I keep getting assignments constantly from my students with sentences that:
1) Do not have anything capitalized 2) Do not have periods at the end of the sentence 3) Are run-on sentences 4) Oftentimes have shortcuts for words (the most common being 'u' for the word "you").
Does anybody know where these habits are coming from?
1) Quality. Sorry, but DivX doesn't come close to quality. It works like an MP3 works: it's portable and playable, but it's not the best in terms of quality. I'd rather pop a DVD into my player and enjoy it with my wife on a 27" TV with a DTS surround sound system than have the two of us huddled around a 17" monitor and a pair of $20 speakers (sure, we could upgrade to surround on the PC, but 5-channel output is not programmed in DivX...but if I'm wrong on this, feel free to give me a swift kick to the mod points).
2) Ease. Buy a player. Rent a DVD. Put it in. Play. And there's no crossing your fingers that it doesn't crash, no reconfiguring of the stupid screen saver to not interrupt the movie, and no stupid "remote control" that keeps getting in the way of playback every time the mouse gets bumped.
3) Physical portability. MP3s finallybecame famous and widespread when you could move them around in a player no larger than a pack of cigarettes. Granted, DVD's are physically larger, but you can carry 20 DVD's in a portable CD-wallet...Come to think of it, I suppose you can do that now on some portable DivX players (100 min. movie = 700MB * 20 movies = 14 GB 20GB players). But DVD's are (right now) less cumbersome, but I don't think they'll stay that way for long.
Ohio is regulating (or overregulating) its own state's businesses.
If Ohio was saying something along the lines of "if you sell something on eBay to another resident of Ohio, you owe a sales tax to the state," it would be legal. It's the exact same thing as if you purchase something online, often times you'll see the "add x% tax if you are a resident of y state".
But Ohio cannot say "we forbid you to sell to anybody in California unless you buy a state license from us" is unconstitutional. As soon as you begin to do business with anybody outside your state, trade and tax laws move beyond the state to the federal level. Only Congress has the power to tell a resident of Ohio that they can't sell anything to Californians, hence the name "Inter-state Commerce."
Which degree(s) do YOU think will go well with a Computer Science Bachelors?
When I read this, my first response would be to pit the question on the submitter. Why ask./? We don't know who you are, your personality, or what you really want to do with your life five years down the road. Sure, you ask what would be helpful to increase your marketability, but marketability in what? My field is education, and I double majored in CS and Math Ed. An Ed degree would be great for any company looking for communication and management skills, but it won't get you very far if you're looking for marketability for anything to do with, say, software engineering.
I don't know if./ will be able to help you with this type of personal decision. I've already seen a few friends drop out of college at some point because the only advice they followed was everybody elses, never their own.
Sure, you can get as much advice as you can take on what might "look good" on a resume, but I also knew a few classmates who tried for a minor that they thought would give them a one-up. In the end, they didn't like what they were studying, were too mentally exhausted to try harder, and just detested the class material so much that they then detested the work that came with it. And no employer's going to want to hire someone who isn't motivated to do their job, that's for sure.
Figure out what you would really like to do first. If you don't know, try out market yourself with what you have. If you then find something that you'd really like to go for but don't have what the education / experience, THEN you'll find the motivation to take more classes, and you'll know what you need to take.
...the concept of debuting an actual movie trailer as part of a plot in an actual TV program could not fit as seemlessly into too many other television shows.
I mean, imagine how it would sound debuting on Enterprise...
Mayweather: "Sir, we seem to be getting a faint signal eminating from the planet Zeridian-4 in the Bravidian System."
Captain Archer: "Damnit. We just got done smearing Klingon blood across the galaxy. What now?"
Mayweather: "Actually sir...it appears to be a very faint television signal!"
Captain Archer: "Wow. We're witnessing a new species develop radio technology for the first time. Just imagine how it must of felt when Earth transmitted its first wireless signals into space. Well, let's tune in, shall we?"
[STAR WARS trailor ensues...]
Mayweather: "Uh, sir, what the..."
Captain Archer: "Not a clue. What the hell is a "meesa" anyway? Hoshi, can you translate any of it? Are they hostile?"
Hoshi: "I don't know, captain. I didn't get enough of a sample of their language. But this "force" doesn't sound very friendly..."
I find your pitiful attempt at making a public spectacle of your pathetically feigned lack of confidence in your own abilites nothing more than a sad nuisance to this otherwise well-established and intelectual forum....
Heheh...that's why I love Slashdot. No problem sounding like an intellectual jackass...got all the time in the world to edit my own words to make sure they come out just right! Now if I can just find a way to incorporate a "Preview" button into everyday conversation!
Back when I was a good ol' Nintendo player... I never really liked sports games. They were all the same...you had over twenty baseball games alone to choose from for the NES, they all got stale rather quickly...let's see here, there was "Baseball", "RBI Baseball", "RBI Baseball II", "Bases Loaded", "Bases Loaded II", "Bases Loaded III", "Bases Loaded IV"...
Then I found a friend who rented Baseball Simulator 1000. Baseball was unreal to the point where it was fun. Bunt on a "tornado pitch" that goes over 200 mph and you could get a home run! Choose to hit a "missle ball" and whoever was dumb enough to get in the way of the ball was carried all the way to the outfield fence, smacked against the wall, and knocked out cold for two seconds of play. The game added creativity to an otherwise stale game.
