Oh, yeah. I have a degree. It's in a non-technical field, but I can at least check off the "college graduate" on my list.
Still. The problem is when you work in "the real world", it's: no college degree college degree. When you work in a university, it's: no college degree undergrad degree graduate degree Ph.D. post-doc asst. professor tenured professor assoc. professor full professor. I'm still way far down on that foodchain, even though I have no plans to move up it.
Well, if I'm being honest, it's a good job. I wish it paid more, but we do live out in the hills, not in a major city. Most of the faculty look down on us, but then, most faculty look down on everyone everywhere. But, someone did offer to buy me some nice dark beer the other day because I printed a poster out for him on our plotter on like 2 hours notice. I do get pretty good toys - I told them recently if I was going to be Macintosh support, I would need a Mac computer at my desk at work, so I could play with it and figure out how things worked (I'm no OSX guru). They turned around and bought me a 17" powerbook. Which... is bigger than I needed - I mean, it's huge - but they did make it happen when I said I needed it. As far as conferences go, they will send us to conferences if it's important.
I'm trying to get them to send me to a VMWare conference soon, because our new lovely remote login cluster (20 dual xeon dual core 4GB ram machines, mostly used for instructional teaching for programming classes - C++, java, intro to unix is there somewhere, MPI stuff, networking, etc)... with some of the funding we're going to be getting in the future, I'd love to get a fiber-channel SAN and re-image these servers so they're running VMWare, so I can use it to seamlessly shift the load to under-used nodes. They all support virtualization-on-cpu, and IPVS is good, but it's not perfect, at load balancing. I envision a setup where if a node gets overloaded (compared to peer nodes), it will move the VM to an underutilized node (move the configuration and the RAM contents over the network, which is switch gigabit), and then up the VM on the new node with the same hard drive slice from the SAN. But that's something that I don't know how to make work at the moment. It sounds like a fun project, though =).
And in the interest of full disclosure, I am probably over dramatizing my workload somewhat - but the beginning of fall semester is especially rough. I use the term "40 hour work week" loosely, as over the past 3 weeks, I've probably averaged 55 or so hours over 6 days per week. And I'm not kidding about how annoying the door lock updates are. Honestly, though, once midterms have passed, everyone gets into cruising mode, and I can kick back and relax a little, and do some long-term project work, or even just take a few minutes to catch my breath.
Virginia has screwed the pooch on the budget again, this year, though. So everyone watch out for either a 7.5% tuition hike, or a 7.5% reduction in operating budget on the horizon. *Crosses fingers*.
Case in point: I'm the linux admin for the place that I work (a Computer Science department at a university). I support linux-on-desktop, our remote login cluster, a bunch of random servers that faculty members decide they need because "I need feature X that is [so insanely out of date | so insanely bleeding edge] that our infrastructure isn't going to support it". I manage licenses for a dozen mathematical, statistical, and otherwise proprietary closed source programs. Lately, the Mac guy quit, so all of a sudden, I'm also the support for the Macintosh folks. I manage the linux backup rotation, which is all nightly rsync-based. I handle the linux half of our windows domain / ldap / kerberos / nfs-automount / samba / cifs single log-on system. I also am still the admin for a handful of Sun servers, and (believe it or not) a few DEC Alphas we have running Tru/64 (or whatever the hell it's called now) Unix. I can't tell you how many projects have been installed/written/maintained by Graduate students who have since left school that fall into my lap when the faculty member realizes no one is maintaining random-app-that-no-one-uses-but-must-always-be-wor king. Oh, I also am in charge of maintaining the stock of toner for the 25-odd different laser printers we have, and distributing it out to people when they come knocking.
What am I spending about 8-10 hours of my 40 hour work week on lately? The powers that be decided that they could fire the part-time student work-study that we used to have to do odd IT jobs, and now, I manage 30-odd card-swipe door locks, which a monkey could do, and which are a huge time sink, considering they're spread out across 3 buildings among 5 square miles, and everyone wants them updated at least three times a week. So, I have to cart one of two different laptops to each physical key card lock and update them.
If I don't get around to moving your Laserjet printer from computer A to computer B, configuring the cups server, and reconfiguring all other 9 computers in your project lab to print to the new server today, it's cause I'm freaking busy. If I can't figure out why your mouse doesn't refocus on matlab on your home linux box when you SSH into the cluster and display the graphical component locally, I'm sorry. If I can't get your bleeding-edge hot off the assembly line wireless card to work in any of [fedora core 5 | fedora core 6 | ubuntu | Centos 5.0] with several different kernels and everything from the stable to the nightly build of NDISwrapper, and the best I can do is that it works *most of the time*, and only causes a kernel panic *sometimes*, I'm sorry. If I can't find an unused room for your new multimedia lab, move 8 powermacs across campus, set them up, get the networking people to install and activate network ports (after getting the paperwork pushed through the financial people), and set up all your software by the time you teach class on Wednesday, when you tell me Monday afternoon, and especially when I had sent out emails in freaking JUNE asking what needed to be done for the upcoming fall semester, sorry - I'm only human.
