From the middle of the fifteenth century to the twenty-first, banks have only cared about one thing and one thing only.
POWER!
Mugabe lost it, so the banks cooperated until the Zimbabwean dollar was solely backed by Mugabe's fillings.
The value of the German mark was manipulated after the first world war to the benefit of the Krupp industrial group.
That little debacle resulted in bankrupting the country, theft of all of the funds (a few million marks was a comfortable retirement one month and the face value of the stamp saying the bank had closed your account the next.)
Krupp just happens to make arms so it also led to the second world war.
Why do you think that the federal government and the Federal Reserve are so scared of inflation?
The specter of needing a wheelbarrow full of bills to buy a loaf of bread haunts their memory worse that the great depression.
The Catholic church may have been extreme in its excommunication of money lenders, but that doesn't mean that they weren't right about money being the root of all evil.
Even if the bank succeed in assassinating Julian Assange, WikiLeaks will release the documents to their mainstream press partners.
(Think about it. if he, as the public face of WikiLeaks, causes only a 1% drop in stock valuation, that's still billions of dollars out of the pocket of the banking community. The man's dead. He'll be a martyr, but a very dead one. [The "rape trial" is obviously an attempt at character assassination. Rape as a crime is NEVER pursued so much as to cause extradition. Once the leak is done with, the charge will be done with... {Julian Assange may be a prick and an egotistical asshole. For all I know he may even be guilty. Rape charges DON'T happen like that unless somebody with "mui dinero" is calling the shots. (Think of what YOU could expect if your sister was the victim. Do you see the cops from the local precinct running to another country to capture somebody. Its not even a murder. That's what I'm saying.)}])
Now the question is how scared are these partners.
Do the Guardian, the New York Times and half a dozen other still retain enough editorial integrity not to knuckle under from the shit storm of advertising the banks are going to unleash defending their fictional record and fighting the truth of how nefarious, perfidious, greedy, grasping, manipulative, wanton crazed, depraved and devoid of human sensibility, their actions are.
Banks are definitely not charities.
They aren't even businesses.
They're banks.
They handle money, and money is the root of all evil.
this autopsy performed on you?"
Its theater. You're supposed to be lulled into a sense of complacency.
This will catch only the incompetent terrorists. But given the fact that these guys are obviously not the sharpest knives in the drawer, (obviously since they've been talked into believing that there's an afterlife, that they'll be entitled to a bunch of grapes when they reach Valhalla, or wherever you go when you're no longer going anywhere, they're pretty friggin' stupid,) the system should catch all of those morons.
Now I'm not saying a word on their other reprehensible policies (like alleged sexism, racism, ageism, etc.) but if they have booze vending machines, its all good.
Of course, I buy my booze days in advance from The wine Library.
Then again, you never know when you're suddenly going to get descended upon by a horde of thirsty barbarians in football helmets and have to run out and buy hooch to save your life, sanity &| virginity .
You know that Microsoft's marketing is currently attempting to "redefine" the "cloud" to muddy the waters so they can claim success with any of the half-baked ideas that issue of of its cloaca.
Next year, look for ads touting the "web" as the "cloud" and claiming every IIS server out there as a "cloud enabling" system.
After all, Two Face was born Harvey Dent, a District Attorney.
Hell, what's the difference between Lex Luthor and Dick Cheney? (Okay, that may not be a fair comparison. Luthor won't shoot you in the face and never even apologize.)
Politics seems to be the final stage of law, where an already withered sense of morals finally gets strapped onto greed and a sense of entitlement and your soul finally dies.
All you can do is to ensure that there is enough material and of a diverse enough nature that they get exposed to a wide variety of subjects/topics and then can dive into what ever interests them.
My parents didn't have an internet but we did have a library at home and access to a public library.
They fostered curiosity, inquisitiveness and risk evaluation (should I or shouldn't I?) by example.
NO KNOWLEDGE IS BAD, BUT HAVING NO KNOWLEDGE IS BAD.
The end result is that I am sitting here in my home-office on my duff while most of my friends growing up are unemployed or stuck in dead-end thankless jobs just waiting for the next round of pay cuts, or dead.
Both of my parents are dead now but none of us were prepared for Bush and the idiocy of letting the fools at the bank take risks like they did on financial instruments like derivatives.
By the rule of 72, (72 divided by the real percentage of interest that I can get for my savings) it now takes 36 years for the value of my assets to double (longer than I've got left to live statistically,) so what I've got now is all I'll ever have, and I still have to live, eat and pay NJ real-estate taxes. (This last item means I'm not going to make it and will have to sell at some point, hopefully not before the new WTC complex across the river is up which would raise my condo's value...)