The other fun baseball-spinoff was Base Wars. Unless it was a force-out, you got to battle your opponent to determine if the base runner was out or safe (all the players were robots). When you won games, you got extra money to purchase for faster movement on the field, armor, or weapons that you could really use to waste your opponent with.
But I find sports games to be a lot like first-person shooters. Every year, you get about 50 new titles. On average, 49.5 of them are recycled from previous titles; the gameplay is always the same, just with different "maps" (a.k.a. "stadiums" in the sports genre) and different players to play with.
...but then, I wouldn't be serving my civic duty to/. , so here goes...
Queue "Rapists get less time" posts.
So what we need to do is lobby harder for longer prison sentences for rapists, rather than lobby for less prison time for software "distributors."
First, let's get one thing straight: what this guy did was illegal, in the sense that it was against the law (hate to be redundant, but it sets up my next point). Anyone who can't see that can't see straight.
Second, I know a lot of/.ers will argue something along the lines of, "The laws are crooked. They were written by rich RIAA-like bastards. We're rebelling against an unjust law, therefor it is just to rebel!" Sadly, vigilantism will not get you much further than a jail cell these days. Punal consequences aside, you are distributing something that is not yours and does not belong to you, therefore you have no right to pass it to others, through whatever medium you choose to do so with (CD or peer-to-peer). Best analogy I can think of is counterfeiting. You take faux productions of something, which themselves have no value assigned to them by a governmental power, and yet you illegally use it as if it has said power. It is theft. You choose to do it, fine by me. But you better be ready to face whatever consequences exist.
Finally, there are those who will say that 15 years is too harsh a penalty. Well, last I checked, most rapes committed have "penalties" of 15 or more years, but most of those criminals actually have experience working the system where they can get out in seven years or less. And the other problem (I hate to get into a sociological discussion here, but...) is that society has been dealing with rapists since the beginning of time. We're accustomed to the crime being committed, and the sentences that are handed down have been shaped over changes in cultural views throughout the millenia. On the other hand, mass illegal software trade and distribution, as seen here, has been developing for the last 30 years (and really persecuted for the last 10). There's very little social precidence to base judgements on, and instead, judicial courts are basing their rulings merely on law, which takes us back to who writes the law...
The software industry are busy spanking poor college students who couldn't afford over-priced software
I was laughing so hard when I read this, then I read that someone modded it "insightful." Now I seriously question the rationality of/. modders.
And I suppose we should leave the poor drug dealers alone because, I mean, they're only in their low-to-mid 20's and grew up in such poor neighborhoods. It would be so cruel to go after these poor kids who had it so rough. I mean, how can they afford such over-priced 5 karat diamond rings, necklaces, and earings? We should be going after the diamond cartels instead!
So cry me a river. In the mean time, this kid got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. So yea, he deserves a spanking.
Unfortunately, it looks as if a monumental ruling (at least, in/.'s eye) produces, in the end, nothing more than a disclaimer sticker on the front box.
Sure enough, the new packages for Windows XP Home Edition and NAV 2005 direct you to Microsoft and Symantec web pages where those EULAs are posted.
Perfect. Another warning label. So we went from "Warning: By opening this package, you agree to the following terms of the EULA as explained on the enclosed CD" to, "Warning: By opening this package, you agree to the following terms of the EULA posted at http://www.screwtheconsumer.biz/allyourbasearebelo ngtous.html"
some people don't have to study to get good grades...I couldn't be bothered to spend that much time doing shit I already knew.
In my classroom I would call you a black hole. Not only do you take the teacher's time and suck it down that deep gravity well of arrogance but you end up sucking the energy from others who don't have that level of knowledge and really need some of it from whatever source they can get.
And you know what's great? Not only do I fight black holes like you, but I also fight another black hole, Yahoo Games. There are not a lot of people like you and me who are smart enough to absorb information like a sponge and retain it despite our inept study habbits, particularly referring to the electronic form. In the mean time, we end up sending the message to everybody else that drowning your mind in a melting pot of Flash entertainment will not harm our cognative development.
And the poor kids who have an attention span of a misquito end up losing.
Your post sounds like a boast of "Education failed me, but hell, I'm a success, and I'll be damned before I stop saying that nobody should give a rat's ass about public education." Thanks. Truth be told, you kinda remind me of roadkill. You think you're so bold when you dash across the highway, but your eyes are so close to the ground, you'll never get a chance to see the car coming before it runs you over.
No matter what we try and harvest as an energy source, we're always going to screw up this planet in some way.
Of course, that is until the invention of Mr. Fusion!
Course, on the other hand, since we're already warming up the planet with global warming, perhaps we can use this "side effect" of Wind Energy to balance the equation!
1) President Bush empowered himself to take the civil liberties away from US Citizens. The last president I remember really hacked away at rights explicitly stated in the US Constitution was John Adams (correct me if I'm wrong). Bush claims that it will only be used on terrorists, but merely being accused of being one automatically strips you of your civil liberties. Declared guilty before proven innocent. Even Timothy McVeigh still received a lawyer and a trial.
2) President Bush guarded nothing in Baghdad except the oil refinery. I truly believed up until I read about this that "liberating" Iraq was not because of the oil, but because Saddam was hiding something up his sleeve. I tried to convince everyone I could in Egypt that it wasn't about the oil.
You just gotta love reading this ruling, it actually makes me feel intelligent.
