For all the years of good service we've had from google, who are we to question the removal of features?
Their bread and butter? Without us (the millions of people who use google rather than a competitor) they don't have a business.
I read your post and thought I could detect a tongue firmly in cheeck. I don't know what is more disturbing.... the +2 insightful moderation or the notion that your comment implying that intelligent people should essentially bend over for their "superiors" and accept whatever they may do passively and happilly could possibly have been intended not as humor, but in earnest.
Or is everyone's stock answer to anyone's criticism of Our Corporate Masters(tm), or anyone's demand for corporate accountability not just to their stockholders, but to their community, their customers, and their resources (us, as it is our clicks and our eyes they are selling to their advertisers) to "go out and start your own company and stop criticisizing Our Greatness(tm)"?
On a more serious note (and I only feel compelled to say this because so many moderators obviously aren't getting what I believe you intended as a bit of wry humor), our president, our congress, and far too many common folks (on slashdot and off) may eagerly fall to their knees in the presence of their corporate masters (and may indeed race one another to do so), but some of us remain free thinkers and expect to criticize any organization, profit-driven or not, when they misbehave.
And crippling a service to increase revinue is certainly misbehaving, whether or not that service is "free." (Our clicks, our eyes, that they are selling and making billions off of, are also free. If this exchange becomes unequitable because of Google's dominant position... we have nowhere else to effectively go... then we can and should bitch about it, loudly)
ICANN sucks but the UN is a corrupt and filled with pompous idiots. Next thing you know, the Secretary General's son will own your domain name, and you'll have to pay his Swiss lords a monthly fee to use it.
I'll take the regular idiots at ICANN, thank you.
I concurr.
The UN as a mechanism to facilitate inter-government communication and consensus is invaluable. But it it a profound mistake for anyone to look to the UN for anything more than occasional, unreliable, passing help on any humanitarian issue, be it prevention of disease (by far their best effort of any), prevention of genocide (Dafur, Ruanda, Kosovo, etc.), or freedom.
People forget that the UN's constituency is governments, not people, and that the majority of those governments are corrupt, repressive, and kill scores of said people. Even if the US were a perfect democracy (it is anything but), its constituents are by and large repressive, corrupt, and often murderous regimes.
Bush's anti-UN stance is terrible -- the UN is the best mechanism for diplomacy and international consensus there is. But as a world government the UN would be far worse than the Bush regime... or just about any other regime, for that matter. Food-for-oil scandals, the blind eye being turned toward [insert any of several hundred genocidal atrocities committed by member states over the last fifty years], and the empowerment of governments at every level over that of people, human rights' charter notwithstanding, and you get a taste of what will come should the UN begin to control human issues directly, including that of internet speech vis-a-vis the DNS domain name system.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned that Spanish has two past tenses: the imperfect and the preterite. It's somewhat similiar to what's being mentioned about Choktaw, only you're more likely to encounter someone who speaks the language.
German is similiar. It has two (I don't recall the technical term) tenses, one if which implies factual information and one that implies claimed information not necessarilly factual:
Er sagte, sie waere jung.
Er sagte, sie sei jung.
Both say "he said, she was young," but with different implications as to its veracity.
Thank you, now please go back to knowing that you cannot do anything and leave those that actually do something fight for what they feel is worth fighting for.
Thos who can, do. Those who can't, claim its impossible and that those who are doing are wasting everyone's time.
Congrats big-time to the European techies for standing up to the entrenched interests on this subject and, possibly, changing the course of history for the better. I do not pretend to know what the outcome of your efforts will be, but as one embittered American who has watched our democracy vanish at every level, from the grass roots on up to the lobbiests, I applaud your efforts and the positive results they have had thus far.
We've got a basic problem here: the best correlation for doing well for Bush is the presence of e-voting machines. The only way to debunk this is to come up with a variable that correlates even more strongly for Bush AND ALSO correlates independently with the presence of e-voting machines. Merely throwing variables up in the air, as I've seen throughout this./ discussion, isn't going to help you do that most efficiently.
No, but Republican apologist snowjobs aren't intended to explain the results, or debunk the growing evidence that widespread election fraud via voting machines and Diebold tabulators have resulted in the second stolen presidential election in four years.
They are intended to befuddle the public into remaining quiescent and submissive. And they succeed beautifully in achieving that objective.