Honestly, I know a lot of IT staff are lazy control freaks, but come on - some of us are spinning our wheels trying to move as fast as we can, while you all are pulling us in 40 different directions. We're expected to be master of all trades, and that takes time and effort. And I don't respond well to insults, questions of ability, yelling, or last-minute-emergencies-that-could-have-been-preve nted. Try smiling and doing a bit of planning in advance, and you'll go far. Trust me.
Here is the question: Should the road builder be forced to open up his private roadways to the public, at no cost, even though he spent $X Billion of his own money building the roads?
Problem with this: AT&T and others were given tax breaks and governmental funding to build their infrastructure. THEN, they charge the consumers to use it after having been granted an essential monopoly by the government. THEN, they continue to receive tax revenues and government subsidies to operate it (Universal service fund). NOW, they want to be able to charge Google to give their content to you, as well as charge you to get Google's content.
I don't know why you all want to use analogies, because this genuinely isn't hard to understand.
But, if it were your road analogy, it would be more along the lines of: The road builder spent $X billion of his own money, along with $Y Billion government subsidies to build the road. Now he has been granted exclusive rights to high-speed traffic, and the only other routes from anywhere to anywhere else are 2 lanes and filled with traffic 24/7. Oh, and he owns that route, too, by the way. So, he charges people a fee to use the highway, while the government is still paying him to maintain the road.
Now he wants to charge you not only to get ON the toll road, but to get OFF the toll road, and charge more, based on how fast you were going. Also, the road builder is ugly, and wants to have sex with your sister.
Whatever. ISP's should be tightly regulated in favor of the consumer, at ANY cost. It helps our case that our fucking tax dollars built their infrastructure in the first place, and that the companies have been granted a virtual monopoly over what *should* be publicly owned infrastructure. I dunno, man, sweeden seems to be headed for 100 Mbit internet for $30/month in the next year or three. What the fuck is wrong with us?
I think it depends on how you view things. Some people wouldn't say that a life lived the way their God wants them to is wasted. Meaning it's not just about worship and giving money or whatever, but the doing-good-to-others, being selfless and an upstanding citizen, etc and the other ideals usually present in the Bible but then not always obeyed by those who promote them. If it were followed properly I imagine it wouldn't be a wasted life at all, it would be a satisfying one that enriched the lives around it as well.
Right, but my point was only that all these things you say are good, and could be done with out the god part of the equation. As another of your sibling posts says, religion is not all bad. I will agree with this, but the parts of religion that aren't bad - charity, love for your fellow man, etc - aren't the religious parts.
All I'm saying is that living what I consider a "good religious live", i.e. one in which you seek to make humanity better than when you came into the world, could be done without the religious aspect; and if that's the case, then spending your time worshiping god, even in addition to doing these things, doesn't negate the fact that it's still irrelevant to the end goal of bettering humanity.
Still, I think Jesus had a lot of good ideas, if he existed. Feed the poor, assist the sick, love your neighbor, treat other people how you wish they'd treat you, don't be quick to judge, don't overlook your own inequities - all these things are excellent. Which is why if he were a philosopher, I'd be all about his teachings. Unfortunately, someone had to go and make a religion out of them instead, and not only that, one in which half the followers skip over all the philosophical goodness and go straight to the fire-and-brimstone eternal-life-only-for-believers bits. Nothing turns people off to christ like christians.
So even if something like Heaven (for instance) doesn't exist, it doesn't matter because A.) if Heaven exists, you're set, B.) if Heaven doesn't exist, you'll be dead by the time you learn the truth so who cares, and C.) you will have lived your life free of worry and doubt in regards to death, which is to your benefit during life.
If you're saying what I think you're saying here, you're talking about Pascal's Wager, which in essence states that the consequence of believing in god and being proven wrong at death is smaller than believing god doesn't exist, and being proven wrong at death (and thus spending eternity in hell).
This, to me, is not only fundamentally flawed, but it is the cornerstone on which religious bigotry is based. For one, who's god should one believe in? Presumably the god of the one who is positing the wager. But, to me, the larger issue is this: If there is a god, and you've spent your life trying to enrich humanity and all those around you without any respect to any god, and god doesn't want to let you into heaven... then god is evil. If there is NO god, and you've spent your life worshiping him, and giving people money who represent him, and there IS NO eternal life... you have wasted the only precious resource you have, which is your time on earth.
I, like many others on slashdot, believe that when you die, your body goes into the ground and you rot. There is no continued existence after death, when your brain shuts off for the last time, you are dead, and it's the end of the line. I can think of no greater tragedy than to waste the limited time we have here together on earth by worshiping god.
Life is precious. Religion robs us of the preciousness of this commodity by telling us that there's more of it over the next hill. Wake up, folks. The next hill is a cliff.
In fact, yes if you walked in and observed them choking customers on their way out and you continued to go in and buy something, you would be consenting. In fact somebody just might file suit against you for knowingly participating!
It doesn't make it legal to do something illegal just because you consent to it, know about it, or others consent to it.