Life fast, die young and leave a good looking corpse... I'm nought for three unfortunately.
The problem is that they aren't taking full multi-dimensional advantage of the information available to them.
Otherwise the TSA would KNOW when you are flying, or riding the rail, or sailing, or taking the bus, (paid for by whom on which credit card,) where you are going to and why... (So much for airport security. Its just some theater to see just how much bullshit you'll put up with.)
Otherwise the Feds, the NIS, the NSA, the FDA, the FAT and a whole host of three letter acronyms which are running pieces of this country would not be rattling your cage (and you are in a cage,) every chance they get.
You sheeple are such dupes you don't even know which way to run, which way the hills are, nor how you're being led.
The fact is that you are even paying for the abuse you are railing against while asking for more of the same.
You can't even get banks to venture a loan backed by assets.
Corporations are sitting on billions in cash which explains what the banks are doing with the money. NOTHING!
They're paying themselves more interest on the money on hand and less interest on the cash reserves than ever before.
We have the idiots at the Fed to blame for that.
Their policy of fractional percentage DECREASES in the cost of borrowing the Fed's money by the major banks means that it doesn't pay for them to lend it out at all.
You must be kidding if you think that Rupert Murdoch (of Fox) isn't talking to Jef Zucker (of NBC) and Steve McPherson (who's now out so it might be Paul Lee) (of ABC) or Les Moonves (of CBS) and the rest of these media moguls when they get together in their conclaves in Aspen or Teluride or wherever the Hell they get together whenever the Hell they get together.
The phase "given a level playing field" shows a charming naiveté on you part which is astonishing given that you're posting on/.
I know at least one kid who was heartbroken in Montréal during the reign of Pierre Eliot Trudeau when the cops over reacted and blew up his box full of furry critters.
Microsoft has yet to learn that most of the planet doesn't deal with enterprises.
That's Microsoft's bailiwick and their undoing as well.
Microsoft will do as well with the desktops they helped enterprises change but they've been pinned there as effectively as Erie/Bucyrus was with their large earth movers, and unable to even see the threat from Case backhoes. Case is bigger than ever and Erie/Bucyrus is a company that operates in an extremely rarefied "project atmosphere."
Not every project needs huge expenditures, complex change control and multi-phase deployment.
Google is doing fine dealing with people and enterprises in other relationships and charging per connection.
Microsoft simply charges too much for equivalent (actually lesser,) service.
After the initial hubub dies down in a few hours of days, who'll remember why?
The idiot consumer'll just remember that he'd heard the name somewhere.
That's the fault of the "non retentive nature" of media.
Unless there are "survival reasons" to remember, we forget.
You're countrymen ate children from a certain economic/religious/ethnic group in the previous war?
Get into a media relegated memory economy and you'll be able to generate positive press in no time.
You'd have to really f*ck up badly to become a pariah. (To this day, Gypsies aka Romanche are reviled and relegated to impoverished lives all across Europe because of something that happened back during the crusades. Nobody remembers exactly what or why, but something did.)
I repulsed by the very idea that they would violate of their common carrier status (we're Ma Bell, we connect everyone from presidents and kings to the scum of the earth - Ernestine the hone operator.)
If your ISP is doing that, thrown them off the 'net.
The day they announce some bone headed scheme like that is the day I use wide key PGP and 256 bit SSL to encrypt EVERYTHING I send.
(And I don't use Google mail for anything non-trivial.)
PC motherboard makers are all STILL delivering boards with parallel printer ports and those awful separate printer and mouse ports and D25 external monitor ports. How brave of them. How daring.
Apple is the only company with the balls to spit in the eye of backward compatibility. They're the only company who get it and don't mind pissing off their old customers by forcing them to adopt something new the next time they buy an Apple computer.
That's the only way we get advancement in this lousy industry.
The bigger change is letting go of the optical drive (there goes using my DVDs anymore without an external drive... (Good thing I have three...)
I've got a Titanium PowerBook G4, an iMac G5, two MacBook Pros ALL OF WHICH ARE STILL WORKING EVEN AFTER NINE YEARS.
Let Apple keep on innovating. They're not obsolescing my machines.
I just keep buying new ones, new storage devices, scaners, MIDI keyboards, cameras, audio recorders, mixers.
The setup I've got now will keep on working just fine...
"You cannot and not be missed; someone's bound to know, your mother, or a friend..." -Clive Moody
In these far more mobile times, lots of people die and are not missed. Some deservedly so.
The number of dead is rising just as exponentially as the number of living and therefore ex-living.
