The pols rely on our willingness to sit on our asses and take whatever is handed down. Mindless violence isn't the answer. Co-ordinated public demonstration *is*.
Writing letters by itself has never made any difference. Pols are more afraid of party whips than they are of the odd disgruntled constituent.
I know of only two instances where the govt. were forced to back down quickly over an issue without wasting everybody's time trying to cover their asses:
1) The Poll Tax riots during the Thatcher era.
2) The lorry driver's blockade of the petrol depots, widely and visibly supported by the public during the current New Labour govvernment.
They almost backed down over the Iraq war but it dragged on too long and public opposition waned, which the government had been banking on (see temporary sig).
It's clear from this that the only thing that does make a difference is positive action. Show your anger in the form of getting together on mass and picketing the House of Commons. Unfortunately this means that to get anything done you have to get the support of a *lot* of people. Issues that only affect (or are only of interest to) a small minority are doomed from the start and that's that.
Government is like a giant steamroller. It has a huge amount of inertia and so to stop it you need to meet it with a huge amount of mass.
These issues about the effectiveness of parliamentary democracy have come into focus now because of the complete absence of any effective opposition since the Tories were crushed.
I advocate replacing the current system of party-controlled parliamentary democracy with a system of jury-style appointment, with relatively short terms and no chance of immediate re-appointment on expiry. No more professional politicians. And no more demagogues. People who seek power are usually least fit to wield it. And there must be less centralisation of power which must be devolved to a more local level, the more local the better.
Government by direct consensus only. And there must be checks and balances to limit the incredible political power of the civil service
--
Naturally the common people don't want war, but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.
Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering (at the Nuremberg Trials after WWII)
I do always cast my vote whenever the time comes and I have on several occasions written to my parliamentary representatives about various issues. None of which ever makes a damn bit of difference because all they ever want to do is follow the party whip (local MPs and MEPs) or pursue their own nefarious agenda (eg. Arlene McCarthy). Written responses - when they even bother - tend to be either bland, misleading reassurances or else just a stiff re-statement of party policy.
If you get clear support from someone it's only because they either belong to an ineffective opposition party desperate for support, or they are a powerless backbencher. The minute they get into power their concern for your problem tends to be overtaken by other things.
So the idea that under the current system our representatives are responsible to us is not borne out in reality. They don't feel beholden to us at all. And when it gets near to election time and they need our vote, they rely on the gullibility of the majority to swallow their renewed false promises.
Not only do I get very little good out of the current system, but in fact it's been very hostile to my interests on a number of fronts: the IR35 taxation regime hostile to small business; central governments' seizing of local authority town planning control so that they can enact their plans to build all over my local bit of the green belt; support for stupid IP laws; widespread videocamera surveillance; plans to introduce national ID cards etc. etc. you can bet that the last two things on this list are mostly intended to track dissidents and prevent public opposition from getting out of hand.
I just don't have the time and resources to fight all of these issues by myself. The problem is that I don't have any effective representation in a political system that is serving someone else's interests i.e. their own and those of influential corporations and the very wealthy.
Save me from ambitous politicians. The only ambition I want to see is the ambition to do what we tell them to. This is sadly lacking in the current system. There is a ridiculous notion circulating among the ruling political class in the UK that the people of this country want "leadership", "someone with the passion and conviction to take decisions and carry them out". Who the fuck told them that? The people do not want anything of the sort, they want to be in control of their own lives. And no more of this ludicrous "we have a mandate" nonsense. They lie to us about what they are going to do in their 4-5 years and then expect us to be happy while they then just do whatever they like?
So as for your "they know better than us" attitude, I just disagree with that altogether. It's time we were allowed to grow up as a society.
It dismayed me to find an attidude such as yours here on slashdot. I'm afraid your perpetuation of these myths about them acting in our best interests actually makes you very much part of the problem.
--
Naturally the common people don't want war, but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.
Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering (at the Nuremberg Trials after WWII)
Another explanation: the net has gotten critical mass and is becoming conscious....
Or someone's attempt to produce "a-life" has been more successful than they realized, and these packets are what is being emitted by the virtual society's first "telescopes"...or, maybe we didn't even notice the "telescope" packets at all and these large packets are actually their first "astronauts"...
What we have now is effectively dictatorial. What I want is an end to all dictators. What I want is a government that is accountable to its electors on a daily basis, government by electoral consensus: a system of government that can't be bought by big money. And an an end to all personal ambition in politics. There must be no hidden agendas for those we place in positions of responsibility. I am sick to death of having my cheese moved around by people over whom I have no control. Don't get me started.