Well, it makes it about 95% legal in a trivial case like receipt checking. Your rights are not an absolute thing. If rights were absolute, we wouldn't need a legal system.
Wow, dude, I don't even know where to start; please, do not speak for the rest of us who actually *care* about our rights.
You CANNOT consent to something that's illegal with no ramifications for the party doing the illegal act. Selling yourself into slavery, for instance, does not make slavery legal for the person who buys you, regardless of whatever contract you sign.
At the most, and I'm not conceding this point, you might be able to argue that walking past a sign at the front door constitutes a contractual agreement, with terms agreed to on both sides ("Fry's will exist facilitate you purchasing electronics, you will consent to searches upon egress"). So what? Contracts are made to be broken, and at worst, Fry's can deny you the ability to enter their private property. They CANNOT SEARCH YOU IF YOU DON'T WANT THEM TO, even if you concede that you enter into a contract that SAYS that they can when you enter the store.
Sheesh, man. Your slippery slope has turned into a slalom.
Are you referring to the Declaration of Independence? "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness"? That's not part of the constitution and not really grounds for a court case based on what it says.
No, but "Life, Liberty, and Property" are mentioned specifically in the 14th amendment:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
No, but murder is a crime. Violation of the Fourth Amendment is not a crime. It's a procedural violation. The remedy is not jail time for the violator... it's exclusion of illegally-seized evidence. Similarly, a search by a private person (when you are an invitee on to their property) does not violate any substantive rights you have. If you don't like their practices, no one is compelling you to shop there.
Woah there, buck rogers.
Main Entry: crime Pronunciation: 'krIm Function: noun Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin crimen accusation, reproach, crime; probably akin to Latin cernere to sift, determine 1 : an act or the commission of an act that is forbidden or the omission of a duty that is commanded by a public law and that makes the offender liable to punishment by that law; especially : a gross violation of law
The Constitution is the law. Violating the law is called crime. Viola. Just because the law branches into "Civil" and "Criminal" doesn't mean civil infractions aren't crimes.
Aside from which, there's a lot more wrong with your statement. Starting with the penalty for violating the 4th amendment: The only thing that may happen to Jack "Hang'em High" McCoy is that some piece of evidence is thrown out of court, but violating someone's 4th amendment rights is a serious offense, and the person who is guilty of doing it can be either sued in civil court or charged in criminal court (not sure which). In addition, entering a private residence does NOT give the owner or proprietor the right to search you. Period. It is within their right to prohibit you from entering, as long as the reason they are doing so is not violating your 14th amendment rights.
As a former employee of Best Buy, I can tell you conclusively that the reason to hire the person to stand at the front of the store, operate the cameras, and check receipts, has NOTHING to do with actually preventing theft. That person occasionally finds someone acting suspiciously, but it has far more to do with two other things:
1.) A show of force to would-be shoplifters. 2.) A decrease in the cost of corporate insurance, in much the same way that having an alarm system decreases the cost of your homeowners'.
Of course, there are still things that could give you trouble, like the network card or the sound card. However, you should be able to detect this and present a message to the effect that "Sorry, this hardware is not currently supported. You can file a request at... . In the meantime, you can continue without the functionality this hardware provides, or replace it by compatible hardware. A list of compatible devices can be found at...." That's a heck of a lot friendlier than the system simply not starting at all.
Yeah, when I tried Ubuntu recently on a laptop that I had to work on, it had some things that gave it trouble. First on the list was the ATA controller. I kind of gave up then.
I agree with you, Ubuntu is not this great awesome religion changing linux distro. It's just another distro that does a few things well, and has a lot of people claiming it does a lot more things well, when it doesn't do them any better than anyone else. CentOS 5 installed all the hardware on this Latitude d630 correctly, except the NVidia Quadro NVS 135M, and the Intel 4965 wireless chipset. Ubuntu... not so much.
Seriously, I can't be the only one worked up about this. Tell me there have to be other people that recognize the value of naming things with the least specific delimiter first, right?
[year]-[month]-[day]-[[hour]]-[[min]]-[[[sec]]] to me is the only correct way to name anything that is designated by a date. You go as far as you need delimiters between files. Or sometimes I use a shortcut and just name stuff unixtime, which still guarantees that when I do an ls, everything is in the correct chronological order.
Not ubuntu, though. Ugh. Seriously, people, get it right.
Ubuntu's version number system is very simple, straightforward, and understandable--it consists of two numbers taken from the date of the release it is applied to: [year].[month]. Very simple, huh?
Which would be FINE if the versions were in ALPHABETICAL ORDER, which they're not.
Why is 7.10 later than 8.04? It shouldn't be, and I don't care if they're using the period as only a separator between the year-and-month, it's still just as wrong.
They should put the year first. Jeez, is that so hard? But, no, gotta do stuff different. Why gotta do stuff different? Because. Think outside the box. Break the mold. Tear down the glass ceiling. No, fuck you, do it like everyone else, or risk being considered a joke to real IT professionals.