That's the beauty/shame of living on the cusp of an exponential curve.
There are more people alive right now than have ever lived before... period.
My family dates back to Andalusia, Spain on my father's side (grandfather was a Spanish civil war draft dodger [and where we got the brains in the family,:-]) and an English/Scottish/Iroquois mix on my mother's side (who was no slouch either on the brains side.)
Grand-ma on my mother's side is where I got my fondness for drink (and my grand-pa, also on my mothers side, is where I got the strength to put the bottle down,) while ancestry on my father's side is where I learned how to take it easy...
If you want to talk genealogy I can dig deep.
I'm sure I've get some ancestors who got Giordano Bruno's wonderful treatment at the hands of the hands of the Catholic Church in Spain. I even have a coffee mug made out to/in his honor.
They could have been taking a dirt nap, (favored destination given their lack of rationality and propensity for violence,) disappeared into the juvie system, or into the adult prisoner population, screwed with the wrong people and got turned into a pile of broken Q-Tips.
We didn't know, and we didn't care. (The difference between ignorance and apathy.)
Slashdot Mirror
From the middle of the fifteenth century to the twenty-first, banks have only cared about one thing and one thing only.
POWER!
Mugabe lost it, so the banks cooperated until the Zimbabwean dollar was solely backed by Mugabe's fillings.
The value of the German mark was manipulated after the first world war to the benefit of the Krupp industrial group.
That little debacle resulted in bankrupting the country, theft of all of the funds (a few million marks was a comfortable retirement one month and the face value of the stamp saying the bank had closed your account the next.)
Krupp just happens to make arms so it also led to the second world war.
Why do you think that the federal government and the Federal Reserve are so scared of inflation?
The specter of needing a wheelbarrow full of bills to buy a loaf of bread haunts their memory worse that the great depression.
The Catholic church may have been extreme in its excommunication of money lenders, but that doesn't mean that they weren't right about money being the root of all evil.
Even if the bank succeed in assassinating Julian Assange, WikiLeaks will release the documents to their mainstream press partners.
(Think about it. if he, as the public face of WikiLeaks, causes only a 1% drop in stock valuation, that's still billions of dollars out of the pocket of the banking community. The man's dead. He'll be a martyr, but a very dead one.
[The "rape trial" is obviously an attempt at character assassination. Rape as a crime is NEVER pursued so much as to cause extradition. Once the leak is done with, the charge will be done with...
{Julian Assange may be a prick and an egotistical asshole. For all I know he may even be guilty. Rape charges DON'T happen like that unless somebody with "mui dinero" is calling the shots.
(Think of what YOU could expect if your sister was the victim. Do you see the cops from the local precinct running to another country to capture somebody. Its not even a murder. That's what I'm saying.)}])
Now the question is how scared are these partners.
Do the Guardian, the New York Times and half a dozen other still retain enough editorial integrity not to knuckle under from the shit storm of advertising the banks are going to unleash defending their fictional record and fighting the truth of how nefarious, perfidious, greedy, grasping, manipulative, wanton crazed, depraved and devoid of human sensibility, their actions are.
Banks are definitely not charities.
They aren't even businesses.
They're banks.
They handle money, and money is the root of all evil.
The needs of people are quite diametrically opposed to those of business.
People love to share, businesses hate to share.
People hate secrecy, business thrive on secrecy.
People live without counting every bean in a jar, business are run by bean-counters.
Same ol' Microsoft FUD.
They're closing the barn door after the barn burnt down and all the horses are bolted.
Just ask them how Bing is doing to hear paeans about how well that's doing.
Switching the rails on the flacks is trivial, you just have to ask 'em the right question.
Fact is that Microsoft OWNS the business desktop and business things tied to it, but THAT'S ALL.
Browsing is something that occurs OFF the business desktop and NOBODY TRUSTS MICROSOFT not to rat them out to the corporate IT department.
That's why Chrome is a fast riser.
That's why Google is so big in web searches.
That's why Android is the "up and coming" and phone app system.
That's why Apple OWNS the consumer "Intelligent Appliance" space (iPod, iPad, IPhone, Macs of all stripes,)
That's why Nintendo, Sony and X-Box are ducking it out over CONTENT (the best game experience,) in the console space,.
Screw Microsoft... They've been screwing your workplace for years.
For 90% of workers, the money that is spent on IT is money that comes out of THEIR pockets.
