The simple truth is that the US is at least as corrupt as Mexico
Wait a second. Do you seriously believe that? Can you so easily dismiss the corruption that permeates the Mexican society (yes, not only the political institutions)? It's a corruption so pervasive, people take it for granted and live by it.
The USA certainly has the faults you listed, I won't deny any of those, but to say that it's more corrupted than Mexico?
in a gesture of support for the four men hackers have begun assaulting plaintiff websites, beginning with that of the The International Federation of the Pornographic Industry.
An XP "downgrade" can only be purchased with a Business or Ultimate version of Vista. So if a customer is looking at a configure-to-order laptop such as with Dell or Lenovo, then in many cases customers have to upgrade their OS from Home Basic or Home Premium in order to get the XP downgrade option.
Is this charging more for XP...in many people's minds, yes. But legally (Full disclosure: IANAL), they are paying for the Vista upgrade, not for the XP downgrade.
If I present you two hardware-wise identical laptops, both downgraded (or upgraded, being that Vista is a POS) to WindowsXP, but one was running Vista Home and the other Vista Business, would you be able to tell the difference? Would there be any difference at all, between the two laptops? Of course not.
It's very easy to argue that Microsoft is in fact milking the customers for all they're worth, by actually charging them for the downgrade to XP.
I don't even have to remember Facebook - I still remember Facebook Beacon, and it wasn't pretty.
Facebook's policy seems to be: let's try to screw our customers as hard as possible - after all, what other way there is to see how much they'll take? Facebook reminds me of another company with a similar modus operando: Microsoft. Which, perchance, happens to be one of Facebook's largest investors.
shit, either. A year or two ago, they were on the mat for following browsing habits even after the user is logged off. Sure, there was a "big backlash", but as you can see, the Facebook management didn't learn a thing.
Oh, reading the comments, it doesn't seem that people remember that event, at all. I guess Facebook are right to try, again and again. Rape their users for all they're worth.
That is not necessarily true:It is a well established fact that human beings are motivated by the consequences of their actions, be that positive of negative consequences. I am sorry that I am putting it in such high-level form, but it's for brevity.
Awareness of a certain punishment (whether death is the worst punishment or not, is an argument I won't get into) has an effect on the actions of individuals - the effect of negative consequences of certain actions is such as to decrease the motivation of individuals to perform such actions.
While there may be a desire for revenge on the part of a victim's family and friends, that does not change the fact that a negative consequence associated with a crime, has a deterrent effect.
Sometimes races are a good thing. Sure, it's a sign of the imperfection of the human being as such... but we are what we are. And racing after a prestigious prize is sometimes the best motivation for groundbreaking science.
Rather than whine that this won't get us peace in the world, I'd choose to be glad that humanity can pull off some stunning scientific breakthroughs.
For the record, Fermilab were supposed to retire the Tevatron, since the LHC obsoletes it - so the US team is not completely imbued by nationalistic sentiment. But, Tevatron seems to be the biggest show in town for a while, no need for the false modesty.
The scientific journal publishers (Elsevier/Science Direct etc.) are the worst of the worst of humanity. Scientists across the world work for a pittance (we have the worst salaries, even janitors earn more) researching and trying to contribute something that will benefit the whole humanity. They try to publish their research, but while doing so they accept to - give copyrights of their text to the publisher - give copyrights to all the pictures in the paper to the publisher - PAY for their work to be published
At the same time - other scientists review these papers for free
And finally - the publisher charges EVERYONE (including us, the scientists who wrote the article) to access the material.
WHAT the FUCK is wrong with the academic world? I mean, I see all my colleagues bend over to take it up the ass from the publishers. Elsevier has basically a licence to print money - you coulnd't find a better business model, since everything is done by others, including review and editing.
Fuck you Elsevier, IEEE and also Nature (not as scummy, but fuck you, too) etc.
I for one extremely dislike virtual keyboards. It's quite clumsy to type on them, unless you have a stylus, and even then I'd prefer Graffiti.
Not to mention that they are impossible to use by blind people, and hard to use by visually-impaired people.
Sure, I know Slashdot readers don't give a fuck about the needs of impaired people - but it's a minority that has otherwise great potential. I'd love to see manufacturers targeting specifically blind and visually-impaired people as part of their strategy.
It is effectively 2 years after the initial release. Vista came out in what, 2006?
This is very true, and your post deserves to be modded +10, not just +5. The only way to mod it +10 is to have another post containing this same, at +5 as well.