...or simpy wake up to the fact that democracy (as it is enacted in Europe and the USA) just doesn't work, the politicians have all been captured by special interests and no longer serve the people, and the only thing that will work is direct action, starting with massive civil disobedience.
But when you're not at work, I don't think they have any more right to govern your appearance
I agree wholeheartedly. The tattoo/piercing thing is purely about taste.
It appears that a predilection for "body modification" is specific to (or else rapidly defining) a particular subculture. People who are into these things are usually into a whole lot of other things I don't like (eg. promiscuous sex, drugs, the clubbing scene).
The people I usually associate with don't really belong to that subculture either (most of them are twentysomething professional types, of a geekish or nerdish inclination). So I don't feel isolated in my opinions, reactionary though I may appear to some.
Regarding uglies - the very worst thing in modern fashion surely has to be the exposed belly. Too many girls who could do with cutting back on the calories and spending some time down the gym are exposing rolls of flab where it would best be kept under wraps. And it's often hairy flab as well. Eww!
Whether or not they are artistic is hardly the point. human flesh is hardly an appropriate canvas for a civilised person. It's all too obvious that the most enthusiastic wearers imagine they are making themselves more attractive with all these piercings and paintings, judging by the proportion of uglies within their ranks. But it's just a form of self-mutilation and in my opinion it makes you look like you have mental health problems. And there's no bigger turn-off as far as the opposite sex is concerned.
We should all keep in mind though that there aren't any hard core greedy evil people in our industry. They are all basically good hearted people who chose trying to create a better society as their life's work at a substantial cost in personal income. Petty, bickering, overly impressed with ourselves, flaming, yes that describes most of us Linux kernel developers, but there isn't enough money floating around to attract any genuinely bad folks into our industry.
Ha ha, bravo, bravo! I like this guy, he seems like a genuinely good person. If only more people had his attitude the world would be a better place.
If you get on OK with Pat Metheny (I particulrly recommend his "Still Life, Talking" album), then you are bound to enjoy Lyle Mays also, who used to play with Metheny.
You may also enjoy Chick Corea, who plays piano with a small group. Very mellow. I recommend "Eye of the Beholder". Somebody stole my copy:o(
If you like very hard Jazz fusion (eg Miles Davis' weirder stuff) then try Weather Report, especially from when Jaco Pasterius was still with them. Virtuoso performances guaranteed.
OTOH, whenever some Brazilian public sector department needs new software functionality that doesn't already exist on Linux (if such a category even exists today) they'll need to either write it or commission an external developer to write it. And it will need to be open source to comply with regs. So there'll be even more open source software! Yay!
we technically were STILL AT WAR from 1991...He still blatantly violated... Isnt that 'illegal'?
I'm sorry but this is just nitpicking. You might claim that you had the right to invade the country due to some technical legal loophole but that doesn't justify flouting a global consensus, blasting the country to shit and causing the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians. "I really dont understand where this 'US is the root of all evil' thinking comes from" Heh. you did it to yourselves. And you keep on doing it, viz. the sabre-rattling at Syria.
***Where were you people when clinton was in kosovo and somalia i wonder???***
The UK was in Kosovo. I can't provide figures but the way it played over here was that there was a greater involvement from European troops than there was from US troops (which would be only proper). But that's never how things are portrayed in the US media. I assume you already understand why intervention in Kosovo was unambiguously legitimate and justifiable in ways that the recent intervention in Iraq wasn't.
Yeah, we should have just let germany keep france during ww2 i guess.
LOL! I never tire of hearing this. Due to general apathy by the majority of Americans, the US was quite content to sit back and watch the Nazis roll across Europe - that is, until you got your own asses kicked by the Japanese. This reluctance to enter the war could have been partly because of (1) the huge amount of trade the US was doing with Germany, or (2) the lucrative export in War loans and arms exports the US was doing with the Allies. Hey, there's nothing quite like playing both sides against the middle, is there? If it hadn't been for the Japanese decision to take the Pacific Rim, a serious blow to US economic interests, the US would apparently have remained neutral forever. So you can drop the "avenging hero" BS. Despite the John Wayne movies.