Before the printer runs the Toner Loading Program, it performs a "checksum operation," a "commonly used technique" to ensure the "integrity" of the data downloaded from the toner cartridge microchip.
Of course, you don't have to "understand" every piece of information presented in the ruling, but "understanding" what is written is a very "commonly used technique" to insure the "integrity" of communicating in the English language.
I recommend just sticking a firewall up at the root of your network and blocking all traffic on port 80
This is hilarious! Oh, and other advice to follow: "Don't drink water because thousands of people drown each year!"
If someone needs to access a site, have a system where they can request a site to be opened for access. Of course...you (as network admin) have final say.
Haaaaaa! My gut can hardly take it! Why should the admins waste time on securing the network when the admins can take their whole day manually relaying terabytes of internet data to workers? This is a great joke! I mean, then the admins can actually give permission to some perv at work when he needs to satisfy his daily allotment of porn! Keep the jokes comin!
Work is for work.
Wait a sec...you actually sound serious here...you mean...no..joke?
HAA HAA HAA! I can't believe someone thinks this is a solution! This is brilliant! Wait, this is more than brilliant! I mean, let's PAY MONEY for an internet connection and then block port 80 at the firewall so that no one can access the internet!
Oh wait...wait...I got the idea! How 'bout we also remove all the toilets from company bathrooms, so employees don't waste so much time reading the newspaper on the crapper!
Alright, rather than just "mod", here's my take on all of them:
1) Electoral Reform - Oh brother. The electoral system is not broken. You should understand that the fact that a minority-vote-getter can become president actually proves that "Majority rules, minority rights" does exist in this country. Besides, electoral voting actually strengthens the individual vote (Miami-Dade county would not even exist if it wasn't for the 2000 vote).
2) Online Voting - my opinion, but I think there's more pressing issues than just the opportunity to vote online (besides, you don't get the obligatory "I voted" sticker).
3) Judiciary Appointment - this process was made to prevent stupid Joes from appointing judges. You can call it corruption, but Bush has had a *ton* of court appointments denied by Congress... there are checks and balances to this system.
4) AIDS - not unique. This question always appears in the debates, and they always have canned answers. "Blah blah, money for research, blah blah, I don't have AIDS, so I don't care, blah blah." Move on.
5) Supreme Court Justices - PICK THIS. Every president wants some "echo" of their power to last throughout the ages, and this dates all the way back to John Adams and the appointment of Federalist John Marshall. Ask this question, and you get a good mirror image of the policies you can expect from candidates themselves.
6) Marijuana vs. Alcohol - Hippie question. Alcohol is part of our culture, like it or abstain from it. No dance with Mary Jane. Move on.
7) Drug Fight - Don't ask -- you'll get another canned answer from the politicans. "DARE this, Community involvement that, but you gotta love the alcohol commercials!"
8) Medical Marijuana - Another canned response "Needs more research - need to make sure there's a way that it doesn't get abused." Not worth the breath, hippie. Go pack your bags and move to Holland.
9) Drug Provision for Financial Aid - Definately the way to Go. My gosh, this is a good question, and one I never thought about before. Poster definately has a point that those who have paid their time still deserve an education.
10 and 11) Draft - They'll all deny it, and everyone knows that. They may plan it, but they'll never admit to it. So don't bother to ask.
12) Focused goal on Alt. Fuels - Worth Asking, especially with the spin on the "10 year mission to the Moon" emphasis. It just goes to prove that things can get done if you really put your mind to it.
13) Child Abuse - Sad to say it, but skip it. What you need to stop this is GrassRoots - neighbor to neighbor, family to family, friend to friend, and teacher to student is the only way to fix abuse. Jail does not deter hate.
14) Animal Rights - Eat more meat. Death to PETA. Next.
15) Sex Ed - Thought Provoking - it's a good domestic question, because teenage pregnancy has always been a problem.
16) Home Schooling - Last I checked, Bush was supporting it with "No Child Left Behind." If he wasn't, he'll just plug it as another alternative to failing schools.
17) USA, the World Bully - Fine ask it, but the same question will be asked in the debates, and the answers will only be the same as what is said in the television commericals.
18) Isreal vs. Palestine - Don't ask, don't tell - it's been the policy for the last 50 years regarding the actions of Isreal. No US leader that I know will change that right now.
19) Integrate Family Values - Of course, the president has always been responsible for raising the children of the US-of-A. Need family values? Find a family that you can value.
20) Metric Conversion in the USA - thanks. I needed a laugh. Metric in the USA? That's hilarious.
21) Civil Marriage for Gay/Lesbian
No, the problem is this:
on
Less Might Be More
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Everyone in the IT industry needs money. Unfortunately, the company that needs it the most is Microsoft. Release a new OS every 3 years and a new Office suite every 2 years, price them insanely high (well, at least the Office suite), rewrite the platform to use a higher-higher language, which requires a faster CPU to process what really amounts to someone typing in the letter 'a', and pressure everyone to believe that yesterday's computer just isn't good enough for today's "software innovations."
Or perhaps instead it might be the little guy, you know, the independent tech consultant, promising you the "latest and greatest platform" to support your every need as a business. Really what he is doing is playing on your ignorance, buying the biggest and baddest machine he can get his hands on (so that a $800 consultants fee won't look as large compared to the $5000 server your company just purchased), and then playing your stupidity to lead you to believe that (for $120/hr), he's the only guy in the world who can support the platform for you. And all this time, he's just trying to feed his own business....