Be afraid... BE VERY AFRAID /.ers,
this autopsy performed on you?" Its theater. You're supposed to be lulled into a sense of complacency. This will catch only the incompetent terrorists. But given the fact that these guys are obviously not the sharpest knives in the drawer, (obviously since they've been talked into believing that there's an afterlife, that they'll be entitled to a bunch of grapes when they reach Valhalla, or wherever you go when you're no longer going anywhere, they're pretty friggin' stupid,) the system should catch all of those morons.
Of course, I buy my booze days in advance from The wine Library.
Then again, you never know when you're suddenly going to get descended upon by a horde of thirsty barbarians in football helmets and have to run out and buy hooch to save your life, sanity &| virginity .
You know that Microsoft's marketing is currently attempting to "redefine" the "cloud" to muddy the waters so they can claim success with any of the half-baked ideas that issue of of its cloaca.
Next year, look for ads touting the "web" as the "cloud" and claiming every IIS server out there as a "cloud enabling" system.
Pu-leaze...
Yeah, I can see that.
After all, Two Face was born Harvey Dent, a District Attorney.
Hell, what's the difference between Lex Luthor and Dick Cheney? (Okay, that may not be a fair comparison. Luthor won't shoot you in the face and never even apologize.)
Politics seems to be the final stage of law, where an already withered sense of morals finally gets strapped onto greed and a sense of entitlement and your soul finally dies.
All you can do is to ensure that there is enough material and of a diverse enough nature that they get exposed to a wide variety of subjects/topics and then can dive into what ever interests them.
My parents didn't have an internet but we did have a library at home and access to a public library.
They fostered curiosity, inquisitiveness and risk evaluation (should I or shouldn't I?) by example.
NO KNOWLEDGE IS BAD, BUT HAVING NO KNOWLEDGE IS BAD.
The end result is that I am sitting here in my home-office on my duff while most of my friends growing up are unemployed or stuck in dead-end thankless jobs just waiting for the next round of pay cuts, or dead.
Both of my parents are dead now but none of us were prepared for Bush and the idiocy of letting the fools at the bank take risks like they did on financial instruments like derivatives.
By the rule of 72, (72 divided by the real percentage of interest that I can get for my savings) it now takes 36 years for the value of my assets to double (longer than I've got left to live statistically,) so what I've got now is all I'll ever have, and I still have to live, eat and pay NJ real-estate taxes. (This last item means I'm not going to make it and will have to sell at some point, hopefully not before the new WTC complex across the river is up which would raise my condo's value...)
Life fast, die young and leave a good looking corpse... I'm nought for three unfortunately.
How can we in the tech community be surprised that that "the powers that be"©® are taking advantage of everything that we make available to them.
The problem is that they aren't taking full multi-dimensional advantage of the information available to them.
Otherwise the TSA would KNOW when you are flying, or riding the rail, or sailing, or taking the bus, (paid for by whom on which credit card,) where you are going to and why... (So much for airport security. Its just some theater to see just how much bullshit you'll put up with.)
Otherwise the Feds, the NIS, the NSA, the FDA, the FAT and a whole host of three letter acronyms which are running pieces of this country would not be rattling your cage (and you are in a cage,) every chance they get.
You sheeple are such dupes you don't even know which way to run, which way the hills are, nor how you're being led.
The fact is that you are even paying for the abuse you are railing against while asking for more of the same.
It might be illegal if you can prove it, but I'm sure that the heads of the corporations don't scribble it down or send it through email.
The amount of corporate espionage which occurs in any country is only partly funded by a desire to get the goods on the competition.
The rest is funded by a desire to maintain a profitable equality in pricing.
Whatever you're smoking, it must be illegal.
You can't even get banks to venture a loan backed by assets.
Corporations are sitting on billions in cash which explains what the banks are doing with the money. NOTHING!
They're paying themselves more interest on the money on hand and less interest on the cash reserves than ever before.
We have the idiots at the Fed to blame for that.
Their policy of fractional percentage DECREASES in the cost of borrowing the Fed's money by the major banks means that it doesn't pay for them to lend it out at all.
You must be kidding if you think that Rupert Murdoch (of Fox) isn't talking to Jef Zucker (of NBC) and Steve McPherson (who's now out so it might be Paul Lee) (of ABC) or Les Moonves (of CBS) and the rest of these media moguls when they get together in their conclaves in Aspen or Teluride or wherever the Hell they get together whenever the Hell they get together.
The phase "given a level playing field" shows a charming naiveté on you part which is astonishing given that you're posting on /.
Comedy Central than on your so called newspaper/news show/news/broadcast. Suck to be you America...
puppies or kittens.
I know at least one kid who was heartbroken in Montréal during the reign of Pierre Eliot Trudeau when the cops over reacted and blew up his box full of furry critters.