Hell, even the spineless "mainstream" American media won't touch this story with a 20 meter cattle prod, despite the mountain of evidence available, and the many voices trying to raise public awareness of what has happened. They're too busy curry favor with the president-elect's administration.
"This country contains people dummer than the common stump, even dumb enough to believe Creationist psuedo-science. This is a fact, not a theory, regarding the origin of many of the world's problems. These people should be approached with caution, studied carefully, and critically considered undependable, irratic, and quite dangerous."
And lest someone to the right of Adolf Hitler (slightly more than 50% of the voting public if election results are to be believed) get their panties in a knot, IAAA (I Am An American).
Patent law, like copyright law, is essentially international in nature.
Wrong. Patent law is legislated and regulated at the national level. There are (limited) treaties for recognizing patents internationally, and allowing patent holders in one country to file for patents in another within a limited timeframe, but patent law per se is national, and varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
For example, the United States is IIRC the only country in the world that has legislated software patents, and I believe the only country in the world that recognizes patents on ways of doing business (go figure). Duration of patents varies from country to country as well, despite WTO efforts to "harmonize" (read: apply the most draconian conditions everywhere) patent law.
You can be granted patents in any number of different countries; it's possible that MS holds patents in the relevant countries, not just in the US.
That is currently not possible (see above: the US is the only country that recognizes software patents). It will only become possible if other countries (the EU, China, Japan, etc.) amend their patent laws to create software patents, something they are increasingly unlikely to do.
the mainstream press in an unashamed curry-for-favors frenzy with the current administration to the point of refering to the appointment of the man who presided over the Abu Graib scandal and authored a memo on how the Geneva convention shouldn't be applied to prisoners as attorney-general, as a moderate and uncontroversial choice in direct opposition the objective fact ('moderate' may be subjective, but 'uncontroversial' is certainly contrary to the objective fact that he has been and remains a controversial figure, and a controversial appointment)
FCC, in its capacity as Internet regulators, introduces the "Great Homeland Firewall", which bars USA citizens from connecting to foreign sites deeemed dangerous and/or terrorist. Some people note that Democratic blogs also appear to be rejected by the FCC Firewall.
In all seriousness, this past weekend I had an interesting conversation with an expat couple my girlfriend knows, who have been living on a houseboat in France for the last several years (and who flew back to the states to vote).
They told us about how millions of American expats the world over were trying to contact their friends and associates in the United States, to coordinate their political efforts via web sites in the US, etc. only to have their emails bounce relentlessly, and the websites in the US be unreachable for weeks at a time. Phone converstations with friends revealed that these websites were, interestingly enough, perfectly reachable from within the US.
(Cue right-wing zealot's dismissal of "foreign" ISPs and "shoddy unamerican technology").
Of course, the problems all went away one day after the election.
These were not isolated incidents. They were widespread and widely documented.
I'm not sure what to make it (and I expect a dozen or so responses from Republicans denying, dismissing, or attempting to legitimize what appears to have been a concerted effort at blocking communications between US citizens by someone in a position to do so), but I do think it is very interesting that the blocking that is occuring is in the opposite direction you and most of us have assumed it would be. To our knowledge (bit honking caveate there) we aren't being blocked from obtaining information abroad, but folks outside the US are being blocked from obtaining information within the US, or contacting people via email/chatrooms/online fora within the US.
I can imagine several reasons why the powers that be might want to do this. None of them are good, and most are very chilling indeed.
In any event, it appears infrastructure similiar to China's Firewall is already in place, and may have been actively deployed for political purposes already. In context with other developments (Diebold election debacles, the mainstream press in an unashamed curry-for-favors frenzy with the current administration to the point of refering to the appointment of the man who presided over the Abu Graib scandal and authored a memo on how the Geneva convention shouldn't be applied to prisoners as attorney-general, the FCC asserting regulatory control over all things digital, and so) I'm inclined to revise my timetable for the complete decline of the US from 10-20 years to 1-3 years... and I really think I'm being optomistic, here. We could be out the last of our rights by the end of the next congressional term, the way things are going.
If anyone knows (otherwise I'll go to the gentoo forums) when you install the PPC version does it give an option to install a bootloader (like GRUB/LILO etc.) to dual boot OS X, or is this something they expect you to do afterwards?