I find it amazing that with a super fast modern CPU and 4GB RAM I am still able to render my PC unresponsive for a few seconds - in both Windows and Linux!
Exactly! This puzzles me all the time - simply because I know it doesn't have to be like that! BeOS users are ones of the few that don't take this as a normal behaviour. Various GHz of CPU frequency and GBs of RAM, 16x PCI-E, much faster hard-drives... and still, from time to time, your OS is unresponsive. It's hard to accept.
I have actually used BeOS a lot, mostly for composing. I have experienced the highest level of responsiveness from an OS with BeOS - this is still unsurpassed. When I talk about responsiveness, I specifically mean it from the point of view of the user. Applications that play some kind of media (be it MIDI, audio or video of any kind) will never, under any circumstance, be interrupted by any other process. If you copy a file while playing a video, it will not skip. The file may not copy as fast at times, or other processes may slow down, but the video will not skip. In addition to this, the user commands, be it with the mouse or with the keyboard, are always taken into consideration. No "hourglass" or other bullshit. I don't know how BeOS was engineered to achieve this, I only know that no other OS I used during and since then, achieved this sort of responsiveness.
I've used Linux a lot, and am definitely a fan of some distros, and I also like OS X quite a bit, but neither are 100% "committed" to my whim. With BeOS, what I want is listened to and executed, and fuck everything else. I guess this means BeOS would be a terrible server OS - but very often I miss exactly this kind of behaviour.
If Haiku manages to achieve the same characteristics, it will be for me, the best desktop operating system in the world. I specifically look for support of modern CPUs, chipsets, graphics cards and soundcards. Perhaps not all of them, or even not most of them, but the ones that will be supported will appear in my house.
The post you critique claims that Josephus quoted the Tanach, not the other way around.
I am well aware of that. And I tried to say that there is no circular citation. Thanks also to the fact that the Tanach predates Josephus by about a thousand years (for the newer books).
But the "right" to not be defamed is not defined in the constitution, so doesn't the right to free speech over-ride the "right" not to be defamed?
I am not a lawyer, and am going purely on common sense here: I think that the right of to not be defamed (I didn't put those sarcastic quotes of yours) is a basic human right.
The Hebrew Bible (Tanach? I think the Torah is part of the Tanach, which should be most of the Old Testament. I might be rusty on this) does not quote Josephus' Antiquities, so your example doesn't quite fit.
There, federal rail, and unified communication. Oh, and don't let the NRPC or the USPS run this, they have enough problems.
A quick digression regarding the USPS: I don't know exactly what problems the USPS has, but as someone living outside the US and regularly receiving parcels of different size, mostly sent by USPS, I have to say that I'm extremely satisfied with their service. Not a single parcel damaged, not a single parcel lost - never, ever ever. And I received about 350 parcels from the USA sent by USPS. Contrast that with UPS which have managed to damage every and each parcel I got through them, at least a little bit. Some were even punctured through with something 10-20mm in diameter, damaging the content.
Add to that that the USPS prices are very competitive compared to European postal services (and compared to the infamous UPS), and you can see why I am so happy with USPS, even though I am not even a US citizen.
They didn't feel they had any choice when the school principal decided to back up the teacher about the kid having an "inappropriate book in class" (seriously now, the works of Jules Verne are inappropriate??????)
It's almost unbelievable, but sadly, the depth of human stupidity are endless. I wish I could have been a little fly on the wall hearing the principal and the teacher actually exclaim that with a straight face.
But, all is well what ends well, at least for your friend's family. Yeah, it'll cost them money, but it will be well spent. Tough a big part of me wants to hope that there are public schools with higher standards of teaching.
The argument about cheap labour: it has always been the political elite (in the US that is identical or overlapping with industrialists or large shareholders) that lobbied against enforcing immigration law - because their factories needed the cheap labour. It's not the ordinary people that support the illegal immigrants.
Incidentally, could you tell us what steps did your friend (the father of the bright kid) do in response to her being sent home "with warnings"? I must say, I got quite infuriated when I read that.
Slashdot Mirror
The simple truth is that the US is at least as corrupt as Mexico
Wait a second. Do you seriously believe that? Can you so easily dismiss the corruption that permeates the Mexican society (yes, not only the political institutions)? It's a corruption so pervasive, people take it for granted and live by it.