As an exercise, put these in order (current format):
10.04 1.08 3.05 12.06 7.07
Answer: 10.04, 3.05, 12.06, 7.07, 1.08.
Now, make it swapped, year first, month second:
7.08 4.12 8.01 6.10 5.07
Answer: 4.12, 5.07, 6.10, 7.08, 8.01. Now, it looks correct, it serves the same purpose (displays age-since-release, which is the only argument I ever hear in favor of their scheme), and it's standardized. Plus, releases will sort alphabetically (and if you're concerned about years after 2010, just make them 07.08, 04.12, etc).
This is what holds ubuntu back - the culture of "different for different's sake". LINUX IS NOT MODERN ART, remove head from ass, and release something with a standardized version number and no silly name, and it might get recognized as anything but a niche distro for people who are trying to get more hardware support on their laptops (something it's not as good at as it would sound like from listening to forum fanbois, anyway).
I actually just saw that today. Might fiddle with it. But, still, if I set karmabonus:off and show me +2 and above comments, I'm going to get a lot of crap that's posted at +1 and moderated up once.
Yeah, I agree with you. I have my display set to show comments +3 and above; because with karma bonuses and bad moderation, comments 2 and below are often a waste of breath. I want to read *all* the comments that have actually been moderated at least once upwards.
Can't do that with the new system. You can say "highest ranked comments get priority showing up on my screen", but that's not what I want. if a story has 40 +5 comments, I don't want to set it to only show me +5's inadvertently by switching to the new system's threshold. I want to see the +3's too.
My god, sir. You win the "most applicable analogy on Slashdot" award. It's not often that someone uses an analogy that makes sense, but that's a good one.
Just to name two. In 1907, there were a few hundred breweries in the US; after prohibition and into the 50's, there were fewer than 60. Now there are over 1400, not counting house brews, homebrew, and smaller microbrews. In 1980, your options were bud lite or michelob. Now, almost everywhere you go, there are import selections as well as a number of american small brewer options - Sierra Nevada, Blue Moon, Magic Hat, Rolling Rock, Red Dog, etc.
Likewise, in 1907, most people cooked and ate at home 97 times out of 100 or more. Granted, there's a lot of culinary conformity at the exits on the interstates, and there's an Applebees in every large city from here to Houston. But, there's also tons and tons of mom-and-pop restaurants, most ready and willing to give you excellent (or sub-par) food and service - often far more varied than you can get from the commercial conformists. Don't believe me, go to Brooklyn some time and find the Dominos, and compare its volume of business to diFara's on Avenue J. Restaurants are a competitive business - far more so than in 1907, and with far more consumer choice.
If anything WoW is better than any other MMO I've played (EQ blaaah) for the sheer fact that they update content/balance/etc the game so much. And they do a bunch of it for "free" as well (read: you don't have to buy another expansion), they've released some monster patches.
Welcome, from those of us at eve-online.
All our expansions and patches are free. No stringing people along waiting for the expansion. Also, I think I might have paid $20 for the game, which included the first month fee (usually $15).
If your brother wants to make money doing music (regardless of the fact that I think that's a bad reason to start a hobby, but w/e) he should tour. If he has the internet to distribute his music, he will have fans all over. Use myspace to set up a tour, go out on tour and make enough money to get to the next town. If attendance at shows is flat, it's because people are tired of it, and even if new people are coming to the shows, old ones aren't anymore.
But that's kinda not the point. I don't know why your brother wants a record contract; he doesn't stand to make money because he magically is on a record label. Certainly not by selling CD's. Record labels take almost 100% of CD sales. Bands make money at LIVE SHOWS and via SELLING MERCHANDISE. Tell him to sell T-Shirts and bumper stickers and whatever.
The bottom line is - Nobody makes money as a musician. Those that do are very lucky, and are a tiny minority. Do music because you love it. Like my friend (whose slashdot userID is KEPSUX): everything his band does can be found at http://www.atomicraygunattack.com/ and is free. He'll sell you a CD with artwork and a track list if you want it, or a T-Shirt, but it's for the music. Not for the dollars.
[...] and why doesn't Sun Microsystems make laptops, I was looking for Unix machines recently and I decided to go with the Mac book pro, rather than the Linux machines (laptops) at Dell, because of the hardware and general lack of processing power, which doesn't seem to lend itself to virtualizing other Operating systems.
That's odd.
I'm looking at right now a Dell Latitude D630 that has 3.5 GB of addressable ram, a Core 2 Duo T7300 dual core chip @ 2 Ghz, and an NVidia Quadro graphics card. And it's running Centos 5 just fine.
1.) So, owning a device which can contain copyright-infringing music is grounds for the government to assume you *are* using it to contain copyright-infringing music? If so, is there going to be a tax on plastic baggies? Cause they could be containing cocaine...
2.) IF this tax is put in place on iPods, and the reason behind it is because they assume that the contents of the iPod have been obtained outside of the legally approved methods, does this mean now that you can steal as much music as you want in canada, if you own an iPod? Because, otherwise... what the fuck is the tax for? How are they going to bring a court case against you for depriving them of money, when you have in fact given them money because the government assumes that you're doing the very thing you're being sued for!
