Slashdot Mirror

Bet you didn't know this. As I've posted, I just spent a few years at lovely (cough) FCI Elkton in Ohio. As with most BOP facilities, Elkton has a UNICOR "factory" where inmates work for up to $1 per hour, (though most make much, much less) to turn out furniture (Living in a dorm? It's probably got UNICOR furniture), mattresses, fencing, various types of wire, signs, lockers, filters, even prescription eyewear. And they also make guided missile components, batteries, injection molds, even power transformers and equipment. Wanna see a list?

And of course, they can compete with real companies, at insanely low prices because of near-slave labor. Nike has nothing on UNICOR.

But wait! There's more! Yes, UNICOR will handle all your sensitive documents and assign hundreds of barely trained drooling inmates (anyone with computer skills is banned from the work, as you would expect from the Government. I worked there for two weeks till they found out I had skills and banned me from the factory.) to take your paper documents (like Patent applications), use 1980's scanners and then get inmates to "fix" the scans manually on cutting edge Pentium 4 computers, discarded as "e-waste" by the US Government.

Need OCR/Coding/Indexing? No other company can touch our prices. And sure! You can trust our Luddite sex offenders not to talk about the contents of your patent to, say, a competitor.

Oh, the XML? They sub that out, since no Federal inmate is allowed by statute to write even markup code.

Or, maybe you have tons of sensitive paper documents that need electronic imaging? We will hand your precious records to our cadre of drug dealers (remember, if they've so much as written an email, they are forbidden! Only the very worst and stupidest for us!) and let them copy each one by hand. They won't take any. Really. Nope.

So! You can trust the USPTO with your work of a lifetime, they'll take care of it and secure it with all the power of the US Government.

Well, Sarah has figured out the real reason for the Gulf oil spill, and that reason is those of us who actually care about the environment.

No really, she's serious. We just need to let the oil companies drill unrestricted pretty much wherever and whenever they want, sans restictions and we wouldn't have these problems. Thank God we have a genius like Sarah to tell us unwashed slobs what the truth is.

That unrestricted oil drilling is safe, clean and green!

[I hate Goombas from Super Mario Bros. But] I also hate fucking ducks with shells. Those fucking freaks of nature just piss me the hell off. I love to stomp on them and then grab the shells and just wipe mushrooms the fuck out with them.

But even more than that, I hate people who insist Koopas are ducks. According to the field guide Koopas of the Mushroom Kingdom by James Bond:

• This is a duck.
• This is not a duck.
• These are ducks.
• These are not ducks.

A lot of people got their NES with both Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt and should know what a Nintendo duck looks like. The only kind of "duck" in a Koopa shell is a turtle that has "ducked" into its shell.

Hey! 15 dollars buys an awful lot of beans and tortillas, pal

probably because he doesn't want his picture to be replaced with this.

Um, it's not racist. He's playing off of his name and relating it to a cartoon character.

Speedy Gonzales

racism - Any attitude, action or institutional structure which systematically treats an individual or group of individuals differently because of their race. The most common form of racism in North America is in the form discrimination against African-Americans. However, it occasionally is manifested as preferential treatment for blacks. A secondary meaning is the belief that one race -- normally caucasian -- is inherently superior to other races. See also sexism, religism, and homophobia.

OK - no arguments - this has nothing to do with...
anyway until today I had never before heard it called Q-36 - so I went and did a google search and found that people call it both at about a 50% level between PU and Q. Nonetheless, I found two wave files where CLEARLY Marvin says PU, and one where it is UNCLEAR. I stick to my original statement - its PU not Q, or and BTW I'll take vi over Emacs any day :-)

PU_wave1
PU_wave2
PU_or_Q_Wave

OK - no arguments - this has nothing to do with...
anyway until today I had never before heard it called Q-36 - so I went and did a google search and found that people call it both at about a 50% level between PU and Q. Nonetheless, I found two wave files where CLEARLY Marvin says PU, and one where it is UNCLEAR. I stick to my original statement - its PU not Q, or and BTW I'll take vi over Emacs any day :-)

PU_wave1
PU_wave2
PU_or_Q_Wave

OK - no arguments - this has nothing to do with...
anyway until today I had never before heard it called Q-36 - so I went and did a google search and found that people call it both at about a 50% level between PU and Q. Nonetheless, I found two wave files where CLEARLY Marvin says PU, and one where it is UNCLEAR. I stick to my original statement - its PU not Q, or and BTW I'll take vi over Emacs any day :-)

PU_wave1
PU_wave2
PU_or_Q_Wave

Let's face it: unless you are a superhero with genius of the caliber of Galt or Roark, you've probably given up on yourself too. (Or you will eventually :-). Not every Slashdotter grows up to be RMS or Torvalds. Not every kid from the projects grows up to get a multimillion-dollar NBA contract. 95% of the time, it's lack of talent. 4% of the time, it's talent atrophied by laziness. 1% of the time, it's talent ground down into the dust by teh 3v1l m00chers and l33chers.