I dualboot Gentoo and Mac OS X 10.3 on a 17" powerbook with no problem whatsoever. As to your question "do they expect you to do it later," I think you may not be aware that the Gentoo installation process is manual (following a very well documented, step by step procedure, but nevertheless, manual). This is in contrast to Mandrake, for example, that gives you a nice install gui and sets stuff up for you automagically... but then becomes a bear to maintain over time (Gentoo a year later is as maintainable and easy to sync up as it was on day one... and as current as the latest download).
So your question is a little orthogonal to the situation, making a "yes/no" answer unrevealing.
Summary: Following the Gentoo docs, you will have a bootable Gentoo system that supports dual booting with Mac OS X. Configuration specifics for the bootloader may need to be cross-referenced with a dualboot HOWTO... it has been a couple of years since I installed Gentoo, so I don't recall the specificis anymore. I do recall it being quite straightforward, however... and it does still work fine today, two years (and countless "emerge --deep -u world"s) later.
Take a look at Miami-Dade... IIRC, they are using touch-screens there.
Miami-Dade was supposed to be incredibly Democratic and they only got a 54-46 margin.
Very suspect.
I agree with your conclusion, but not with your reason.
The Diebold touchscreens are a bit of a red herring. Yes, they are a concern and should be audited (and auditable)... though Diebold made sure to design their equipment to be impossible to audit, a deliberate design decision in stark contrast to the ATMs they manufacture as their core business.
The Diebold tabulators are the real concern. Like the touchscreen machines, they produce no paper trail and are difficult or impossible to audit... again, as a deliberate design decision, in contrast with other banking equipment Diebold manufactures.
The tabulators are the big computers that collect millions of votes and tallies them up. They are used to count votes from touch screens, as well as from other precincts using everything from op-scan sheets to punch cards. A two digit back door code will let you change voting totals, with absolutely no evidence that you've done so.
In every other country, when exit polls differ significantly from the official results, it is generally considered a pretty strong indicator of voter fraud. In the United States, CNN simply changes their polling data to match the official result... abdicating fully their position as our democracies watchdog and a check and balance on the government.
I have no idea if the elections in Ohio and Florida were rigged, or if Bush won legitimately. I truly hope it is the latter. I don't expect the US to emerge from four more years with much intact in the way of its economy and influence in the world, much less with many of the social gains of the last quarter century still intact, but it would be far worse for America if Bush stole this election than if he won it legitimately.
The problem is, with machines that are designed to be impossible to audit, and with tabulators that have a software feature designed to facilitate fraud, we can't know.
Ever.
And that is terribly disturbing.
To any critically thinking mind, the legitimacy of this entire election is serious doubt, and would have been irrespective of who won. Using unauditable equipment in an election undermines the entire process at its most fundamental level, and does more to destabilize the political climate in America than a thousand bin Ladens could possibly ever achieve.
Diebold and others who produce similarly shoddy election equipment need to be put out of business, immediately and perminently.
All in all it appears likely Bush did win the popular vote and as much as I'd wish the win was due to rigging it appears there is a good chance that it just indicates the majority of Americans actually like Bush and by my standards that suggests they are not good people. Its also apparent that evangelicals now completely dominate America government and that is really not good unless you are one.
It's not even good if you are an evangelical.
Each of these fools (even my Mormon-converted family) thinks it will be their religion that comes out on top once they've managed to turn our secular nation into a theocratic state.
Whatever religion becomes the defacto religion of government (right now it is clearly the Methodists, but who knows where it will be by the time the last of the separation of church and state has been eroded), most evangelicals will discover they don't belong to the ruling sect.
As a result, they will discover that their own freedom of religion is significantly reduced, perhaps eliminated altogether. It won't just be non-Christians who are discriminated against and disempowered, it will be a big chunk of the Christians themselves, including those evangelicals that don't happen to belong to The President's Church.
For that matter, a fair number of people belonging to The President's Church will probably find their freedoms a thing of the past as well.
It truly is appalling how low America has sunk. We really do deserve the political, social, economic, and cultural isolation the Bush administration is bringing down on America. It is ironic that we fought the Korean War and the Vietnam War because we bought into the notion of the "Domino Theory," in which the Communists (the "Al Q'aida" boogeyman of the day) would economically and politically isolate America, until the rest of the world was a part of their economy and we stood alone. Were that to happen, America would dwindle to insignificance... our strength always came from our trade with other nations and our diplomacy, of which our military was a key component, but not the major component.