Oh yeah and how many war movies have you seen where the hero wasn't American? The way Hollywood tells it, the British and the Russians did sweet fuck through all the whole war. Guess what, the 100,000 who died in the battle to take Berlin and finish the war were Russian. Of course you don't see that in the movies. The recent submarine movie where the Enigma project became thoroughly Americanized was a relatively mild example of this distortive tendency. Well, I have news for you pal. You need to stop getting your history lessons from the TV and pick up a book or two. Preferably one with small print and not too many pictures in it.
and just so you know, I think the US should withdraw all its troops worldwide. Put them on our borders so nobody gets in. Kick all foriegners out, and let the rest of the world go to shit without us. You think the world is so terrible WITH us, try it WITHOUT us!
Well, if you must. It's really no skin off my nose. But it would be overreacting, don't you think? All the rest of the world wants is for the US to behave in the way we all ask each other to behave: play nice with the other children, try not to get into fights, if a fight starts try not to make it worse, don't tell lies and don't try to hog all the cookies. The United States hasn't done very well on any of these counts.
Everybody agrees Saddam Hussein was a bad guy. He was very nasty to his own people. But there are plenty of nations in the world where this kind of thing is going on, and the US is, as a matter of public record, usually solely responsible for putting them there. Moreover the US continues to prop up many of these evil regimes, in its narrow own political interest. It has always done so and it will no doubt continue to do so. Yet Iraq was singled out. What Hussein did to his own people is therefore clearly of zero interest to the US government, never mind what the excuse of the week is.
So don't give me any of this "evil regime" crap. The only way to justify an illegally prosecuted war on the basis of that is to hold that the ends justify the means. And if you admit that line of reasoning, anyone can justify any act they like. It was a favourite of Hitler's and Pol Pot's.
It's possible that you understand the above but chose to ignore it. However here is the part that you are evidently don't understand at all, if you wrote honestly:
Neither the United States, nor any other country, has any right or duty to unilateral military intervention in the affairs of another sovereign state.
That's final, and not open to interpretation, or debate, or argument. It is enshrined in international law. It is necessary because national governments sometimes act unjustly in their own interests without regard to the sovereignty or welfare of other nations (as the US has done illegally a hundred times or more since the end of the second world war in fact, but I digress).
There is a single exception to this law. If there had been a credible threat to US security from Iraq it would have been excusable. In practice, if such a threat had existed the US would not even have had to act in isolation (lets call a spade a spade here, the "allies'" involvement was entirely due to US influence and generally against the wishes of their own populations. So much for democracy).
But, as the other nations - for example France and Germany - were saying at the time:
*and* as the anti-war movement in the US and the UK and the other "allies" maintained,
*and* the UN weapons inspectors were saying and continue to say,
*and* as evidenced by the failure of Iraq to produce the expected WMDs in his own defence,
*and* as evidenced by our failure to find any WMDs ever since.
So there wasn't any goddamn threat. Bush and his dad and his uncles in the CIA made it up. The whole war must have been fought for other reasons they didn't want to share with us.
All that much is increasingly transparent at this point, increasingly out in the open to the dicomfiture of the US and UK governments, but they know that public dissent can be managed. After all, it's easier to get forgiveness than permission. And in the end, it wasn't that hard to get permission, either. See below:
--
Naturally the common people don't want war, but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.
Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering (at the Nuremberg Trials after WWII)
Well, except that what he said about the IDE code is true, at least in 2.4.20. Systems under high load can freeze up badly, this is particularly noticeable when ripping a CD to disk but that's not the only way it can happen.
Also once the task responsible has gone you'd think the system would return to normal. It doesn't. God help you if you had a lot of web pages open in Mozilla; it's the first thing to freeze up and once it does that it doesn't come back even if CPU & memory utilization elsewhere is cut back to the minimum. Parts of KDE can go into a permanent sleep like that too.
I don't know why some applications should be so utterly incapable of recovery after a resource shortage, I'm just reporting an observation.
This is the first IDE system I've run Linux on. it's never happened to me on any of my SCSI systems running the same 2.4.x kernel series.
Thus begins a diatribe which turns out to be wholly ad hominem.
I thought your original post was verging on a troll and I just had to strike back on behalf of my favourite president of recent times. So most of your remarks are wildly misdirected, because they assume a political allegiance I do not lay claim to. I am in fact strongly libertarian (with a few conservative misgivings). Because the main parties in the UK are run by self-serving liars thieves and demagogues, I have for the last 15 years been a consistent supporter of the Green party (for which I have voted every time they put up a local candidate, which is most local and general elections).
So on the face of it our political leanings appear to be almost identical. In fact the correspondence is almost uncanny.