> Rand's proposed solution is to ignore such people as much as possible, and to focus on the handful of people you meet in life that are like you. Frankly, I don't think I have the energy or the patience for that any more. But maybe I would have done better had I learned about this early in life, instead of in my mid 30s. Rand's pretty strong stuff, but you can still do OK in life by using it as a mixer against a base of Strauss and/or Machiavelli.

Let's take it from the top:

According to Rand, the moochers and leechers may be dirtballs, but they're pretty well-off dirtballs. After all, they run all of government and most of the business world.

According to Machiavelli, there's nothing particularly wrong with that, either.

Treat life as a game. It's a fun game, whether you're keeping score with dollars or human lives. Or better yet, both. There's a 99% probability that your optimal strategy is the same as everyone else's: kissing a little ass to get ahead. And investing the proceeds of your getting-ahead in the companies that are kissing a little government ass to get ahead. Even if it means giving a cut of the action to the governments that are kissing leech ass to keep themselves in power. (Remember, you get your tax dollars back in profits when Congress awards a fat contract to a company you own shares in!)

The chaser for your philosophical martini comes from the greatest of all sages... Daffy Duck. "Oh, sure, I know I'm a louse. But I'm a live louse."

Like this?

Every fiendish trick he tries blows up in his face and/or leaves him momentarily levitating over thousands of feet of empty air (followed by an amazing impact at speeds faster than that of sound in the rock he hit).

Wile E is particularly apt because he leaves everyone guessing about who is funding his unending stream of Acme contraptions, and because the bird is always too fast for him.

Every fiendish trick he tries blows up in his face and/or leaves him momentarily levitating over thousands of feet of empty air (followed by an amazing impact at speeds faster than that of sound in the rock he hit).

Wile E is particularly apt because he leaves everyone guessing about who is funding his unending stream of Acme contraptions, and because the bird is always too fast for him.

However, that's much different from what the GPL *does*, which is to use copyright law to attempt "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" by making it easy to publish software that's free as in speech (with other positive side effects) and know that the software you're using is free so you can do even more things with it and not have to hire bunch of lawyers telling you that that it's safe to touch before adding value to it.

Re: BTW - Confusing WindRiver with WinDriver would be like confusing MacOS 9 with Mac OS9....

I think you mean...

"At last, after 2000 years of work, the Illudium Pu-36 Explosive Space Modulator"

...Pu-36, as in the isotope of plutonium with 36 neutrons, if I rememeber my isotope notation correctly. Then again, I initially thought it meant the number of PROTONS and looked up the atomic number 36 as being Krypton... How ironic, something of Krypton blowing up Earth. But then I remembered isotopes differing in NEUTRONS. ;)

I would like? I would like a trip to Europe...

I would like to ask the owners of this "Red Hat Is Not Linux" site why they feel the need to do this? I mean, does that mean that Mandrake is not linux? Does that mean that /Suse/ is not linux? Well please, do tell, what is linux?

I agree that the "commercialization" of linux may one day be harmful to it as far as it's being a powerful and fully open OS. But that does not mean that simply because a company which produces a distro or some such to make money is no longer linux.

So what? So there are some companies which have chosen to only _support_ one distro of linux. How can we expect a "linux friendly" company to support all flavors of linux when it is open source and there can be so many subtle yet important differences between each distro? What do you suggest, standardization,?

Agreed, Red Hat should not be taken as "the" linux distrobution. But just because they have gone public or "sold out" or some such that they should not be considered linux. RH was the very first disro I ever tried, mainly because IMHO they were the first to try and draw in newbies and not treat them like morons. Not that I am not a moron, but I like to think that I can count all my toes without the need of a calculator.

But what do I know? I'm going back to knitting a sweater from my belly button lint...

Patch it around

65,000... Hey! The keyboard isn't working! What's wrong with this darn....

Program "Song" has performed an illegal operation and will be terminated.

[OK]