I remember beading an article in the IEEE Spectrum called: "Reaching for the megaflop" in the nineteen-seventies.
I was working for CDC building power supplies (at their facility in Dorval, PQ, Canada) and keeping up with technology.
Exaflop computing is just blowing me away...
Sarah Palin is a non-issue. Until she decides to get off the fence, we don't give a shit about her anymore than anybody else.
If she's brain dead enough to decide she want's the job, then she'd better be prepared to have NO SECRETS.
Go Julian Assange.
You're like a glove the TSA uses.
Microsoft has yet to learn that most of the planet doesn't deal with enterprises.
That's Microsoft's bailiwick and their undoing as well.
Microsoft will do as well with the desktops they helped enterprises change but they've been pinned there as effectively as Erie/Bucyrus was with their large earth movers, and unable to even see the threat from Case backhoes. Case is bigger than ever and Erie/Bucyrus is a company that operates in an extremely rarefied "project atmosphere."
Not every project needs huge expenditures, complex change control and multi-phase deployment.
Google is doing fine dealing with people and enterprises in other relationships and charging per connection.
Microsoft simply charges too much for equivalent (actually lesser,) service.
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After the initial hubub dies down in a few hours of days, who'll remember why?
The idiot consumer'll just remember that he'd heard the name somewhere.
That's the fault of the "non retentive nature" of media.
Unless there are "survival reasons" to remember, we forget.
You're countrymen ate children from a certain economic/religious/ethnic group in the previous war?
Get into a media relegated memory economy and you'll be able to generate positive press in no time.
You'd have to really f*ck up badly to become a pariah. (To this day, Gypsies aka Romanche are reviled and relegated to impoverished lives all across Europe because of something that happened back during the crusades. Nobody remembers exactly what or why, but something did.)
Why there's a red maple leaf there is beyond me.
I'm a Canadian and like to toot our own horn but this was done by an international consortium in Geneva.
C'mon guys. Get the story straight.
I repulsed by the very idea that they would violate of their common carrier status (we're Ma Bell, we connect everyone from presidents and kings to the scum of the earth - Ernestine the hone operator.)
If your ISP is doing that, thrown them off the 'net.
The day they announce some bone headed scheme like that is the day I use wide key PGP and 256 bit SSL to encrypt EVERYTHING I send.
(And I don't use Google mail for anything non-trivial.)
PC motherboard makers are all STILL delivering boards with parallel printer ports and those awful separate printer and mouse ports and D25 external monitor ports. How brave of them. How daring.
Apple is the only company with the balls to spit in the eye of backward compatibility. They're the only company who get it and don't mind pissing off their old customers by forcing them to adopt something new the next time they buy an Apple computer.
That's the only way we get advancement in this lousy industry.
The bigger change is letting go of the optical drive (there goes using my DVDs anymore without an external drive... (Good thing I have three...)
I've got a Titanium PowerBook G4, an iMac G5, two MacBook Pros ALL OF WHICH ARE STILL WORKING EVEN AFTER NINE YEARS.
Let Apple keep on innovating. They're not obsolescing my machines.
I just keep buying new ones, new storage devices, scaners, MIDI keyboards, cameras, audio recorders, mixers.
The setup I've got now will keep on working just fine...
written by a friend of mine.
"You cannot and not be missed; someone's bound to know, your mother, or a friend..." -Clive Moody
In these far more mobile times, lots of people die and are not missed. Some deservedly so.
The number of dead is rising just as exponentially as the number of living and therefore ex-living.
That's the beauty/shame of living on the cusp of an exponential curve.
There are more people alive right now than have ever lived before ... period.
My family dates back to Andalusia, Spain on my father's side (grandfather was a Spanish civil war draft dodger [and where we got the brains in the family, :-]) and an English/Scottish/Iroquois mix on my mother's side (who was no slouch either on the brains side.)
Grand-ma on my mother's side is where I got my fondness for drink (and my grand-pa, also on my mothers side, is where I got the strength to put the bottle down,) while ancestry on my father's side is where I learned how to take it easy...
If you want to talk genealogy I can dig deep.
I'm sure I've get some ancestors who got Giordano Bruno's wonderful treatment at the hands of the hands of the Catholic Church in Spain. I even have a coffee mug made out to/in his honor.
Like I said, they just disappeared.
They could have been taking a dirt nap, (favored destination given their lack of rationality and propensity for violence,) disappeared into the juvie system, or into the adult prisoner population, screwed with the wrong people and got turned into a pile of broken Q-Tips.
We didn't know, and we didn't care. (The difference between ignorance and apathy.)
Nobody ever spoke of them after that day.