Where we may differ, however:
I don't really think Clinton is a "great man" along the lines of (the history book version of) Abraham Lincoln or Frankin Delano Roosevelt, but at least he is a just man and a man of peace, as world leaders go.
Yes he did send troops out on police actions of various kinds but by and large the military actions carried out in his name were measured and proportionate, compared to those of the current incumbent.
Bottom line: Clinton did not make America hated and disrespected overseas as George W Bush has.
In my opinion neither Clinton's alleged college dorm room marijuana habit nor his illegitimate blowjob from a Whitehouse intern could make him an evil man or a poor leader. These strictly harmless leisure-related acts are utterly irrelevant to the vast majority of the world (including most Americans, if contemporary opinion poll results are any indication). The only people who wanted to make heavy weather out of it were his political opponents. Surprise, surprise.
Anyway Clinton wasn't the first world statesman to look for a "bit on the side". Sorry to disappoint you but due to its generally occult nature, marital fidelity has never been a pre-requisite for historical greatness (they're kind of orthogonal really).
Almost all healthy heterosexual men are naturally inclined to desire multiple sexual partners, with only social convention to hold their drives in check.
But status and power are just about the most powerful aphrodisiacs in existence - for both the man in possession of them and for those women looking on. The resultant combinaton of male sexual confidence and overt female availability is a powerful temptation to dangle in front of any man with a normal sex drive. But it's also a relatively harmless one compared to others that may beset the most powerful man in the world.
Such as lust for revenge, or cravings for world domination.
It's more than possible that GWB's shitty attitude toward the rest of the world (and toward a good number of his own citizens, it increasingly appears) could have its origins partly in a retarded or frustrated sex drive. It's not an unrealistic theory because the same could be said of a lot of grouchy middle-aged men.
So a bottle of Viagra and an eager intern or two might have helped to avoid a costly and generally pointless war. And that would have been wrong? According to you it would have been, apparently.
I've noticed recently that there seems to be an increasing number of pro-strong-copyright trolls on Slashdot, both anonymous and registered varieties. It certainly looks like the MPAA & RIAA are now getting their (member's) employees posing as geeks to come to slashdot and muddy the waters. It's information warfare I guess.
Actually I do remember the same thing happening about two or three years ago with an extended spate of pro-Microsoft trolls. And then some Microsoft insider blew the whistle and Microsoft were caught red handed. It didn't put a stop to it immediately IIRC, but it died away eventually anyway.
Bill Clinton is a truly great man. Not perfect, because he's human. But he's still one of the less corrupt and self-serving American politicians of recent years. And he's not reviled by the majority of the people on the planet. You can say that for him, at least. Unlike this fuckwit "Dubya", for instance.
There are serious problem with forums (fora?) and mailing lists.
First, there's the signal-to-noise ratio, which can get pretty awful even in fora designed originally to support just one piece of software or one piece of functionality. See for instance the number of different lists you need to hunt down just to get started diagnosing a problem with subsytems involving components from different sources. eg getting the TV functionality on a Radeon All-in-Wonder to work with your distro's patched-up kernel, the v4l2-bttv kernel modules, the various gatos kernel modules, XF86 modules and associated bits, and a couple of viewers like xawtv and avview. Which still don't work for me. Unsurprisingly.
Then there's the poor internal structure of the lists themselves. Most posters seeking help don't bother to supply a meaningful and apposite subject line since they are only thinking about getting an answer to their problem today rather than documenting their painful journey for the benefit of future travellers. This tends to render the list's thread view into more or less random nonsense.
And then, many forum host providers only provide search capability at the subject line level, so poor (or confused) subject line relevance forces you to google for the information just in that one list as from a great distance. And even the mighty Google can swamp any good matches in a sea of distraction, because even Google doesn't support (AFAIK) search target restriction modifiers at any smaller granularity than per host.
The result of these deficiencies is that you can search for days, weeks even, without coming across an unambiguously documented example of the problem you are looking for - even when it is inevitable that someone somewhere *must* have suffered the same problem. If it's a complex problem and if you do manage to find a documented example, it's odds on that the question will have been left dangling with not so much as an acknowledgement from anyone. Or, there will be some "red herring" reply spawning a substantial thread of only barely tangential relevance.
