybody but mcgrew, get off my lawn!)
The desktop isn't going away. Distributed computing will be stick around as well, as will AJAX and "Web 2.0" (whatever that means). How much software is created for each of these, and the distribution of how much we spend working with applications that use each of these models, will change over time. Increased network speeds and availability have made models that require access networks less cumbersome and will probably continue to do so, but I don't think that there will ever be a complete "death of the desktop" (just like there has never been a complete death of COBOL).
There is an ethical dilemna inherent in having children anyway. Actually, come to think of it, there are several.
1) You will always want, but never be able, to provide the "best possible" environment for a child. In fact, it's possible that humans are so complex that it is impossible for a human to know what is the best possible environment for a child.
2) The kid didn't ask to be here. Sure, most 5-year-olds are busily enjoying life most of time (except when they are throwing tantrums because you won't buy them Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs)...but what about the ones with horrid degenerative diseases, malformities, dwarfism, etc? If you are the child's parent, it's YOUR FAULT that the child is this way.
3) What if you child, rather than finding the cure for cancer or being the next Einstein, turns out to be the next Hitler?
4) More people - especially in the Western, "civilized" world - means a greater environmental impact, which may reduce the time we have to find a way off this planet before being poisoned by our own wastes.
Of course, I've neatly sidestepped all of these by deciding that I'm not going to have children for reasons that have nothing to do with the above dilemnas.
Good god, I hope this doesn't become a long-running meme (especially the misspelling of "heard"). If it does, I will make an effort to show up in every
If I customize Firefox, the Linux kernel, or Gnome to make it easier for me to do things, it does not affect the experience of anyone who is using the official client without customizations. If I do the same thing for an MMO - and change it to give myself an unfair advantage, such as the ability to see through wall, rather than just to make it work better with my video card - then it will affect the experience of other players. And given that we have seen this kind of behavior in closed-source MMOs, you can bet it's going to happen in an open source one. But it will happen faster.
Why am I cheering about what seems to be a complete breakdown of what geeks want?
Simple - for most books, the "rightsholder" is the AUTHOR, not the publisher. (This is the opposite situation from the music industry.)
So authors will need to contact Amazon to disable this, and I'm betting that generally they won't bother. If the book publishers tell Amazon to do it, Amazon can just point out that the copyright is not in their control.
Really? I've pretty much stopped going to CNN.com because it seems like 75% of their stories are only only available in video format. (That's hyperbole, folks - I know it's really less than 50%. Probably lots less.) Now, a story that would take me half a minute to read is only available as a three minute video. It's a waste of time and bandwidth as far I'm concerned.
Except there's no such thing as permanent safety. See, the safety is only as complete as the people in charge of making things safe are trustworthy. Creating safety requires giving people power, and power corrupts. Therefore, the people in charge of safety will be corrupt. Sure, the system may work for a while, but eventually a person that is very susceptible to corruption will be put in charge, and it will break down, probably quite spectacularly and quite quicky.
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." -- Albert Einstein
