If you give me a bat, and I break it over your head, would you give me another bat? If you have any shred of common sense, no, you wouldn't.
How many people do you think would want to fight for your freedom, if the first thing you do with it is stab them in the back? How many people do you think would die for you if you're so vehemently opposed to the cause that they are fighting for?
This isn't about freedom of speech, it is about human decency. Freedom of speech is wonderful, but if one has any shred of decency, one will at least show some form of respect for those who sacrifice their lives to defend the very freedoms that allow you to spit in their face.
I'll tell you what... Why don't you go to your local military base and say that to a soldier's face?
Judging by your tone of voice, you obviously don't understand that there are millions and millions of men and women who have sacrificed themselves so you can speak those very words of hatred for their cause. So, because they have signed their life away to defend you and your family, you are going to deny them the tools that could very well save their lives, and yours in the process, because you take issue with the politicians on Capitol Hill?
And since when did a country need to threaten the US in order for there to be justification of a war? The US is suddenly forbidden from coming to the defense of other nations? I'm sure the Kurds would love to speak with you - well, those that survived the gas attacks, that is.
Fuck politics, you can believe whatever you want to (by the way, thank a soldier for that), but the one thing you do not do is speak ill of a man who would die for you and your family.
Perhaps you could read the article, which states the reason why a ban was put into effect.
Spare, exposed lithium batteries are capable of shorting out. In response to the flaming cargo plane that graced Philadelphia a few months ago, I think the TSA is just trying to play it safe.
Read the article - it clearly states that installed batteries are exempt. Therefore, your cellphones, cameras, iPods and laptops aren't affected. They're talking about spare batteries that are loose in the luggage, and they even mention that placing your batteries in their original packaging or in a zip-lock bag is deemed a safe storage location that prevents shorting.
It took longer to type this response than it did to read and comprehend the article itself.
By that logic, analog audio would have died in the 80's and everything would have TOSLink/EIAJ Optical. Hell, up until two years ago I never had optical audio on a computer.
Seemingly "obsolete" and "slower" technologies have their uses, and in some cases can be better than ultra-bleeding-edge.
Oh, and if 480Mbps USB transfers can bog down a CPU, I'd pay to see what 5Gbps+ would do.
Made up? If you think it's trash, take it up with ISO. Your quarrel is with SI, not me. Go read a Wikipedia article on SI and gigabytes and maybe you'll get some sense knocked into you, Coward.
Do your research - your point is pretty much ass-backwards. The manufacturers are quoting their sizes in gigabytes, which are SI units defined as 10^9 bytes. A gibibyte is the familiar 2^30, 1024MB unit that we all associate as being a gigabyte.
Anyone with a few functioning brain cells would look at Wikipedia to see what, exactly, a gigabyte is! A gigabyte is a SI unit- literally, 1,000,000,000 bytes. What the layman thinks is a gigabyte (1024MB) is a gibibyte, a giga-binary-byte.
Seagate was being completely honest in their branding of the package. It's the operating system, still referring to a gibibyte as a gigabyte, that is "defrauding" users of that non-existent 7% that they seem to want so badly. Hell, the IEC even recommended about 8 years ago that everybody make that distinction between gibibytes and gigabytes, and refer to them properly to avoid the exact same confusion that brought this lawsuit about.
I believe that one of the most important questions to ask is not "Are Mac users smart enough", but rather, is Apple fast enough to hammer out a security update before a good portion of their userbase starts to get infected?
I think it's safe to say that the Mac is a relatively safe computing platform. However, it wasn't created as an infallible and invincible machine - it certainly has had its problems, but its strength lies in Apple's swiftness in determining and correcting the problems and security holes.
If Apple were anything like Microsoft when it came down to security updates and patching, Mac OS X would be just as vulnerable as any commercial UNIX system. (I'm not going to say it would be as vulnerable as Windows - different codebase, apples and oranges, etc.)
Uh, you probably use Windows. Moreover, you've most likely *never* used Mac OS X.
I'll give you a run for your money - most Windows users are pretentious drooling fan boys who think they're so 1337 because of their "pwnage" and think that messing with school computers makes them a "1337 haxx0r".
The key to shutting up all the marketing bimbos and "tech" columnists is to tell them to RTFM and build it themselves. Invite them to spend a week or two siting at a desk handling thousands of users who forgot their password, lost a file or couldn't use Outlook if their life depended on it. And on top of that, tell them to read up on AJAX and code a fully functional, production-quality corporate site within the week.
IT has been pressured into adopting numerous immature products and "solutions" (I despise that word) on the path to "corporate success" (another buzzword) I'll help all the buzzword bimbos out a bit by tipping them off to effective "solutions".
Chat: What the fuck did you want VOIP for if you're not going to make internal conference calls and use personal mailboxes? If you want to talk to 5, 10, 15 people at the same time... use your shiny new VoIP phone.