To maximize our leverage of all the previous problem-solving that has been done by ordinary half-able users like you and me, we need to make it nice and easy for people to document their questions and answers in a more structured, accessible and re-usable way. Yes, there should be a single repository, centralized in the sense that if it succeeds (a la freshmeat and sourceforge), alternatives would be irrelevant and possibly even counterproductive; but not necessarily centralized in the sense of control. Rather it might be distributed in terms of implementation and maintainance (cf wikipedia or bugzilla as opposed to freshmeat or "ask slashdot").
The key concept to the creation of something an orders of magnitude more useful than the current generation of help sources is the use of structured data for indexing, categorization and traversal rather than hit-and-miss indexing of freeform text by search bots. Users need to be able to search precisely for documented Q&A on previous instances of whatever specific and arcane combinations of circumstance have led to their own predicament. To this end, submissions need to be carefully tagged with a full compliment of relevant keywords and perhaps even the semantic relationships between them, and those keywords and relations may need to be amended again whenever somebody manages to add another piece to the puzzle.
I envisage a submission procedure driven by a continually evolving and diversifying system of nested questionnaires with the intention of:
(1) Guiding the submittor through what has been established by previous contributors in order to establish any correspondence between the current problem and all extant knowledge to get the context right (eg is this really just a tv viewer problem - or is it really a video subsystem problem?)
(2) Extracting the majority of the content into some kind of semantic net*. A free text exposition of the problem
The detriment is that everybody who bows down to an aggressor perpetuates and strengthens the aggressor's hegemony and thus places everyone else at increased risk of attack.
If it really is completely unfeasible in the US legal system for innocent parties to defend themselves against attackers with deep pockets then they can't be said to have equal status under the law. Surely, then, legal system reform should be the very first political priority of every single American adult of voting age until they achieve that equal status?
(Disclaimer: I don't really have any personal axe to grind here since I don't download or upload music, I'm British and resident in the UK and I just don't believe this could happen here).
Slashdot Mirror
Right but have you considered the damage these speakers must surely be doing to your inner ear?
Writing letters by itself has never made any difference. Pols are more afraid of party whips than they are of the odd disgruntled constituent.
I know of only two instances where the govt. were forced to back down quickly over an issue without wasting everybody's time trying to cover their asses:
1) The Poll Tax riots during the Thatcher era.
2) The lorry driver's blockade of the petrol depots, widely and visibly supported by the public during the current New Labour govvernment.
They almost backed down over the Iraq war but it dragged on too long and public opposition waned, which the government had been banking on (see temporary sig).
It's clear from this that the only thing that does make a difference is positive action. Show your anger in the form of getting together on mass and picketing the House of Commons. Unfortunately this means that to get anything done you have to get the support of a *lot* of people. Issues that only affect (or are only of interest to) a small minority are doomed from the start and that's that.
Government is like a giant steamroller. It has a huge amount of inertia and so to stop it you need to meet it with a huge amount of mass.
These issues about the effectiveness of parliamentary democracy have come into focus now because of the complete absence of any effective opposition since the Tories were crushed.
I advocate replacing the current system of party-controlled parliamentary democracy with a system of jury-style appointment, with relatively short terms and no chance of immediate re-appointment on expiry. No more professional politicians. And no more demagogues. People who seek power are usually least fit to wield it. And there must be less centralisation of power which must be devolved to a more local level, the more local the better.
Government by direct consensus only. And there must be checks and balances to limit the incredible political power of the civil service
--
Naturally the common people don't want war, but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.
If you get clear support from someone it's only because they either belong to an ineffective opposition party desperate for support, or they are a powerless backbencher. The minute they get into power their concern for your problem tends to be overtaken by other things.
So the idea that under the current system our representatives are responsible to us is not borne out in reality. They don't feel beholden to us at all. And when it gets near to election time and they need our vote, they rely on the gullibility of the majority to swallow their renewed false promises.
Not only do I get very little good out of the current system, but in fact it's been very hostile to my interests on a number of fronts: the IR35 taxation regime hostile to small business; central governments' seizing of local authority town planning control so that they can enact their plans to build all over my local bit of the green belt; support for stupid IP laws; widespread videocamera surveillance; plans to introduce national ID cards etc. etc. you can bet that the last two things on this list are mostly intended to track dissidents and prevent public opposition from getting out of hand.
I just don't have the time and resources to fight all of these issues by myself. The problem is that I don't have any effective representation in a political system that is serving someone else's interests i.e. their own and those of influential corporations and the very wealthy.