Now we are isolating ourselves more effectively than the Communists ever dreamed of doing, and it appears the average American voter has been frightened enough, hateful enough, bigoted enough, or just plain stupid enough to embrace the policies and the idiots who are doing this to us.
We've earned the consiquence of our own foolishness. I just hope they aren't as severe as I fear they'll be.
Here in Chicago's 49th precinct I just got done standing in line for one hour and forty minutes. In the past I've voted in this precinct, and for both midterm and presidential elections I've never had to wait more than a couple of minutes.
Truly, the voter turnout is astounding, and the number of young people voting unprecidented. Eyeballing the couple of hundred people in line before and after me, I'd say between two thirds and three quarters of the people voting were under 30.
This bodes well for Kerry, assuming the Diebold Tabulators don't change a chunk of our votes to Bush (Not sure if they're used to count Illinois votes, but they are used in a number of states that are not using the Diebold touch screens, and the tabulators can be used to change tens of thousands of votes in a few keystrokes, simply by entering a two digit back-door code. All without a papertrail, and no way to effectively retrieve the altered data. Welcome to American Democracy 21st century style).
There's some stuff in MozSuite that I have missed in FF:
Ctrl-click to open in new tab (no middle mouse button on my touchpad)
This annoyed me too at first. Try ALT-click.
I discovered it by accident. I have no idea why they changed CTRL-click to ALT-click in Firefox vs. Mozilla, but they did.
The other two points I don't miss in the least, as I (a) don't run windows (I value my sanity), and (b) have no phobia of entering text into the location bar.:-)
Really, CTRL-click was something I couldn't live without, so I was very glad to stumble on ALT-click.
I find it facinating that everyone just assumes that women in ancient Egypt were subservient. Where is the evidence for this? Contrary to public opinion, as a simple search on the role of women in ancient Egypt on Google will attest, the historical record suggests that woman in Egypt had legal parity with men.
That is debated among historians. While Egypt did have female rulers, it does not appear that women were equal among the working masses... just as weomen hardly enjoy equal rights today in Pakistan, despite the fact that the country has had a female leader (who even as prime minister was not allowed to look into the eyes of a male).
What isn't debated among historians is that women in many other parts of the world in that day and age were not treated at all equally, and indeed were treated as property/slaves/etc by many cultures.
Had you RTFAed, you would have noticed that the character being played was not from Egypt, he was from a distant land. Historically, the odds that said culture would be sexist as hell (to put it mildly) were quite high.
As others noted, the players took modern day equal rights for granted. Something they really shouldn't be doing, in reality today with Bush et. al. bent on rolling women's rights back to pre-1960s status, and certainly not in a role playing game set in ancient Egypt.
Riotinig (in game or otherwise) is so asinine... it leads me to believe that most of the "women" in game were actually men in drag. Although perhaps not... it will be interesting to watch how women in the United States react when, as a consiquence of their inaction and apathy, the "unthinkable" happens and they lose their freedom of choice under Roe v. Wade and find their bodies chattal of the state for nine months again -- something most people like to believe will never happen, but the current administration for whom some many women are naively voting has publicly stated as one of their objectives. Will they riot, as so many psuedo-women have in game? Or will they engage in more intelligent civil disobedience and political activity, as they have so many times in the past to achieve parity under the law. My money, based on historical evidence, is on the latter... which again is why I suspect so many of the "women" in this game were in fact played by men. Rioting has generally been, in most historical contexts anyway, such a "male" response.
We can surmise that, but we don't really know
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Rob Pike Responds
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Perhaps Pike's background with non-academic (i.e. commercial) research centers causes him to think about patents in a different light than, say, Stallman's background in working at MIT in the '70s (an academic research center, among other things).
Well, since he dodged the question with a disingenuous slam of the questioner, using his disagreement with the questioner's analogy as cover to do so, we really don't know the answer to that. Based on his unwillingness to answer the question and defend his point of view (which one may surmise based on previous behavior and his dismissal of software patents as an issue worthy of addressing, is pro-software patent) we can guess that his perspective does differ from most in both the industry and academia (including Stallman), but with his refusal to answer the question we really don't know.
That is Disingenuous Spin, His answer IS political
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Rob Pike Responds
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Maybe because he's getting tired of this issue? Maybe he wants to focus on actual code instead of politics?
And how, pray tell, is he going to do that when all but the most trivial code runs afoul of patents and is vulnerable to litigation? (According to many analysts, this is already the case.)