Our school district has these old IBM PC 315 Pentium Pro servers. Their idea was to throw them away. Well, all I did was take the RAM and HD from one computer, stick it in the other (64MB and 4GB doesn't really cut it anymore, but 128MB and 8GB still do), load them with Win98, Firefox, Thunderbird, Office 2000, and one of the teachers asked me if it was a new computer. Really, all it needed was more RAM and a reformat.
There are quality PC parts out there that are being thrown in the bin because people are led to believe that you absolutely have to have a 3 GHz, 1GB of RAM, 120GB hard drive system just to run multimedia apps in Internet Explorer. The only thing I told the staff at my school is that it won't play DivX. Then everyone looked at me and asked, what's DivX?
I love it when the last consultant hired convinced the district to buy a dual G5 XServe w/ 2GB RAM & 180GB SATA storage just to set up a file server for a total of 400 students and staff at the school. Love it even more when we already have a dual PIII, 1GB RAM, and RAID-5 140GB system doing that job already (and we're only using 22GB of hard disk space right now).
The problem is this: people want money, and they'll use as much FUD to sell you what you don't need. If a 5-foot high fence keeps the dog out, there ain't no reason to tear it down and build it higher.
No way will GW drop the "no-fly" list. They'll probably just add an exception to the rule:
"If the passenger is overweight, has grey hair, looks like someone kicked his face in, and turns so red in the face when you tell him he might be a terrorist that he looks like he's going to spontaneously combust, let him pass."
I do believe that Slashdot's slogan is "News for Nerds, stuff that matters."
Now, if you consider every single news flash regarding, oh say, SCO, more important than a movie that I believe will make a fundamental impact on the future of how politics are played out in America, the fine, avoid this thread. But personally, I think nerds should be just as educated about how their country is run politically as well as technologically.
And besides, one of the greatest lessons to be learned from this movie (though I would have thought it would have been learned much earlier than this) is as follows: Never try and forcefully hide information from the public. The more you try and supress it, the more intreaguing it becomes and the more demand there is for it. If you really do want to hide something, try to be as discrete about it as possible.
But as soon as Disney tried to put the movie away because of benefits they've received from the Bush family, the press pounced, and Moore had a documentary that was "scandalous", and just like Clinton has proved himself, people love a scandal (and I'm sure/.ers will as well...I'd wager this thread will get about 1200 posts...any takers?)
I'll be the technology coordinator for a school district this coming fall. Now, I know there's a bunch of people out there who are gonna say "Those who don't know, teach." And they can just piss off. I'll tell you, the last tech coordinator I knew personally taught at my high school for four years and is now pursuing a doctorate while being the head of the technology development team at Indiana State University.
First, let me tell you: you need to be professional. That means cordial, exchanging pleasantries whenever possible, writing letters, as well as actually calling the human resources department personel and introducing yourself, if not in person. Believe it or not, professionalism will get you a lot further into acquiring a job then just sending out apps and waiting for something to happen.
Second, you gotta start somewhere. Example: banks always need IT support staff, but more often than not they hire internally. Start off as a bank teller. Sure, for a Comp. Sci. college grad it doesn't sound like a lot of money, but the perks are nice and it leaves plenty of room for growth. From experience, companies that have high demands for entry-level programming positions do so because it is easy to filter the qualified from the "they say that they're qualified, but...". It's simply because a company is not going to waste precious hiring-time to see if you can do the kind of work they demand if you've never done that kind of work before.
Or, try for tech support. Again, the pay ain't great, but every TS company has an IT support staff, and at the few I've applied to in the past couple years, all only hire for that internally, because they want someone who knows their systems and demands rather than some joe with an A+ cert. off the street.
Finally, even accept something lower. I did merchandinsing for CocaCola for a couple years, and they hired a lot of staff internally, including their IT support staff (well, if they did not find internally, they looked elsewhere, but the company knew that a lot of their workers are soon-to-be college grads who are looking for more qualified work, and it saves the company a lot of money not to have to advertise the position).
I suppose to sum everything up: climb the ladder. It's not fun, and you have to lower your expectations to start out with, but if you're as qualified as you say you are (and professional, I can't stress that enough), you'll get what you're looking for eventually.
This article at New York Times explains that Yahoo has decided to boost their E-mail space (Soul sucking registration required) from their current 4 megabytes to 100 in response to Gmail. They are also planning to offer 2 gig mailboxes for $19.99(USD)
Hmm. Now, let's figure out which business deal is better, shall we?
Do I either,
A) Pay $20 for a 2 gig Yahoo box, or
B) Open up 2 GMail accounts for free and still have 2 gigs of storage.
Now, the true genius will suddenly realize that if you open 3 accounts, that means you have 3 gigs of space, and that's more than 2 gigs that Yahoo offers. How many of you figured that one out?
Slashdot Mirror
I keep getting assignments constantly from my students with sentences that:
1) Do not have anything capitalized
2) Do not have periods at the end of the sentence
3) Are run-on sentences
4) Oftentimes have shortcuts for words (the most common being 'u' for the word "you").
Does anybody know where these habits are coming from?
1) Quality. Sorry, but DivX doesn't come close to quality. It works like an MP3 works: it's portable and playable, but it's not the best in terms of quality. I'd rather pop a DVD into my player and enjoy it with my wife on a 27" TV with a DTS surround sound system than have the two of us huddled around a 17" monitor and a pair of $20 speakers (sure, we could upgrade to surround on the PC, but 5-channel output is not programmed in DivX...but if I'm wrong on this, feel free to give me a swift kick to the mod points).