The USA certainly has the faults you listed, I won't deny any of those, but to say that it's more corrupted than Mexico?
in a gesture of support for the four men hackers have begun assaulting plaintiff websites, beginning with that of the The International Federation of the Pornographic Industry.
And I'm not that into pr0n, either.
Only on Slashdot can a post that confuses power (watt) and energy (watt-hour) be modded +3 Interesting.
An XP "downgrade" can only be purchased with a Business or Ultimate version of Vista. So if a customer is looking at a configure-to-order laptop such as with Dell or Lenovo, then in many cases customers have to upgrade their OS from Home Basic or Home Premium in order to get the XP downgrade option.
Is this charging more for XP...in many people's minds, yes. But legally (Full disclosure: IANAL), they are paying for the Vista upgrade, not for the XP downgrade.
If I present you two hardware-wise identical laptops, both downgraded (or upgraded, being that Vista is a POS) to WindowsXP, but one was running Vista Home and the other Vista Business, would you be able to tell the difference? Would there be any difference at all, between the two laptops? Of course not.
It's very easy to argue that Microsoft is in fact milking the customers for all they're worth, by actually charging them for the downgrade to XP.
I don't even have to remember Facebook - I still remember Facebook Beacon, and it wasn't pretty.
Facebook's policy seems to be: let's try to screw our customers as hard as possible - after all, what other way there is to see how much they'll take? Facebook reminds me of another company with a similar modus operando: Microsoft. Which, perchance, happens to be one of Facebook's largest investors.
Thank you for that. It restored my faith in humankind.
Note: no comma was (ab)used in this post.
shit, either. A year or two ago, they were on the mat for following browsing habits even after the user is logged off. Sure, there was a "big backlash", but as you can see, the Facebook management didn't learn a thing.
Oh, reading the comments, it doesn't seem that people remember that event, at all. I guess Facebook are right to try, again and again. Rape their users for all they're worth.
That is not necessarily true:It is a well established fact that human beings are motivated by the consequences of their actions, be that positive of negative consequences. I am sorry that I am putting it in such high-level form, but it's for brevity.
Awareness of a certain punishment (whether death is the worst punishment or not, is an argument I won't get into) has an effect on the actions of individuals - the effect of negative consequences of certain actions is such as to decrease the motivation of individuals to perform such actions.
While there may be a desire for revenge on the part of a victim's family and friends, that does not change the fact that a negative consequence associated with a crime, has a deterrent effect.
Sometimes races are a good thing. Sure, it's a sign of the imperfection of the human being as such... but we are what we are. And racing after a prestigious prize is sometimes the best motivation for groundbreaking science.
Rather than whine that this won't get us peace in the world, I'd choose to be glad that humanity can pull off some stunning scientific breakthroughs.
For the record, Fermilab were supposed to retire the Tevatron, since the LHC obsoletes it - so the US team is not completely imbued by nationalistic sentiment. But, Tevatron seems to be the biggest show in town for a while, no need for the false modesty.
Put some advertising on all that media coverage and use that money to pay some of the lawyers fees.
I'd positively enjoy seeing product placements in a trial!
The scientific journal publishers (Elsevier/Science Direct etc.) are the worst of the worst of humanity. Scientists across the world work for a pittance (we have the worst salaries, even janitors earn more) researching and trying to contribute something that will benefit the whole humanity. They try to publish their research, but while doing so they accept to
- give copyrights of their text to the publisher
- give copyrights to all the pictures in the paper to the publisher
- PAY for their work to be published
At the same time
- other scientists review these papers for free
And finally
- the publisher charges EVERYONE (including us, the scientists who wrote the article) to access the material.
WHAT the FUCK is wrong with the academic world? I mean, I see all my colleagues bend over to take it up the ass from the publishers. Elsevier has basically a licence to print money - you coulnd't find a better business model, since everything is done by others, including review and editing.
Fuck you Elsevier, IEEE and also Nature (not as scummy, but fuck you, too) etc.
I for one extremely dislike virtual keyboards. It's quite clumsy to type on them, unless you have a stylus, and even then I'd prefer Graffiti.
Not to mention that they are impossible to use by blind people, and hard to use by visually-impaired people.
Sure, I know Slashdot readers don't give a fuck about the needs of impaired people - but it's a minority that has otherwise great potential. I'd love to see manufacturers targeting specifically blind and visually-impaired people as part of their strategy.
It is effectively 2 years after the initial release. Vista came out in what, 2006?