Refusing to answer the question and using disagreement with the analogy used by the questioner as cover is an exceedingly political answer (and a tried and true method of dodging uncomfortable questions used by virtually every political candidate for office in recent years, as alluded to the "is he running for office" comment)... dismissing the issue on such a weak pretense clearly amounts to taking sides on the issue, namely the side of the status quo, i.e. pro software patents.
Hardly a non-political stance, merely a disingenuous one.
No wolves here, but a hell of a lot of sheeple
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The Empires Strike Back
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· Score: 5, Insightful
until the goverment says why they raided the place everyone is really just crying wolf.
Um, no. Having the government abscond with people's property without cause or justification, and stonewalling as to why, does not imply no cause for concern, nor is anyone "crying wolf" when they announce to the world that the government has seized their property and silenced their voices without announcing why and without proper due process (which, in case you were sleeping through twelve years of civics classes, includes being told what one is accused of doing wrong).
They might have had a perfectly legit reason or they may have been poltical tools
With no notification to the accused of what they are accused of, it is abuse of power and in violation of acceptable norms in every western liberal democracy. It is irrelevant as to whether the motive was political, legal, or personal... abuse of power is abuse of power, regardless.
We don't know yet and may not know for a long time but so far I'm not inclined to start screaming about censorship just yet.
Not surprising. You represent the school of thought that is primarilly responsible for these sorts of actions, and the erosion of our fundamental rights they imply.
But nevermind, I'm sure you'll scream loudly about how burying your head in the sand is "realistic" and "sophisticated," while those of us who point to such obvious abuses as these are dismissed as the "tin foil hat" crowd. This has happened numerous times in history, and is happening again, proving once more that those who ignore history are indeed doommed to repeat it. Unless, of course, IHBT.
Kind of makes a mockery of the word "justice" doesn't it? When Justice depends on who is in office then the dept of justice is nothing but orwellian doublespeak.
Please people make it a point to re-read 1984 before the election.
Why? Diebold tabulators are being used in more than a dozen states this election. The outcome has already been predecided, the question is merely the means. Either g.W. bush will win the election "fairly" (assuming smearing the war record of veterans and lying perpetually to the American people can be construed as "fair") or his party and its right-wing supporters will flat out steal the election again... this time probably by entering a two digit code in the Deibold tabulators and changing the unauditable totals to something more in line with their desires.
Either way, America has four more years of incomeptence to look forward to. The real test, and why everyone should vote against Bush anyway, is whether the American people will hand a victory to him, or whether he will be forced to defraud our democracy again to get it. We owe it to ourselves to force them to show their true colors, and to not make hanging on to power easy, but don't kid yourself... with the currect Conservative/Reactionary group running things, we're already doomed.
Microsoft, as appalling and disgusting as they are, and as destructive as they have been and will continue to be to our industry, our digital freedoms, and ultimately our rights to free expression in this technological age, are nothing compared to the corrupt regime that has not only let them off the hook, but is actively wrecking this country and its founding institutions on far too many levels to even begin elucidating in this post.
Vote by all means: let the world know we didn't choose this incompetent thug this time any more than we did the last time, but don't kid yourself on who is going to be in the White House after it's all over.
The grandparent's comment was that this is not theft. So yes, he was wrong.
Yes, he's right in saying it's fraud, as are you. But your comment is more accurate "it's also fraud".
You are both correct on semantic technicalities, however, the (great-great?) grandparent post is correct in its overall argument that the implied meaning of "Identity Theft" isn't "theft through fraudulant assumption of someone else's identity" but rather "Theft of someone's identity", which is a nonsensical notion that results in muddy thinking at best. No one's identity is being "stolen" (I don't lose my identity if someone engages in fraudulant activity pretending to be me, I lose my good credit rating and a great deal of time, but nevertheless, that isn't 'theft' of my identity, it is fraudulantly assuming my identity. There is a real difference, and our use of language should reflect that fact.).
Indeed, people refer to "Identity Theft" even when nothing of value has been stolen (yet)... examples include fraudsters who are caught with credit cards in people's names they haven't yet used to commit theft with. So the term is being used in a manner consistent with the implied meaning of "theft of identity" and not the one implied in the semantic games that have followed meaning "theft by means of identity."
Fraud and theft are indeed both occuring, but "Identity Theft" (theft of identity) is not. The great-great grandparent post is correct... the term is a crappy one, as muddled and incoherent as the term "intellectual property," and anyone wishing to think and communicate clearly ought to consider avoiding it.