2) Ease. Buy a player. Rent a DVD. Put it in. Play. And there's no crossing your fingers that it doesn't crash, no reconfiguring of the stupid screen saver to not interrupt the movie, and no stupid "remote control" that keeps getting in the way of playback every time the mouse gets bumped.
3) Physical portability. MP3s finallybecame famous and widespread when you could move them around in a player no larger than a pack of cigarettes. Granted, DVD's are physically larger, but you can carry 20 DVD's in a portable CD-wallet...Come to think of it, I suppose you can do that now on some portable DivX players (100 min. movie = 700MB * 20 movies = 14 GB 20GB players). But DVD's are (right now) less cumbersome, but I don't think they'll stay that way for long.
Ohio is regulating (or overregulating) its own state's businesses.
If Ohio was saying something along the lines of "if you sell something on eBay to another resident of Ohio, you owe a sales tax to the state," it would be legal. It's the exact same thing as if you purchase something online, often times you'll see the "add x% tax if you are a resident of y state".
But Ohio cannot say "we forbid you to sell to anybody in California unless you buy a state license from us" is unconstitutional. As soon as you begin to do business with anybody outside your state, trade and tax laws move beyond the state to the federal level. Only Congress has the power to tell a resident of Ohio that they can't sell anything to Californians, hence the name "Inter-state Commerce."
Which degree(s) do YOU think will go well with a Computer Science Bachelors?
./? We don't know who you are, your personality, or what you really want to do with your life five years down the road. Sure, you ask what would be helpful to increase your marketability, but marketability in what? My field is education, and I double majored in CS and Math Ed. An Ed degree would be great for any company looking for communication and management skills, but it won't get you very far if you're looking for marketability for anything to do with, say, software engineering.
./ will be able to help you with this type of personal decision. I've already seen a few friends drop out of college at some point because the only advice they followed was everybody elses, never their own.
When I read this, my first response would be to pit the question on the submitter. Why ask
I don't know if
Sure, you can get as much advice as you can take on what might "look good" on a resume, but I also knew a few classmates who tried for a minor that they thought would give them a one-up. In the end, they didn't like what they were studying, were too mentally exhausted to try harder, and just detested the class material so much that they then detested the work that came with it. And no employer's going to want to hire someone who isn't motivated to do their job, that's for sure.
Figure out what you would really like to do first. If you don't know, try out market yourself with what you have. If you then find something that you'd really like to go for but don't have what the education / experience, THEN you'll find the motivation to take more classes, and you'll know what you need to take.
...the concept of debuting an actual movie trailer as part of a plot in an actual TV program could not fit as seemlessly into too many other television shows.
I mean, imagine how it would sound debuting on Enterprise...
Mayweather: "Sir, we seem to be getting a faint signal eminating from the planet Zeridian-4 in the Bravidian System."
Captain Archer: "Damnit. We just got done smearing Klingon blood across the galaxy. What now?"
Mayweather: "Actually sir...it appears to be a very faint television signal!"
Captain Archer: "Wow. We're witnessing a new species develop radio technology for the first time. Just imagine how it must of felt when Earth transmitted its first wireless signals into space. Well, let's tune in, shall we?"
[STAR WARS trailor ensues...]
Mayweather: "Uh, sir, what the..."
Captain Archer: "Not a clue. What the hell is a "meesa" anyway? Hoshi, can you translate any of it? Are they hostile?"
Hoshi: "I don't know, captain. I didn't get enough of a sample of their language. But this "force" doesn't sound very friendly..."
And if the French had their way with everything, I would be reading my "Courriel" right now.
If the French really wants to make sure that French still survives as a world language, they need to get off their butts and conquer a few countries.
I find your pitiful attempt at making a public spectacle of your pathetically feigned lack of confidence in your own abilites nothing more than a sad nuisance to this otherwise well-established and intelectual forum. ...
Heheh...that's why I love Slashdot. No problem sounding like an intellectual jackass...got all the time in the world to edit my own words to make sure they come out just right! Now if I can just find a way to incorporate a "Preview" button into everyday conversation!
Back when I was a good ol' Nintendo player... I never really liked sports games. They were all the same...you had over twenty baseball games alone to choose from for the NES, they all got stale rather quickly...let's see here, there was "Baseball", "RBI Baseball", "RBI Baseball II", "Bases Loaded", "Bases Loaded II", "Bases Loaded III", "Bases Loaded IV"...
Then I found a friend who rented Baseball Simulator 1000. Baseball was unreal to the point where it was fun. Bunt on a "tornado pitch" that goes over 200 mph and you could get a home run! Choose to hit a "missle ball" and whoever was dumb enough to get in the way of the ball was carried all the way to the outfield fence, smacked against the wall, and knocked out cold for two seconds of play. The game added creativity to an otherwise stale game.
The other fun baseball-spinoff was Base Wars. Unless it was a force-out, you got to battle your opponent to determine if the base runner was out or safe (all the players were robots). When you won games, you got extra money to purchase for faster movement on the field, armor, or weapons that you could really use to waste your opponent with.