Slashdot Mirror
Hey!
The conservative "rich linguistic heritage" was INTELLIGENTLY DESIGNED, thankyouverymuch!
Oh, yeah. I have a degree. It's in a non-technical field, but I can at least check off the "college graduate" on my list.
Still. The problem is when you work in "the real world", it's: no college degree college degree. When you work in a university, it's: no college degree undergrad degree graduate degree Ph.D. post-doc asst. professor tenured professor assoc. professor full professor. I'm still way far down on that foodchain, even though I have no plans to move up it.
C'est la vie.
Well, if I'm being honest, it's a good job. I wish it paid more, but we do live out in the hills, not in a major city. Most of the faculty look down on us, but then, most faculty look down on everyone everywhere. But, someone did offer to buy me some nice dark beer the other day because I printed a poster out for him on our plotter on like 2 hours notice. I do get pretty good toys - I told them recently if I was going to be Macintosh support, I would need a Mac computer at my desk at work, so I could play with it and figure out how things worked (I'm no OSX guru). They turned around and bought me a 17" powerbook. Which... is bigger than I needed - I mean, it's huge - but they did make it happen when I said I needed it. As far as conferences go, they will send us to conferences if it's important.
I'm trying to get them to send me to a VMWare conference soon, because our new lovely remote login cluster (20 dual xeon dual core 4GB ram machines, mostly used for instructional teaching for programming classes - C++, java, intro to unix is there somewhere, MPI stuff, networking, etc)... with some of the funding we're going to be getting in the future, I'd love to get a fiber-channel SAN and re-image these servers so they're running VMWare, so I can use it to seamlessly shift the load to under-used nodes. They all support virtualization-on-cpu, and IPVS is good, but it's not perfect, at load balancing. I envision a setup where if a node gets overloaded (compared to peer nodes), it will move the VM to an underutilized node (move the configuration and the RAM contents over the network, which is switch gigabit), and then up the VM on the new node with the same hard drive slice from the SAN. But that's something that I don't know how to make work at the moment. It sounds like a fun project, though =).
And in the interest of full disclosure, I am probably over dramatizing my workload somewhat - but the beginning of fall semester is especially rough. I use the term "40 hour work week" loosely, as over the past 3 weeks, I've probably averaged 55 or so hours over 6 days per week. And I'm not kidding about how annoying the door lock updates are. Honestly, though, once midterms have passed, everyone gets into cruising mode, and I can kick back and relax a little, and do some long-term project work, or even just take a few minutes to catch my breath.
Virginia has screwed the pooch on the budget again, this year, though. So everyone watch out for either a 7.5% tuition hike, or a 7.5% reduction in operating budget on the horizon. *Crosses fingers*.
~Wx
Case in point: I'm the linux admin for the place that I work (a Computer Science department at a university). I support linux-on-desktop, our remote login cluster, a bunch of random servers that faculty members decide they need because "I need feature X that is [so insanely out of date | so insanely bleeding edge] that our infrastructure isn't going to support it". I manage licenses for a dozen mathematical, statistical, and otherwise proprietary closed source programs. Lately, the Mac guy quit, so all of a sudden, I'm also the support for the Macintosh folks. I manage the linux backup rotation, which is all nightly rsync-based. I handle the linux half of our windows domain / ldap / kerberos / nfs-automount / samba / cifs single log-on system. I also am still the admin for a handful of Sun servers, and (believe it or not) a few DEC Alphas we have running Tru/64 (or whatever the hell it's called now) Unix. I can't tell you how many projects have been installed/written/maintained by Graduate students who have since left school that fall into my lap when the faculty member realizes no one is maintaining random-app-that-no-one-uses-but-must-always-be-wor king. Oh, I also am in charge of maintaining the stock of toner for the 25-odd different laser printers we have, and distributing it out to people when they come knocking.
e nted. Try smiling and doing a bit of planning in advance, and you'll go far. Trust me.
What am I spending about 8-10 hours of my 40 hour work week on lately? The powers that be decided that they could fire the part-time student work-study that we used to have to do odd IT jobs, and now, I manage 30-odd card-swipe door locks, which a monkey could do, and which are a huge time sink, considering they're spread out across 3 buildings among 5 square miles, and everyone wants them updated at least three times a week. So, I have to cart one of two different laptops to each physical key card lock and update them.
If I don't get around to moving your Laserjet printer from computer A to computer B, configuring the cups server, and reconfiguring all other 9 computers in your project lab to print to the new server today, it's cause I'm freaking busy. If I can't figure out why your mouse doesn't refocus on matlab on your home linux box when you SSH into the cluster and display the graphical component locally, I'm sorry. If I can't get your bleeding-edge hot off the assembly line wireless card to work in any of [fedora core 5 | fedora core 6 | ubuntu | Centos 5.0] with several different kernels and everything from the stable to the nightly build of NDISwrapper, and the best I can do is that it works *most of the time*, and only causes a kernel panic *sometimes*, I'm sorry. If I can't find an unused room for your new multimedia lab, move 8 powermacs across campus, set them up, get the networking people to install and activate network ports (after getting the paperwork pushed through the financial people), and set up all your software by the time you teach class on Wednesday, when you tell me Monday afternoon, and especially when I had sent out emails in freaking JUNE asking what needed to be done for the upcoming fall semester, sorry - I'm only human.
