What do you use for wireless scanning?
177 karma · joined April 5, 2009
But... but they're all atrocious. There must be some covert dynamic that counters that selection pressure. Maybe they're supposed to look attractive when people are actually looking to buy them on a specific occasion, as opposed to impulse purchases such as candy usually placed near the registers.
I'm sure that the point you're raising has been discussed to death in a thousand flamewars, but I happen to be unfamiliar with them. Sorry about that.
Could somebody please sketch out how this argument goes? I will outline my understanding so far, and I will use some jargon and concepts from CS, AI, decision theory and economics, please tell me if that makes me harder to understand:
A1: Community effort is good when it makes people better off (as opposed to achieving some narrow goal).
A2: Most software is community effort, so good software is that which makes people better off. The way to ensure that is to make software free.
B2: Free? Then how would programmers gather resources necessary to support themselves why working in a capitalist economy?
A3: Free is a toxic word. Let's taboo it. Instead, let's talk about what matters to the user who has already acquired software somehow without hurting the programmer:
0. The user has acquired the software without hurting anybody, and it's nobody's business how the software is used, in which manner and to what ends.
1. The user has some software but it's not quite enough to accomplish his task, so he creates the solution using everything at his disposal — and that includes other software he has.
When software is distributed in a form that impedes understanding and editing it, this actively hurts user who is trying to reprogram or extend the software, which is a legitimate manner of use, because every manner of use is legitimate.
2. He wants to help other people (other economic agents), so he uses all the resources at his disposal, including software, to help them. This encompasses sharing software.
B3: But this is a very skewed and simplistic view of economy. Sometimes success depends on hindering your competition (cf. minimax). Sometimes you have to hurt other people to secure your freedoms. Sometimes you have to manipulate the market, withhold information, not do everything in your power to reach the declared goal, not take risks, or take unreasonably high risks.
A4: So what? There are some fundamental rights, and since they don't necessarily conflict, we should simply avoid situations where they do. When that's not possible, we should seek compromises. In the case of software, the right thing to do is to err on the side of more freedom, because otherwise the equilibrium will fall at the point where no further progress is possible, and we don't want that.
B5: Say what you want, but I have I paid job, and my job security depends on me hindering other people's ability to do the same. The best way to do this is not to share the source code I have written. Oh, and by the way, I have an emotional attachment to it, and I cringe to think of somebody messing with it. It is also badly written and I would be ashamed to have it published, but I have no time to clean it up.
A5: This is why we can't have nice things.
B6: Most of hardware is closed source. There is a lot of nice hardware. Some of the nicest hardware is made by some of the most secretive organizations. So you're obviously wrong in your conclusion, and you must have erred in one of the logical steps in your argument.
Windows menus items have certain letters underlined, and you can hit Alt+underlined letter to open a menu, then Alt+letter to select an item or submenu. It provides both discoverability and keyboard-based navigation.
OS X places hotkeys at the far right of every menu item which has a hotkey equivalent.
In dumb evolutionary environments and in anthropics, there is no direct feedback between these two mechanisms. Bacteria get born, behave in a predefined way, and either procreate or die. Successful bacteria are not smart, but simply lucky. They are selected for fitness by a dumb process.
Similarly, activists enter politics to pursue certain interests, these interests do not change significantly, and then the newcomer either gathers enough support to get elected and influence public opinion, or doesn't. Sponsors select the politicians which have already taken a favorable stance, and help them get heard and get elected. Successful activists are those which pursue important issues which attract support and sponsorship.
I suspect that this is how the system is supposed to work, but it breaks when politicians can be adjusted, that is, bought.
Notepad++ is somewhat nicer though.
Sublime Text on the other hand feels simultaneously like a fresh break from the Emacs tradition and like a true gem among the proliferation of half-baked notepad replacements like notepad2 (Scintilla-based, too), gedit or Kate.
It adopts best features from Vim and TextMate in a surprisingly clean way.
[1] http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm
> > I was thinking of speech in the constitutional sense
> Remember, many countries don't have a constitution and don't care for yours.
For some reason I can't see a reply link under hir answer, so I'll just leave this here:
Constitution is neither the only one, nor the most effective assertion of unalienable freedoms. Since the aftermath of WW2 there have been many Charters, Conventions and Declarations of all sorts, many of them accepted ("ratified") by many countries alongside their local laws.
Perhaps the most widely known and accepted one is a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_...
The fact that this is already happening gives me chills.
We really need to openly discuss and codify the reasons behind the war on child pornography.
That very much depends on where you draw the line. If Ruby on Rails, Wordpress or Jango are "professional web applications", then so is werc [1] "web anti-framework" which is built entirely on rc, the plan9 shell.
xmobar [2], dzen [3] and geektool [4] are all notification tools that can watch files for changes or accept, process and display input through pipes.
Quicksilver [5] uses piping, though this is arguably a different paradigm — select object first, then the action, then details. I wonder why this paradigm isn't more popular and articulated, especially in the light of ubiquity of indexing tools like Spotlight on OS X, wonderbar in Firefox and DDG bang operators [6]. It would be interesting to see the trend continue.
Overall, this piping stuff around approach is very subdued, but virtually omnipresent. Modern cell phones (Samsung Bada, anyone?), TVs and other "smart" appliances provide a glimpse of the non-composable world.
[1] http://werc.cat-v.org/docs/
[2] http://projects.haskell.org/xmobar/
[3] https://sites.google.com/site/gotmor/dzen
How do you capture different kinds of information — ideas, references to books or websites, events, addresses?
What do you do more often — review agenda or search for specific keywords?
I know, this has been said time and again already, but venting your frustration on the internet is counterproductive — it assuages an urge to actually do something — and do something you should, because TSA won't dissolve by itself. But there's another side to the endless discussions on the Internet — by illuminating legal specifics of the situation you could effect a slow, incremental progress in public awareness.