But I find sports games to be a lot like first-person shooters. Every year, you get about 50 new titles. On average, 49.5 of them are recycled from previous titles; the gameplay is always the same, just with different "maps" (a.k.a. "stadiums" in the sports genre) and different players to play with.
...but then, I wouldn't be serving my civic duty to /. , so here goes...
/.ers will argue something along the lines of, "The laws are crooked. They were written by rich RIAA-like bastards. We're rebelling against an unjust law, therefor it is just to rebel!" Sadly, vigilantism will not get you much further than a jail cell these days. Punal consequences aside, you are distributing something that is not yours and does not belong to you, therefore you have no right to pass it to others, through whatever medium you choose to do so with (CD or peer-to-peer). Best analogy I can think of is counterfeiting. You take faux productions of something, which themselves have no value assigned to them by a governmental power, and yet you illegally use it as if it has said power. It is theft. You choose to do it, fine by me. But you better be ready to face whatever consequences exist.
Queue "Rapists get less time" posts.
So what we need to do is lobby harder for longer prison sentences for rapists, rather than lobby for less prison time for software "distributors."
First, let's get one thing straight: what this guy did was illegal, in the sense that it was against the law (hate to be redundant, but it sets up my next point). Anyone who can't see that can't see straight.
Second, I know a lot of
Finally, there are those who will say that 15 years is too harsh a penalty. Well, last I checked, most rapes committed have "penalties" of 15 or more years, but most of those criminals actually have experience working the system where they can get out in seven years or less. And the other problem (I hate to get into a sociological discussion here, but...) is that society has been dealing with rapists since the beginning of time. We're accustomed to the crime being committed, and the sentences that are handed down have been shaped over changes in cultural views throughout the millenia. On the other hand, mass illegal software trade and distribution, as seen here, has been developing for the last 30 years (and really persecuted for the last 10). There's very little social precidence to base judgements on, and instead, judicial courts are basing their rulings merely on law, which takes us back to who writes the law...
The software industry are busy spanking poor college students who couldn't afford over-priced software
/. modders.
I was laughing so hard when I read this, then I read that someone modded it "insightful." Now I seriously question the rationality of
And I suppose we should leave the poor drug dealers alone because, I mean, they're only in their low-to-mid 20's and grew up in such poor neighborhoods. It would be so cruel to go after these poor kids who had it so rough. I mean, how can they afford such over-priced 5 karat diamond rings, necklaces, and earings? We should be going after the diamond cartels instead!
So cry me a river. In the mean time, this kid got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. So yea, he deserves a spanking.
Unfortunately, it looks as if a monumental ruling (at least, in /.'s eye) produces, in the end, nothing more than a disclaimer sticker on the front box.
o ngtous.html"
Sure enough, the new packages for Windows XP Home Edition and NAV 2005 direct you to Microsoft and Symantec web pages where those EULAs are posted.
Perfect. Another warning label. So we went from "Warning: By opening this package, you agree to the following terms of the EULA as explained on the enclosed CD" to, "Warning: By opening this package, you agree to the following terms of the EULA posted at http://www.screwtheconsumer.biz/allyourbasearebel
some people don't have to study to get good grades...I couldn't be bothered to spend that much time doing shit I already knew.
In my classroom I would call you a black hole. Not only do you take the teacher's time and suck it down that deep gravity well of arrogance but you end up sucking the energy from others who don't have that level of knowledge and really need some of it from whatever source they can get.
And you know what's great? Not only do I fight black holes like you, but I also fight another black hole, Yahoo Games. There are not a lot of people like you and me who are smart enough to absorb information like a sponge and retain it despite our inept study habbits, particularly referring to the electronic form. In the mean time, we end up sending the message to everybody else that drowning your mind in a melting pot of Flash entertainment will not harm our cognative development.
And the poor kids who have an attention span of a misquito end up losing.
Your post sounds like a boast of "Education failed me, but hell, I'm a success, and I'll be damned before I stop saying that nobody should give a rat's ass about public education." Thanks. Truth be told, you kinda remind me of roadkill. You think you're so bold when you dash across the highway, but your eyes are so close to the ground, you'll never get a chance to see the car coming before it runs you over.
She hated to hear someone say "that sucks" in class, so she would always remind us to replace it with her-choice euphamism: "that vacuums."
I think there's something to be said from this:
No matter what we try and harvest as an energy source, we're always going to screw up this planet in some way.
Of course, that is until the invention of Mr. Fusion!
Course, on the other hand, since we're already warming up the planet with global warming, perhaps we can use this "side effect" of Wind Energy to balance the equation!
Has this act influenced your Presidential vote?
This is simple. Why I voted for Kerry:
1) President Bush empowered himself to take the civil liberties away from US Citizens. The last president I remember really hacked away at rights explicitly stated in the US Constitution was John Adams (correct me if I'm wrong). Bush claims that it will only be used on terrorists, but merely being accused of being one automatically strips you of your civil liberties. Declared guilty before proven innocent. Even Timothy McVeigh still received a lawyer and a trial.
2) President Bush guarded nothing in Baghdad except the oil refinery. I truly believed up until I read about this that "liberating" Iraq was not because of the oil, but because Saddam was hiding something up his sleeve. I tried to convince everyone I could in Egypt that it wasn't about the oil.
You just gotta love reading this ruling, it actually makes me feel intelligent.
Before the printer runs the Toner Loading Program, it performs a "checksum operation," a "commonly used technique" to ensure the "integrity" of the data downloaded from the toner cartridge microchip.