Honestly, I know a lot of IT staff are lazy control freaks, but come on - some of us are spinning our wheels trying to move as fast as we can, while you all are pulling us in 40 different directions. We're expected to be master of all trades, and that takes time and effort. And I don't respond well to insults, questions of ability, yelling, or last-minute-emergencies-that-could-have-been-prev
~Will
Here is the question: Should the road builder be forced to open up his private roadways to the public, at no cost, even though he spent $X Billion of his own money building the roads?
Problem with this: AT&T and others were given tax breaks and governmental funding to build their infrastructure. THEN, they charge the consumers to use it after having been granted an essential monopoly by the government. THEN, they continue to receive tax revenues and government subsidies to operate it (Universal service fund). NOW, they want to be able to charge Google to give their content to you, as well as charge you to get Google's content.
I don't know why you all want to use analogies, because this genuinely isn't hard to understand.
But, if it were your road analogy, it would be more along the lines of: The road builder spent $X billion of his own money, along with $Y Billion government subsidies to build the road. Now he has been granted exclusive rights to high-speed traffic, and the only other routes from anywhere to anywhere else are 2 lanes and filled with traffic 24/7. Oh, and he owns that route, too, by the way. So, he charges people a fee to use the highway, while the government is still paying him to maintain the road.
Now he wants to charge you not only to get ON the toll road, but to get OFF the toll road, and charge more, based on how fast you were going. Also, the road builder is ugly, and wants to have sex with your sister.
Whatever. ISP's should be tightly regulated in favor of the consumer, at ANY cost. It helps our case that our fucking tax dollars built their infrastructure in the first place, and that the companies have been granted a virtual monopoly over what *should* be publicly owned infrastructure. I dunno, man, sweeden seems to be headed for 100 Mbit internet for $30/month in the next year or three. What the fuck is wrong with us?
~Wx
I think it depends on how you view things. Some people wouldn't say that a life lived the way their God wants them to is wasted. Meaning it's not just about worship and giving money or whatever, but the doing-good-to-others, being selfless and an upstanding citizen, etc and the other ideals usually present in the Bible but then not always obeyed by those who promote them. If it were followed properly I imagine it wouldn't be a wasted life at all, it would be a satisfying one that enriched the lives around it as well.
Right, but my point was only that all these things you say are good, and could be done with out the god part of the equation. As another of your sibling posts says, religion is not all bad. I will agree with this, but the parts of religion that aren't bad - charity, love for your fellow man, etc - aren't the religious parts.
All I'm saying is that living what I consider a "good religious live", i.e. one in which you seek to make humanity better than when you came into the world, could be done without the religious aspect; and if that's the case, then spending your time worshiping god, even in addition to doing these things, doesn't negate the fact that it's still irrelevant to the end goal of bettering humanity.
Still, I think Jesus had a lot of good ideas, if he existed. Feed the poor, assist the sick, love your neighbor, treat other people how you wish they'd treat you, don't be quick to judge, don't overlook your own inequities - all these things are excellent. Which is why if he were a philosopher, I'd be all about his teachings. Unfortunately, someone had to go and make a religion out of them instead, and not only that, one in which half the followers skip over all the philosophical goodness and go straight to the fire-and-brimstone eternal-life-only-for-believers bits. Nothing turns people off to christ like christians.
~Wx
So even if something like Heaven (for instance) doesn't exist, it doesn't matter because A.) if Heaven exists, you're set, B.) if Heaven doesn't exist, you'll be dead by the time you learn the truth so who cares, and C.) you will have lived your life free of worry and doubt in regards to death, which is to your benefit during life.
If you're saying what I think you're saying here, you're talking about Pascal's Wager, which in essence states that the consequence of believing in god and being proven wrong at death is smaller than believing god doesn't exist, and being proven wrong at death (and thus spending eternity in hell).
This, to me, is not only fundamentally flawed, but it is the cornerstone on which religious bigotry is based. For one, who's god should one believe in? Presumably the god of the one who is positing the wager. But, to me, the larger issue is this: If there is a god, and you've spent your life trying to enrich humanity and all those around you without any respect to any god, and god doesn't want to let you into heaven... then god is evil. If there is NO god, and you've spent your life worshiping him, and giving people money who represent him, and there IS NO eternal life... you have wasted the only precious resource you have, which is your time on earth.
I, like many others on slashdot, believe that when you die, your body goes into the ground and you rot. There is no continued existence after death, when your brain shuts off for the last time, you are dead, and it's the end of the line. I can think of no greater tragedy than to waste the limited time we have here together on earth by worshiping god.