File Collaboration: Central FTP server and E-mail attachments. End of story.
Live news ticker/Dynamic information: PHP. Read up on "includes". If you really feel like it... throw in one little JavaScript application, but don't junk your web servers for "innovative technologies".
I'm wrong then... I know there's one system manufacturer who only sells through their own outlets, and I was damn sure that it was Apple, but I guess not. Would you happen to know who it is?
...I have yet to see any store that is *not* an Apple store carry Apple computers. This wasn't always the case, though, IIRC. In fact, in recent years Apple has disallowed third-party sales of new Apple systems for various reasons, including the price fluctuations that occur.
iPods and iPod accessories are a different beast - prices vary due to the large amounts of retail outlets that carry iPods and the resulting competition.
The only way to purchase a new Mac computer is through Apple Online or an Apple Store... as for used systems, that's what Craigslist and eBay are for. (MacMall is a good authorized used-system reseller, however)
This is why people are so reluctant to make the switch to Linux and BSD. Attempts to make the OS more stable and more convenient for the non-technical end-user, the very same userbase that we have been trying to reach for years, degrades into a semantics argument and we all tell those Windows n00bs to just "RTFM".
It amazes me that some people wonder why 2007 wasn't the "Year of the Linux Desktop" (and 2006, and 2005, and 2004...)
Free and Open Source software shouldn't be limited by the GPL. If somebody takes open-source libraries and incorporates them into a proprietary program, does it harm you at all? No, it doesn't. They've chosen to seek profit for their software, while you have chosen to freely distribute your work for use and derivative productions. In doing that, the creator of that open-source code hereby surrenders their right to restrict its use.
I can understand everyone's outrage if somebody was reselling an unmodified open-source program, but if your software is truly free, people should be allowed to do whatever they please with it. Make it better, make it worse, give it away or sell it at a price that makes even Photoshop look cheap. Such is the blessing of true freedom.
Not in-depth enough? Oi, every single issue was as in-depth as anyone would ever need. It just seemed to me like they focused way too much on *one topic* in every issue, and they narrowed that topic greatly to the point where there was really nothing I could use and no lessons that I could take away from that magazine. (Synchronizing Scyld/VRTS disks over a network in Python is in-depth enough. I remember one issue a year ago that pretty much covered only that topic. Every additional page in the magazine contained no useful information, no tips, no best practices - in other words, printed toilet paper.) But really, the approach that SysAdmin took was to just hand out the fish instead of giving fishing lessons. As much as I hated grade school and college and just wanted the answers, it was a good feeling to know that I could learn to solve them myself.
Maybe if SysAdmin would take off the blinders and focus on SysAdmins in general rather than certain subsectors of system administration they would greatly expand their userbase and they wouldn't be having this problem.
And everything they sell is at least 50% more expensive than it's PC-based counterpart.
I don't know what orifice you're pulling your "facts" out of, but I know from experience that the MacBook Pro is a Damn Good Deal (TM).
Mine retails for $2300-2400 directly from Apple with the 3-year Apple Protection Plan (support+warranty), whereas an Alienware laptop with the exact same specifications (Core2Duo 2.33Ghz, 2GB Dual-channel DDR2, 120GB SATA, 8x DVD+/-RW DL Drive, 15.4-inch widescreen) and a 3-year warranty was priced direct from Alienware at $3300. The only difference with the Alienware was the video card (They offered an nVidia Go7600 which is comparable to my MRadeon x1600), and the hard drive in the Alienware was 40GB larger.
If you ever bother to touch a Mac (based on your blind prejudice towards Windows, I'm guessing you never will) you'll instantly see why people are drawn to them. I'm a Windows/Linux aficionado and have been for ten years before I switched to a Mac (two weeks ago) and I don't regret the move at all.
The New York Times is the same newspaper that, two years ago, released a very long, very fact-barren cover story, and later ADMITTED that everything in the article was a blatant lie.
The NY Times I don't think we need to delve any deeper. This is the same newspaper that hid the JFK terror plot in the corner, underneath 30 other pages of their shoddy reporting.
I agree, AI is not the best solution when determining intent... however it seems like this idea of a "tazerbot" is decades off. Maybe in the meantime people will realize what a stupid idea this is.
Wishful Thinking is the reason why money is being funneled into projects like this when so much could be done to improve the justice system itself (And no, I'm not whining like a rapper). For a start... let's take the Robocop money and empty the prisons by deporting the major chunk of the prison population that are illegal immigrants. Maybe then we'd have enough room for our competent carbon-based officers to lock up more violent offenders.
"If someone is severely punished by an autonomous robot, who are you going to take to a tribunal?" As a member of a society that's relatively ass-backwards on morals and standards (America, more specifically), I must ask... why are we concerned more about punishing the officer than punishing the criminal?  This robot won't be punishing speeders or jaywalkers with a firm tazering, it would apprehend violent/armed criminals who have an intent to do harm.