Of course, you don't have to "understand" every piece of information presented in the ruling, but "understanding" what is written is a very "commonly used technique" to insure the "integrity" of communicating in the English language.
First, American businesses move to India because you can get well-educated and qualified employees for 1/15th the price. And Americans get pissed.
Now, Americans fly to India because you can get well-educated and qualified doctors for 1/15th the price.
So, what should the response be?
a) Hey, I lost my job and my insurance because it was outsourced to India, so the only way I can afford surgury is flying to India myself.
b) It's a global market in today's day and age, and India needs money.
c) The American health care industry is a bunch of theives. Now we can stick it to them.
d) I needed a vacation and heart surgury. Then I found a travel agent on the internet that promised me both! How could I say no?
e) Do as I say and not as I do.
I recommend just sticking a firewall up at the root of your network and blocking all traffic on port 80
..joke?
This is hilarious! Oh, and other advice to follow: "Don't drink water because thousands of people drown each year!"
If someone needs to access a site, have a system where they can request a site to be opened for access. Of course...you (as network admin) have final say.
Haaaaaa! My gut can hardly take it! Why should the admins waste time on securing the network when the admins can take their whole day manually relaying terabytes of internet data to workers? This is a great joke! I mean, then the admins can actually give permission to some perv at work when he needs to satisfy his daily allotment of porn! Keep the jokes comin!
Work is for work.
Wait a sec...you actually sound serious here...you mean...no
HAA HAA HAA! I can't believe someone thinks this is a solution! This is brilliant! Wait, this is more than brilliant! I mean, let's PAY MONEY for an internet connection and then block port 80 at the firewall so that no one can access the internet!
Oh wait...wait...I got the idea! How 'bout we also remove all the toilets from company bathrooms, so employees don't waste so much time reading the newspaper on the crapper!
Alright, rather than just "mod", here's my take on all of them:
... there are checks and balances to this system.
1) Electoral Reform - Oh brother. The electoral system is not broken. You should understand that the fact that a minority-vote-getter can become president actually proves that "Majority rules, minority rights" does exist in this country. Besides, electoral voting actually strengthens the individual vote (Miami-Dade county would not even exist if it wasn't for the 2000 vote).
2) Online Voting - my opinion, but I think there's more pressing issues than just the opportunity to vote online (besides, you don't get the obligatory "I voted" sticker).
3) Judiciary Appointment - this process was made to prevent stupid Joes from appointing judges. You can call it corruption, but Bush has had a *ton* of court appointments denied by Congress
4) AIDS - not unique. This question always appears in the debates, and they always have canned answers. "Blah blah, money for research, blah blah, I don't have AIDS, so I don't care, blah blah." Move on.
5) Supreme Court Justices - PICK THIS. Every president wants some "echo" of their power to last throughout the ages, and this dates all the way back to John Adams and the appointment of Federalist John Marshall. Ask this question, and you get a good mirror image of the policies you can expect from candidates themselves.
6) Marijuana vs. Alcohol - Hippie question. Alcohol is part of our culture, like it or abstain from it. No dance with Mary Jane. Move on.
7) Drug Fight - Don't ask -- you'll get another canned answer from the politicans. "DARE this, Community involvement that, but you gotta love the alcohol commercials!"
8) Medical Marijuana - Another canned response "Needs more research - need to make sure there's a way that it doesn't get abused." Not worth the breath, hippie. Go pack your bags and move to Holland.
9) Drug Provision for Financial Aid - Definately the way to Go. My gosh, this is a good question, and one I never thought about before. Poster definately has a point that those who have paid their time still deserve an education.
10 and 11) Draft - They'll all deny it, and everyone knows that. They may plan it, but they'll never admit to it. So don't bother to ask.
12) Focused goal on Alt. Fuels - Worth Asking, especially with the spin on the "10 year mission to the Moon" emphasis. It just goes to prove that things can get done if you really put your mind to it.
13) Child Abuse - Sad to say it, but skip it. What you need to stop this is GrassRoots - neighbor to neighbor, family to family, friend to friend, and teacher to student is the only way to fix abuse. Jail does not deter hate.
14) Animal Rights - Eat more meat. Death to PETA. Next.
15) Sex Ed - Thought Provoking - it's a good domestic question, because teenage pregnancy has always been a problem.
16) Home Schooling - Last I checked, Bush was supporting it with "No Child Left Behind." If he wasn't, he'll just plug it as another alternative to failing schools.
17) USA, the World Bully - Fine ask it, but the same question will be asked in the debates, and the answers will only be the same as what is said in the television commericals.
18) Isreal vs. Palestine - Don't ask, don't tell - it's been the policy for the last 50 years regarding the actions of Isreal. No US leader that I know will change that right now.
19) Integrate Family Values - Of course, the president has always been responsible for raising the children of the US-of-A. Need family values? Find a family that you can value.
20) Metric Conversion in the USA - thanks. I needed a laugh. Metric in the USA? That's hilarious.
21) Civil Marriage for Gay/Lesbian
Everyone in the IT industry needs money. Unfortunately, the company that needs it the most is Microsoft. Release a new OS every 3 years and a new Office suite every 2 years, price them insanely high (well, at least the Office suite), rewrite the platform to use a higher-higher language, which requires a faster CPU to process what really amounts to someone typing in the letter 'a', and pressure everyone to believe that yesterday's computer just isn't good enough for today's "software innovations."