Save me from ambitous politicians. The only ambition I want to see is the ambition to do what we tell them to. This is sadly lacking in the current system. There is a ridiculous notion circulating among the ruling political class in the UK that the people of this country want "leadership", "someone with the passion and conviction to take decisions and carry them out". Who the fuck told them that? The people do not want anything of the sort, they want to be in control of their own lives. And no more of this ludicrous "we have a mandate" nonsense. They lie to us about what they are going to do in their 4-5 years and then expect us to be happy while they then just do whatever they like?
So as for your "they know better than us" attitude, I just disagree with that altogether. It's time we were allowed to grow up as a society.
It dismayed me to find an attidude such as yours here on slashdot. I'm afraid your perpetuation of these myths about them acting in our best interests actually makes you very much part of the problem.
--
Naturally the common people don't want war, but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.
Or someone's attempt to produce "a-life" has been more successful than they realized, and these packets are what is being emitted by the virtual society's first "telescopes"...or, maybe we didn't even notice the "telescope" packets at all and these large packets are actually their first "astronauts"...
(shudder)
What we have now is effectively dictatorial. What I want is an end to all dictators. What I want is a government that is accountable to its electors on a daily basis, government by electoral consensus: a system of government that can't be bought by big money. And an an end to all personal ambition in politics. There must be no hidden agendas for those we place in positions of responsibility. I am sick to death of having my cheese moved around by people over whom I have no control. Don't get me started.
...or simpy wake up to the fact that democracy (as it is enacted in Europe and the USA) just doesn't work, the politicians have all been captured by special interests and no longer serve the people, and the only thing that will work is direct action, starting with massive civil disobedience.
It appears that a predilection for "body modification" is specific to (or else rapidly defining) a particular subculture. People who are into these things are usually into a whole lot of other things I don't like (eg. promiscuous sex, drugs, the clubbing scene).
The people I usually associate with don't really belong to that subculture either (most of them are twentysomething professional types, of a geekish or nerdish inclination). So I don't feel isolated in my opinions, reactionary though I may appear to some.
Regarding uglies - the very worst thing in modern fashion surely has to be the exposed belly. Too many girls who could do with cutting back on the calories and spending some time down the gym are exposing rolls of flab where it would best be kept under wraps. And it's often hairy flab as well. Eww!
Eww. A 70-year old woman with saggy, wrinkly, tattoos!
There's nowt so strange as folk, as they say.
Well, yes fair comment I suppose. For non-smokers anyway. And tattoo taboos are I suppose only for non-tattooees.
Whether or not they are artistic is hardly the point. human flesh is hardly an appropriate canvas for a civilised person. It's all too obvious that the most enthusiastic wearers imagine they are making themselves more attractive with all these piercings and paintings, judging by the proportion of uglies within their ranks. But it's just a form of self-mutilation and in my opinion it makes you look like you have mental health problems. And there's no bigger turn-off as far as the opposite sex is concerned.
They can pile on all the features they want, but if there's no built-in bluetooth support then I'm not interested. Anyone else agree/disagree?
If you get on OK with Pat Metheny (I particulrly recommend his "Still Life, Talking" album), then you are bound to enjoy Lyle Mays also, who used to play with Metheny.
:o(
You may also enjoy Chick Corea, who plays piano with a small group. Very mellow. I recommend "Eye of the Beholder". Somebody stole my copy
If you like very hard Jazz fusion (eg Miles Davis' weirder stuff) then try Weather Report, especially from when Jaco Pasterius was still with them. Virtuoso performances guaranteed.
OTOH, whenever some Brazilian public sector department needs new software functionality that doesn't already exist on Linux (if such a category even exists today) they'll need to either write it or commission an external developer to write it. And it will need to be open source to comply with regs. So there'll be even more open source software! Yay!
That's analyzer.
Oh yeah and how many war movies have you seen where the hero wasn't American? The way Hollywood tells it, the British and the Russians did sweet fuck through all the whole war. Guess what, the 100,000 who died in the battle to take Berlin and finish the war were Russian. Of course you don't see that in the movies. The recent submarine movie where the Enigma project became thoroughly Americanized was a relatively mild example of this distortive tendency. Well, I have news for you pal. You need to stop getting your history lessons from the TV and pick up a book or two. Preferably one with small print and not too many pictures in it.
Well, if you must. It's really no skin off my nose. But it would be overreacting, don't you think? All the rest of the world wants is for the US to behave in the way we all ask each other to behave: play nice with the other children, try not to get into fights, if a fight starts try not to make it worse, don't tell lies and don't try to hog all the cookies. The United States hasn't done very well on any of these counts.So don't give me any of this "evil regime" crap. The only way to justify an illegally prosecuted war on the basis of that is to hold that the ends justify the means. And if you admit that line of reasoning, anyone can justify any act they like. It was a favourite of Hitler's and Pol Pot's.