This is very true, and your post deserves to be modded +10, not just +5. The only way to mod it +10 is to have another post containing this same, at +5 as well.
Mods, you know what to do.
I find it amazing that with a super fast modern CPU and 4GB RAM I am still able to render my PC unresponsive for a few seconds - in both Windows and Linux!
Exactly! This puzzles me all the time - simply because I know it doesn't have to be like that! BeOS users are ones of the few that don't take this as a normal behaviour. Various GHz of CPU frequency and GBs of RAM, 16x PCI-E, much faster hard-drives... and still, from time to time, your OS is unresponsive. It's hard to accept.
I have actually used BeOS a lot, mostly for composing. I have experienced the highest level of responsiveness from an OS with BeOS - this is still unsurpassed. When I talk about responsiveness, I specifically mean it from the point of view of the user. Applications that play some kind of media (be it MIDI, audio or video of any kind) will never, under any circumstance, be interrupted by any other process. If you copy a file while playing a video, it will not skip. The file may not copy as fast at times, or other processes may slow down, but the video will not skip. In addition to this, the user commands, be it with the mouse or with the keyboard, are always taken into consideration. No "hourglass" or other bullshit. I don't know how BeOS was engineered to achieve this, I only know that no other OS I used during and since then, achieved this sort of responsiveness.
I've used Linux a lot, and am definitely a fan of some distros, and I also like OS X quite a bit, but neither are 100% "committed" to my whim. With BeOS, what I want is listened to and executed, and fuck everything else. I guess this means BeOS would be a terrible server OS - but very often I miss exactly this kind of behaviour.
If Haiku manages to achieve the same characteristics, it will be for me, the best desktop operating system in the world. I specifically look for support of modern CPUs, chipsets, graphics cards and soundcards. Perhaps not all of them, or even not most of them, but the ones that will be supported will appear in my house.
The post you critique claims that Josephus quoted the Tanach, not the other way around.
I am well aware of that. And I tried to say that there is no circular citation. Thanks also to the fact that the Tanach predates Josephus by about a thousand years (for the newer books).
But the "right" to not be defamed is not defined in the constitution, so doesn't the right to free speech over-ride the "right" not to be defamed?
I am not a lawyer, and am going purely on common sense here: I think that the right of to not be defamed (I didn't put those sarcastic quotes of yours) is a basic human right.
The Hebrew Bible (Tanach? I think the Torah is part of the Tanach, which should be most of the Old Testament. I might be rusty on this) does not quote Josephus' Antiquities, so your example doesn't quite fit.
There, federal rail, and unified communication. Oh, and don't let the NRPC or the USPS run this, they have enough problems.
A quick digression regarding the USPS: I don't know exactly what problems the USPS has, but as someone living outside the US and regularly receiving parcels of different size, mostly sent by USPS, I have to say that I'm extremely satisfied with their service. Not a single parcel damaged, not a single parcel lost - never, ever ever. And I received about 350 parcels from the USA sent by USPS. Contrast that with UPS which have managed to damage every and each parcel I got through them, at least a little bit. Some were even punctured through with something 10-20mm in diameter, damaging the content.
Add to that that the USPS prices are very competitive compared to European postal services (and compared to the infamous UPS), and you can see why I am so happy with USPS, even though I am not even a US citizen.
They didn't feel they had any choice when the school principal decided to back up the teacher about the kid having an "inappropriate book in class" (seriously now, the works of Jules Verne are inappropriate??????)
It's almost unbelievable, but sadly, the depth of human stupidity are endless. I wish I could have been a little fly on the wall hearing the principal and the teacher actually exclaim that with a straight face.
But, all is well what ends well, at least for your friend's family. Yeah, it'll cost them money, but it will be well spent. Tough a big part of me wants to hope that there are public schools with higher standards of teaching.
Yes but now they can only be infected with 3 viruses, and then subsequent ones will fail to install!
You give Microsoft too much credit.
And of course, we know that the better product, especially if it's software, wins.
The argument about cheap labour: it has always been the political elite (in the US that is identical or overlapping with industrialists or large shareholders) that lobbied against enforcing immigration law - because their factories needed the cheap labour. It's not the ordinary people that support the illegal immigrants.
Great post.
Incidentally, could you tell us what steps did your friend (the father of the bright kid) do in response to her being sent home "with warnings"? I must say, I got quite infuriated when I read that.
I see that you have countered each of the grandparent's points, one by one, with your own arguments.