Life is precious. Religion robs us of the preciousness of this commodity by telling us that there's more of it over the next hill. Wake up, folks. The next hill is a cliff.
~Wx
In fact, yes if you walked in and observed them choking customers on their way out and you continued to go in and buy something, you would be consenting. In fact somebody just might file suit against you for knowingly participating!
Well, it makes it about 95% legal in a trivial case like receipt checking. Your rights are not an absolute thing. If rights were absolute, we wouldn't need a legal system.
Wow, dude, I don't even know where to start; please, do not speak for the rest of us who actually *care* about our rights.
You CANNOT consent to something that's illegal with no ramifications for the party doing the illegal act. Selling yourself into slavery, for instance, does not make slavery legal for the person who buys you, regardless of whatever contract you sign.
At the most, and I'm not conceding this point, you might be able to argue that walking past a sign at the front door constitutes a contractual agreement, with terms agreed to on both sides ("Fry's will exist facilitate you purchasing electronics, you will consent to searches upon egress"). So what? Contracts are made to be broken, and at worst, Fry's can deny you the ability to enter their private property. They CANNOT SEARCH YOU IF YOU DON'T WANT THEM TO, even if you concede that you enter into a contract that SAYS that they can when you enter the store.
Sheesh, man. Your slippery slope has turned into a slalom.
~Wx
Are you referring to the Declaration of Independence? "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness"? That's not part of the constitution and not really grounds for a court case based on what it says.
No, but "Life, Liberty, and Property" are mentioned specifically in the 14th amendment:
~Wx
Woah there, buck rogers.
The Constitution is the law. Violating the law is called crime. Viola. Just because the law branches into "Civil" and "Criminal" doesn't mean civil infractions aren't crimes.
Aside from which, there's a lot more wrong with your statement. Starting with the penalty for violating the 4th amendment: The only thing that may happen to Jack "Hang'em High" McCoy is that some piece of evidence is thrown out of court, but violating someone's 4th amendment rights is a serious offense, and the person who is guilty of doing it can be either sued in civil court or charged in criminal court (not sure which). In addition, entering a private residence does NOT give the owner or proprietor the right to search you. Period. It is within their right to prohibit you from entering, as long as the reason they are doing so is not violating your 14th amendment rights.
~X
As a former employee of Best Buy, I can tell you conclusively that the reason to hire the person to stand at the front of the store, operate the cameras, and check receipts, has NOTHING to do with actually preventing theft. That person occasionally finds someone acting suspiciously, but it has far more to do with two other things:
1.) A show of force to would-be shoplifters.
2.) A decrease in the cost of corporate insurance, in much the same way that having an alarm system decreases the cost of your homeowners'.
~Wx
Wouldn't anti-trust be legal; and economic be racketeering / RICO?
~X
Nevermind, i'm an idiot.
I still stand by the animal thing, though.
Of course, there are still things that could give you trouble, like the network card or the sound card. However, you should be able to detect this and present a message to the effect that "Sorry, this hardware is not currently supported. You can file a request at
Yeah, when I tried Ubuntu recently on a laptop that I had to work on, it had some things that gave it trouble. First on the list was the ATA controller. I kind of gave up then.
I agree with you, Ubuntu is not this great awesome religion changing linux distro. It's just another distro that does a few things well, and has a lot of people claiming it does a lot more things well, when it doesn't do them any better than anyone else. CentOS 5 installed all the hardware on this Latitude d630 correctly, except the NVidia Quadro NVS 135M, and the Intel 4965 wireless chipset. Ubuntu... not so much.
Seriously, I can't be the only one worked up about this. Tell me there have to be other people that recognize the value of naming things with the least specific delimiter first, right?
[year]-[month]-[day]-[[hour]]-[[min]]-[[[sec]]] to me is the only correct way to name anything that is designated by a date. You go as far as you need delimiters between files. Or sometimes I use a shortcut and just name stuff unixtime, which still guarantees that when I do an ls, everything is in the correct chronological order.
Not ubuntu, though. Ugh. Seriously, people, get it right.
Ubuntu's version number system is very simple, straightforward, and understandable--it consists of two numbers taken from the date of the release it is applied to: [year].[month]. Very simple, huh?
Which would be FINE if the versions were in ALPHABETICAL ORDER, which they're not.
Why is 7.10 later than 8.04? It shouldn't be, and I don't care if they're using the period as only a separator between the year-and-month, it's still just as wrong.
They should put the year first. Jeez, is that so hard? But, no, gotta do stuff different. Why gotta do stuff different? Because. Think outside the box. Break the mold. Tear down the glass ceiling. No, fuck you, do it like everyone else, or risk being considered a joke to real IT professionals.
As an exercise, put these in order (current format):
10.04
1.08
3.05
12.06
7.07
Answer: 10.04, 3.05, 12.06, 7.07, 1.08.
Now, make it swapped, year first, month second:
7.08
4.12
8.01
6.10
5.07
Answer: 4.12, 5.07, 6.10, 7.08, 8.01. Now, it looks correct, it serves the same purpose (displays age-since-release, which is the only argument I ever hear in favor of their scheme), and it's standardized. Plus, releases will sort alphabetically (and if you're concerned about years after 2010, just make them 07.08, 04.12, etc).