It's possible that you understand the above but chose to ignore it. However here is the part that you are evidently don't understand at all, if you wrote honestly: Neither the United States, nor any other country, has any right or duty to unilateral military intervention in the affairs of another sovereign state.
That's final, and not open to interpretation, or debate, or argument. It is enshrined in international law. It is necessary because national governments sometimes act unjustly in their own interests without regard to the sovereignty or welfare of other nations (as the US has done illegally a hundred times or more since the end of the second world war in fact, but I digress).
There is a single exception to this law. If there had been a credible threat to US security from Iraq it would have been excusable. In practice, if such a threat had existed the US would not even have had to act in isolation (lets call a spade a spade here, the "allies'" involvement was entirely due to US influence and generally against the wishes of their own populations. So much for democracy).
But, as the other nations - for example France and Germany - were saying at the time:
*and* as the anti-war movement in the US and the UK and the other "allies" maintained,
*and* the UN weapons inspectors were saying and continue to say,
*and* as evidenced by the failure of Iraq to produce the expected WMDs in his own defence,
*and* as evidenced by our failure to find any WMDs ever since.
So there wasn't any goddamn threat. Bush and his dad and his uncles in the CIA made it up. The whole war must have been fought for other reasons they didn't want to share with us.
All that much is increasingly transparent at this point, increasingly out in the open to the dicomfiture of the US and UK governments, but they know that public dissent can be managed. After all, it's easier to get forgiveness than permission. And in the end, it wasn't that hard to get permission, either. See below:
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Naturally the common people don't want war, but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.
Well, except that what he said about the IDE code is true, at least in 2.4.20. Systems under high load can freeze up badly, this is particularly noticeable when ripping a CD to disk but that's not the only way it can happen.
Also once the task responsible has gone you'd think the system would return to normal. It doesn't. God help you if you had a lot of web pages open in Mozilla; it's the first thing to freeze up and once it does that it doesn't come back even if CPU & memory utilization elsewhere is cut back to the minimum. Parts of KDE can go into a permanent sleep like that too.
I don't know why some applications should be so utterly incapable of recovery after a resource shortage, I'm just reporting an observation.
This is the first IDE system I've run Linux on. it's never happened to me on any of my SCSI systems running the same 2.4.x kernel series.
I thought your original post was verging on a troll and I just had to strike back on behalf of my favourite president of recent times. So most of your remarks are wildly misdirected, because they assume a political allegiance I do not lay claim to. I am in fact strongly libertarian (with a few conservative misgivings). Because the main parties in the UK are run by self-serving liars thieves and demagogues, I have for the last 15 years been a consistent supporter of the Green party (for which I have voted every time they put up a local candidate, which is most local and general elections).
So on the face of it our political leanings appear to be almost identical. In fact the correspondence is almost uncanny.
Where we may differ, however:
I don't really think Clinton is a "great man" along the lines of (the history book version of) Abraham Lincoln or Frankin Delano Roosevelt, but at least he is a just man and a man of peace, as world leaders go.
Yes he did send troops out on police actions of various kinds but by and large the military actions carried out in his name were measured and proportionate, compared to those of the current incumbent.
Bottom line: Clinton did not make America hated and disrespected overseas as George W Bush has.
In my opinion neither Clinton's alleged college dorm room marijuana habit nor his illegitimate blowjob from a Whitehouse intern could make him an evil man or a poor leader. These strictly harmless leisure-related acts are utterly irrelevant to the vast majority of the world (including most Americans, if contemporary opinion poll results are any indication). The only people who wanted to make heavy weather out of it were his political opponents. Surprise, surprise.
Anyway Clinton wasn't the first world statesman to look for a "bit on the side". Sorry to disappoint you but due to its generally occult nature, marital fidelity has never been a pre-requisite for historical greatness (they're kind of orthogonal really).
Almost all healthy heterosexual men are naturally inclined to desire multiple sexual partners, with only social convention to hold their drives in check.
But status and power are just about the most powerful aphrodisiacs in existence - for both the man in possession of them and for those women looking on. The resultant combinaton of male sexual confidence and overt female availability is a powerful temptation to dangle in front of any man with a normal sex drive. But it's also a relatively harmless one compared to others that may beset the most powerful man in the world.