...
Or perhaps instead it might be the little guy, you know, the independent tech consultant, promising you the "latest and greatest platform" to support your every need as a business. Really what he is doing is playing on your ignorance, buying the biggest and baddest machine he can get his hands on (so that a $800 consultants fee won't look as large compared to the $5000 server your company just purchased), and then playing your stupidity to lead you to believe that (for $120/hr), he's the only guy in the world who can support the platform for you. And all this time, he's just trying to feed his own business.
Our school district has these old IBM PC 315 Pentium Pro servers. Their idea was to throw them away. Well, all I did was take the RAM and HD from one computer, stick it in the other (64MB and 4GB doesn't really cut it anymore, but 128MB and 8GB still do), load them with Win98, Firefox, Thunderbird, Office 2000, and one of the teachers asked me if it was a new computer. Really, all it needed was more RAM and a reformat.
There are quality PC parts out there that are being thrown in the bin because people are led to believe that you absolutely have to have a 3 GHz, 1GB of RAM, 120GB hard drive system just to run multimedia apps in Internet Explorer. The only thing I told the staff at my school is that it won't play DivX. Then everyone looked at me and asked, what's DivX?
I love it when the last consultant hired convinced the district to buy a dual G5 XServe w/ 2GB RAM & 180GB SATA storage just to set up a file server for a total of 400 students and staff at the school. Love it even more when we already have a dual PIII, 1GB RAM, and RAID-5 140GB system doing that job already (and we're only using 22GB of hard disk space right now).
The problem is this: people want money, and they'll use as much FUD to sell you what you don't need. If a 5-foot high fence keeps the dog out, there ain't no reason to tear it down and build it higher.
No way will GW drop the "no-fly" list. They'll probably just add an exception to the rule:
"If the passenger is overweight, has grey hair, looks like someone kicked his face in, and turns so red in the face when you tell him he might be a terrorist that he looks like he's going to spontaneously combust, let him pass."
The Department of Homeland Security...recommended for security reasons using browsers other than Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
Well, no shit sherlock.
I do believe that Slashdot's slogan is "News for Nerds, stuff that matters."
/.ers will as well...I'd wager this thread will get about 1200 posts...any takers?)
Now, if you consider every single news flash regarding, oh say, SCO, more important than a movie that I believe will make a fundamental impact on the future of how politics are played out in America, the fine, avoid this thread. But personally, I think nerds should be just as educated about how their country is run politically as well as technologically.
And besides, one of the greatest lessons to be learned from this movie (though I would have thought it would have been learned much earlier than this) is as follows: Never try and forcefully hide information from the public. The more you try and supress it, the more intreaguing it becomes and the more demand there is for it. If you really do want to hide something, try to be as discrete about it as possible.
But as soon as Disney tried to put the movie away because of benefits they've received from the Bush family, the press pounced, and Moore had a documentary that was "scandalous", and just like Clinton has proved himself, people love a scandal (and I'm sure
I'll be the technology coordinator for a school district this coming fall. Now, I know there's a bunch of people out there who are gonna say "Those who don't know, teach." And they can just piss off. I'll tell you, the last tech coordinator I knew personally taught at my high school for four years and is now pursuing a doctorate while being the head of the technology development team at Indiana State University.
First, let me tell you: you need to be professional. That means cordial, exchanging pleasantries whenever possible, writing letters, as well as actually calling the human resources department personel and introducing yourself, if not in person. Believe it or not, professionalism will get you a lot further into acquiring a job then just sending out apps and waiting for something to happen.
Second, you gotta start somewhere. Example: banks always need IT support staff, but more often than not they hire internally. Start off as a bank teller. Sure, for a Comp. Sci. college grad it doesn't sound like a lot of money, but the perks are nice and it leaves plenty of room for growth. From experience, companies that have high demands for entry-level programming positions do so because it is easy to filter the qualified from the "they say that they're qualified, but...". It's simply because a company is not going to waste precious hiring-time to see if you can do the kind of work they demand if you've never done that kind of work before.
Or, try for tech support. Again, the pay ain't great, but every TS company has an IT support staff, and at the few I've applied to in the past couple years, all only hire for that internally, because they want someone who knows their systems and demands rather than some joe with an A+ cert. off the street.
Finally, even accept something lower. I did merchandinsing for CocaCola for a couple years, and they hired a lot of staff internally, including their IT support staff (well, if they did not find internally, they looked elsewhere, but the company knew that a lot of their workers are soon-to-be college grads who are looking for more qualified work, and it saves the company a lot of money not to have to advertise the position).
I suppose to sum everything up: climb the ladder. It's not fun, and you have to lower your expectations to start out with, but if you're as qualified as you say you are (and professional, I can't stress that enough), you'll get what you're looking for eventually.
This article at New York Times explains that Yahoo has decided to boost their E-mail space (Soul sucking registration required) from their current 4 megabytes to 100 in response to Gmail. They are also planning to offer 2 gig mailboxes for $19.99(USD)
Hmm. Now, let's figure out which business deal is better, shall we?
Do I either,
A) Pay $20 for a 2 gig Yahoo box, or
B) Open up 2 GMail accounts for free and still have 2 gigs of storage.
Now, the true genius will suddenly realize that if you open 3 accounts, that means you have 3 gigs of space, and that's more than 2 gigs that Yahoo offers. How many of you figured that one out?