This is what holds ubuntu back - the culture of "different for different's sake". LINUX IS NOT MODERN ART, remove head from ass, and release something with a standardized version number and no silly name, and it might get recognized as anything but a niche distro for people who are trying to get more hardware support on their laptops (something it's not as good at as it would sound like from listening to forum fanbois, anyway).
~Xiao
I actually just saw that today. Might fiddle with it. But, still, if I set karmabonus:off and show me +2 and above comments, I'm going to get a lot of crap that's posted at +1 and moderated up once.
I dunno, it's worth playing with.
Yeah, I agree with you. I have my display set to show comments +3 and above; because with karma bonuses and bad moderation, comments 2 and below are often a waste of breath. I want to read *all* the comments that have actually been moderated at least once upwards.
Can't do that with the new system. You can say "highest ranked comments get priority showing up on my screen", but that's not what I want. if a story has 40 +5 comments, I don't want to set it to only show me +5's inadvertently by switching to the new system's threshold. I want to see the +3's too.
~X
My god, sir. You win the "most applicable analogy on Slashdot" award. It's not often that someone uses an analogy that makes sense, but that's a good one.
Brewing.
Restauranting.
Just to name two. In 1907, there were a few hundred breweries in the US; after prohibition and into the 50's, there were fewer than 60. Now there are over 1400, not counting house brews, homebrew, and smaller microbrews. In 1980, your options were bud lite or michelob. Now, almost everywhere you go, there are import selections as well as a number of american small brewer options - Sierra Nevada, Blue Moon, Magic Hat, Rolling Rock, Red Dog, etc.
Likewise, in 1907, most people cooked and ate at home 97 times out of 100 or more. Granted, there's a lot of culinary conformity at the exits on the interstates, and there's an Applebees in every large city from here to Houston. But, there's also tons and tons of mom-and-pop restaurants, most ready and willing to give you excellent (or sub-par) food and service - often far more varied than you can get from the commercial conformists. Don't believe me, go to Brooklyn some time and find the Dominos, and compare its volume of business to diFara's on Avenue J. Restaurants are a competitive business - far more so than in 1907, and with far more consumer choice.
~Wx
and even then, most of the guys I game with from the UK can pay L40 or so and get 25-50Mbit. I mean $80 / month is a bit of cash, but... speedy.
If anything WoW is better than any other MMO I've played (EQ blaaah) for the sheer fact that they update content/balance/etc the game so much. And they do a bunch of it for "free" as well (read: you don't have to buy another expansion), they've released some monster patches.
Welcome, from those of us at eve-online.
All our expansions and patches are free. No stringing people along waiting for the expansion. Also, I think I might have paid $20 for the game, which included the first month fee (usually $15).
If your brother wants to make money doing music (regardless of the fact that I think that's a bad reason to start a hobby, but w/e) he should tour. If he has the internet to distribute his music, he will have fans all over. Use myspace to set up a tour, go out on tour and make enough money to get to the next town. If attendance at shows is flat, it's because people are tired of it, and even if new people are coming to the shows, old ones aren't anymore.
But that's kinda not the point. I don't know why your brother wants a record contract; he doesn't stand to make money because he magically is on a record label. Certainly not by selling CD's. Record labels take almost 100% of CD sales. Bands make money at LIVE SHOWS and via SELLING MERCHANDISE. Tell him to sell T-Shirts and bumper stickers and whatever.
The bottom line is - Nobody makes money as a musician. Those that do are very lucky, and are a tiny minority. Do music because you love it. Like my friend (whose slashdot userID is KEPSUX): everything his band does can be found at http://www.atomicraygunattack.com/ and is free. He'll sell you a CD with artwork and a track list if you want it, or a T-Shirt, but it's for the music. Not for the dollars.
[...] and why doesn't Sun Microsystems make laptops, I was looking for Unix machines recently and I decided to go with the Mac book pro, rather than the Linux machines (laptops) at Dell, because of the hardware and general lack of processing power, which doesn't seem to lend itself to virtualizing other Operating systems.
That's odd.
I'm looking at right now a Dell Latitude D630 that has 3.5 GB of addressable ram, a Core 2 Duo T7300 dual core chip @ 2 Ghz, and an NVidia Quadro graphics card. And it's running Centos 5 just fine.
~Wx
1.) So, owning a device which can contain copyright-infringing music is grounds for the government to assume you *are* using it to contain copyright-infringing music? If so, is there going to be a tax on plastic baggies? Cause they could be containing cocaine...
2.) IF this tax is put in place on iPods, and the reason behind it is because they assume that the contents of the iPod have been obtained outside of the legally approved methods, does this mean now that you can steal as much music as you want in canada, if you own an iPod? Because, otherwise... what the fuck is the tax for? How are they going to bring a court case against you for depriving them of money, when you have in fact given them money because the government assumes that you're doing the very thing you're being sued for!