Slashdot Mirror
If you give me a bat, and I break it over your head, would you give me another bat? If you have any shred of common sense, no, you wouldn't.
How many people do you think would want to fight for your freedom, if the first thing you do with it is stab them in the back? How many people do you think would die for you if you're so vehemently opposed to the cause that they are fighting for?
This isn't about freedom of speech, it is about human decency. Freedom of speech is wonderful, but if one has any shred of decency, one will at least show some form of respect for those who sacrifice their lives to defend the very freedoms that allow you to spit in their face.
I'll tell you what... Why don't you go to your local military base and say that to a soldier's face?
Judging by your tone of voice, you obviously don't understand that there are millions and millions of men and women who have sacrificed themselves so you can speak those very words of hatred for their cause. So, because they have signed their life away to defend you and your family, you are going to deny them the tools that could very well save their lives, and yours in the process, because you take issue with the politicians on Capitol Hill?
And since when did a country need to threaten the US in order for there to be justification of a war? The US is suddenly forbidden from coming to the defense of other nations? I'm sure the Kurds would love to speak with you - well, those that survived the gas attacks, that is.
Fuck politics, you can believe whatever you want to (by the way, thank a soldier for that), but the one thing you do not do is speak ill of a man who would die for you and your family.
There goes my karma, but it was worth it.
Perhaps you could read the article, which states the reason why a ban was put into effect.
Spare, exposed lithium batteries are capable of shorting out. In response to the flaming cargo plane that graced Philadelphia a few months ago, I think the TSA is just trying to play it safe.
Read the article - it clearly states that installed batteries are exempt. Therefore, your cellphones, cameras, iPods and laptops aren't affected. They're talking about spare batteries that are loose in the luggage, and they even mention that placing your batteries in their original packaging or in a zip-lock bag is deemed a safe storage location that prevents shorting.
It took longer to type this response than it did to read and comprehend the article itself.
Optical connect? 5GBps? (Or was that 5Gbps?)
By that logic, analog audio would have died in the 80's and everything would have TOSLink/EIAJ Optical. Hell, up until two years ago I never had optical audio on a computer.
Seemingly "obsolete" and "slower" technologies have their uses, and in some cases can be better than ultra-bleeding-edge.
Oh, and if 480Mbps USB transfers can bog down a CPU, I'd pay to see what 5Gbps+ would do.
Made up? If you think it's trash, take it up with ISO. Your quarrel is with SI, not me. Go read a Wikipedia article on SI and gigabytes and maybe you'll get some sense knocked into you, Coward.
Do your research - your point is pretty much ass-backwards. The manufacturers are quoting their sizes in gigabytes, which are SI units defined as 10^9 bytes. A gibibyte is the familiar 2^30, 1024MB unit that we all associate as being a gigabyte.
Anyone with a few functioning brain cells would look at Wikipedia to see what, exactly, a gigabyte is! A gigabyte is a SI unit- literally, 1,000,000,000 bytes. What the layman thinks is a gigabyte (1024MB) is a gibibyte, a giga-binary-byte.
Seagate was being completely honest in their branding of the package. It's the operating system, still referring to a gibibyte as a gigabyte, that is "defrauding" users of that non-existent 7% that they seem to want so badly. Hell, the IEC even recommended about 8 years ago that everybody make that distinction between gibibytes and gigabytes, and refer to them properly to avoid the exact same confusion that brought this lawsuit about.
I believe that one of the most important questions to ask is not "Are Mac users smart enough", but rather, is Apple fast enough to hammer out a security update before a good portion of their userbase starts to get infected?
I think it's safe to say that the Mac is a relatively safe computing platform. However, it wasn't created as an infallible and invincible machine - it certainly has had its problems, but its strength lies in Apple's swiftness in determining and correcting the problems and security holes.
If Apple were anything like Microsoft when it came down to security updates and patching, Mac OS X would be just as vulnerable as any commercial UNIX system. (I'm not going to say it would be as vulnerable as Windows - different codebase, apples and oranges, etc.)
Uh, you probably use Windows. Moreover, you've most likely *never* used Mac OS X. I'll give you a run for your money - most Windows users are pretentious drooling fan boys who think they're so 1337 because of their "pwnage" and think that messing with school computers makes them a "1337 haxx0r".
Stop the light pollution... tint your windows.
The key to shutting up all the marketing bimbos and "tech" columnists is to tell them to RTFM and build it themselves. Invite them to spend a week or two siting at a desk handling thousands of users who forgot their password, lost a file or couldn't use Outlook if their life depended on it. And on top of that, tell them to read up on AJAX and code a fully functional, production-quality corporate site within the week.