Such as lust for revenge, or cravings for world domination.
It's more than possible that GWB's shitty attitude toward the rest of the world (and toward a good number of his own citizens, it increasingly appears) could have its origins partly in a retarded or frustrated sex drive. It's not an unrealistic theory because the same could be said of a lot of grouchy middle-aged men.
So a bottle of Viagra and an eager intern or two might have helped to avoid a costly and generally pointless war. And that would have been wrong? According to you it would have been, apparently.
I've noticed recently that there seems to be an increasing number of pro-strong-copyright trolls on Slashdot, both anonymous and registered varieties. It certainly looks like the MPAA & RIAA are now getting their (member's) employees posing as geeks to come to slashdot and muddy the waters. It's information warfare I guess.
Actually I do remember the same thing happening about two or three years ago with an extended spate of pro-Microsoft trolls. And then some Microsoft insider blew the whistle and Microsoft were caught red handed. It didn't put a stop to it immediately IIRC, but it died away eventually anyway.
Bill Clinton is a truly great man. Not perfect, because he's human. But he's still one of the less corrupt and self-serving American politicians of recent years. And he's not reviled by the majority of the people on the planet. You can say that for him, at least. Unlike this fuckwit "Dubya", for instance.
First, there's the signal-to-noise ratio, which can get pretty awful even in fora designed originally to support just one piece of software or one piece of functionality. See for instance the number of different lists you need to hunt down just to get started diagnosing a problem with subsytems involving components from different sources. eg getting the TV functionality on a Radeon All-in-Wonder to work with your distro's patched-up kernel, the v4l2-bttv kernel modules, the various gatos kernel modules, XF86 modules and associated bits, and a couple of viewers like xawtv and avview. Which still don't work for me. Unsurprisingly.
Then there's the poor internal structure of the lists themselves. Most posters seeking help don't bother to supply a meaningful and apposite subject line since they are only thinking about getting an answer to their problem today rather than documenting their painful journey for the benefit of future travellers. This tends to render the list's thread view into more or less random nonsense.
And then, many forum host providers only provide search capability at the subject line level, so poor (or confused) subject line relevance forces you to google for the information just in that one list as from a great distance. And even the mighty Google can swamp any good matches in a sea of distraction, because even Google doesn't support (AFAIK) search target restriction modifiers at any smaller granularity than per host.
The result of these deficiencies is that you can search for days, weeks even, without coming across an unambiguously documented example of the problem you are looking for - even when it is inevitable that someone somewhere *must* have suffered the same problem. If it's a complex problem and if you do manage to find a documented example, it's odds on that the question will have been left dangling with not so much as an acknowledgement from anyone. Or, there will be some "red herring" reply spawning a substantial thread of only barely tangential relevance.
To maximize our leverage of all the previous problem-solving that has been done by ordinary half-able users like you and me, we need to make it nice and easy for people to document their questions and answers in a more structured, accessible and re-usable way. Yes, there should be a single repository, centralized in the sense that if it succeeds (a la freshmeat and sourceforge), alternatives would be irrelevant and possibly even counterproductive; but not necessarily centralized in the sense of control. Rather it might be distributed in terms of implementation and maintainance (cf wikipedia or bugzilla as opposed to freshmeat or "ask slashdot").
The key concept to the creation of something an orders of magnitude more useful than the current generation of help sources is the use of structured data for indexing, categorization and traversal rather than hit-and-miss indexing of freeform text by search bots. Users need to be able to search precisely for documented Q&A on previous instances of whatever specific and arcane combinations of circumstance have led to their own predicament. To this end, submissions need to be carefully tagged with a full compliment of relevant keywords and perhaps even the semantic relationships between them, and those keywords and relations may need to be amended again whenever somebody manages to add another piece to the puzzle.
I envisage a submission procedure driven by a continually evolving and diversifying system of nested questionnaires with the intention of:
drat! - screwed up the html tags, but the link does still work.
If it really is completely unfeasible in the US legal system for innocent parties to defend themselves against attackers with deep pockets then they can't be said to have equal status under the law. Surely, then, legal system reform should be the very first political priority of every single American adult of voting age until they achieve that equal status?
(Disclaimer: I don't really have any personal axe to grind here since I don't download or upload music, I'm British and resident in the UK and I just don't believe this could happen here).
Regarding the boycott of RIAA recordings, I totally agree. That's why I keep the RIAA Radar>/a> bookmarklet on my mozilla toolbar ;o)