IT has been pressured into adopting numerous immature products and "solutions" (I despise that word) on the path to "corporate success" (another buzzword) I'll help all the buzzword bimbos out a bit by tipping them off to effective "solutions".
Chat: What the fuck did you want VOIP for if you're not going to make internal conference calls and use personal mailboxes? If you want to talk to 5, 10, 15 people at the same time... use your shiny new VoIP phone.
File Collaboration: Central FTP server and E-mail attachments. End of story.
Live news ticker/Dynamic information: PHP. Read up on "includes". If you really feel like it... throw in one little JavaScript application, but don't junk your web servers for "innovative technologies".
I'm wrong then... I know there's one system manufacturer who only sells through their own outlets, and I was damn sure that it was Apple, but I guess not. Would you happen to know who it is?
...I have yet to see any store that is *not* an Apple store carry Apple computers. This wasn't always the case, though, IIRC. In fact, in recent years Apple has disallowed third-party sales of new Apple systems for various reasons, including the price fluctuations that occur.
iPods and iPod accessories are a different beast - prices vary due to the large amounts of retail outlets that carry iPods and the resulting competition.
The only way to purchase a new Mac computer is through Apple Online or an Apple Store... as for used systems, that's what Craigslist and eBay are for. (MacMall is a good authorized used-system reseller, however)
This is why people are so reluctant to make the switch to Linux and BSD. Attempts to make the OS more stable and more convenient for the non-technical end-user, the very same userbase that we have been trying to reach for years, degrades into a semantics argument and we all tell those Windows n00bs to just "RTFM".
It amazes me that some people wonder why 2007 wasn't the "Year of the Linux Desktop" (and 2006, and 2005, and 2004...)
This post brought to you by Solaris 10.
Free and Open Source software shouldn't be limited by the GPL. If somebody takes open-source libraries and incorporates them into a proprietary program, does it harm you at all? No, it doesn't. They've chosen to seek profit for their software, while you have chosen to freely distribute your work for use and derivative productions. In doing that, the creator of that open-source code hereby surrenders their right to restrict its use.
I can understand everyone's outrage if somebody was reselling an unmodified open-source program, but if your software is truly free, people should be allowed to do whatever they please with it. Make it better, make it worse, give it away or sell it at a price that makes even Photoshop look cheap. Such is the blessing of true freedom.
Q: How do you address a visit and speech from an MPAA official? ...
A:Publicly announce that his speech will be freely available for download.
Not in-depth enough? Oi, every single issue was as in-depth as anyone would ever need. It just seemed to me like they focused way too much on *one topic* in every issue, and they narrowed that topic greatly to the point where there was really nothing I could use and no lessons that I could take away from that magazine. (Synchronizing Scyld/VRTS disks over a network in Python is in-depth enough. I remember one issue a year ago that pretty much covered only that topic. Every additional page in the magazine contained no useful information, no tips, no best practices - in other words, printed toilet paper.) But really, the approach that SysAdmin took was to just hand out the fish instead of giving fishing lessons. As much as I hated grade school and college and just wanted the answers, it was a good feeling to know that I could learn to solve them myself.
Maybe if SysAdmin would take off the blinders and focus on SysAdmins in general rather than certain subsectors of system administration they would greatly expand their userbase and they wouldn't be having this problem.
Mine retails for $2300-2400 directly from Apple with the 3-year Apple Protection Plan (support+warranty), whereas an Alienware laptop with the exact same specifications (Core2Duo 2.33Ghz, 2GB Dual-channel DDR2, 120GB SATA, 8x DVD+/-RW DL Drive, 15.4-inch widescreen) and a 3-year warranty was priced direct from Alienware at $3300. The only difference with the Alienware was the video card (They offered an nVidia Go7600 which is comparable to my MRadeon x1600), and the hard drive in the Alienware was 40GB larger.
If you ever bother to touch a Mac (based on your blind prejudice towards Windows, I'm guessing you never will) you'll instantly see why people are drawn to them. I'm a Windows/Linux aficionado and have been for ten years before I switched to a Mac (two weeks ago) and I don't regret the move at all.
The New York Times is the same newspaper that, two years ago, released a very long, very fact-barren cover story, and later ADMITTED that everything in the article was a blatant lie.
s e/2007/01/04/ny_times_admits_to_a_blatant_lie
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/JaniceShawCrou
I agree, AI is not the best solution when determining intent... however it seems like this idea of a "tazerbot" is decades off. Maybe in the meantime people will realize what a stupid idea this is.
Wishful Thinking is the reason why money is being funneled into projects like this when so much could be done to improve the justice system itself (And no, I'm not whining like a rapper). For a start... let's take the Robocop money and empty the prisons by deporting the major chunk of the prison population that are illegal immigrants. Maybe then we'd have enough room for our competent carbon-based officers to lock up more violent offenders.
to be hypocritical when it comes to security.
Two words. "alpine" and "dottie".