If your science teaches you anything let it be that todays science facts will always be overturned tomorrows science; don't build of your science a religion as brittle and baseless as that you think you are attacking.
You are engaging in numerous logical fallacies that make your argument completely irrelevant to this, the real world.
1. It isn't "my" science. This terminology is intended to dismiss and diminish the evidence I passed along from very reputable, scientific sources in the form of a URL link by implicity implying it is "my hypothesis," or that I adhere to science in a manner analogous to how you adhere to religion (hint: faith != reason).
2. You imply science teaches something it does not: that "today's facts will always be overturned" (emphesis mine). This is not true. Facts are never "overturned." Emperical data is emperical data: it doesn't go away even when new data are discovered. Theories and interpretation may change, new data may shed new light on how best to interpret the older data, or a flaw in the collection of the older data may be discovered (this is comapratively rare, however), but "facts" as such do not change.
The implication is that all scientific theories are discarded. This is not a falsifiable statement (we have plenty of theories which have not been discarded and appear to have proven themselves over time, with the occasional refinement in precision, but without violating causality we cannot know if any theories will stand up over the next million or billion years of scientific inquiry, nor can we know if we will develope a new theory, in a new discipline, that stands up to indefinite scrutiny and is never discarded). As the hypothesis you've made (and fallaciously ascribed to "my science") is nonfalsifiable it is by definition not addressed by the scientific method (which requires hypotheses to be falsifiable). Therefor, science says no such thing. QED.
3. Any scientific theory is subject to revision or rejection if new evidence shows it to be erroneous. As noted before, these are not new facts (emperical data), but new interpretations of existing and/or additional facts. However, you argue that because a theory may be later disproven or discarded, that all theories (including the five or so that appear with overwhelming evidence to disprove the fundamental precepts of the Book of Mormon) will be discarded at some later date. Again, this is a logical fallacy: the one does not necessarily follow from the other.
4. You further imply that, because there is a vanishingly small possibility that one of the numerous genetic analyses which disprove the notion that Native Americans are descended from Israelis might be flawed, or the theory interpreting the data might later be refined or discarded, that it and the several corroberating, unrelated data (and independent theories which are used to interpret those unrelated data) are as likely to be discarded as not, and the arguments therefor "fragile." This ignores the rather obvious fact that the likelihood of even one of the several methods by which the premis of the Book of Mormon has been disproven is vanishingly small, particularly given to corraboration with other, unrelated fields of study that have reached the same conclusion indepently of one another, and that the liklihood of all of the various studies being likewise incorrect is so small as to be laughable. And that assumes a randomness to the results (this isn't a roll of the dice, after all, this is meticulous, careful study), which simply isn't the case.
5. Finally, you state:
A superficial and brief understanding of DNA and mormon scripture may result in almost any opinion
which has nothing whatsoever to do with the scientific evidence presented, in which studies performed by experts in the field, independent of one another, have all reached the same conclusion through different paths, applying different areas of genetic science applied to
Slashdot Mirror
Even if the US were a perfect democracy (it is anything but), its constituents are by and large repressive, corrupt, and often murderous regimes.
Gurr! That should of course read:
Even if the UN were a perfect democracy (it is anything but), its constituents are by and large repressive, corrupt, and often murderous regimes.
For all the years of good service we've had from google, who are we to question the removal of features?
.... the +2 insightful moderation or the notion that your comment implying that intelligent people should essentially bend over for their "superiors" and accept whatever they may do passively and happilly could possibly have been intended not as humor, but in earnest.
... we have nowhere else to effectively go ... then we can and should bitch about it, loudly)
Their bread and butter? Without us (the millions of people who use google rather than a competitor) they don't have a business.
I read your post and thought I could detect a tongue firmly in cheeck. I don't know what is more disturbing
Or is everyone's stock answer to anyone's criticism of Our Corporate Masters(tm), or anyone's demand for corporate accountability not just to their stockholders, but to their community, their customers, and their resources (us, as it is our clicks and our eyes they are selling to their advertisers) to "go out and start your own company and stop criticisizing Our Greatness(tm)"?
On a more serious note (and I only feel compelled to say this because so many moderators obviously aren't getting what I believe you intended as a bit of wry humor), our president, our congress, and far too many common folks (on slashdot and off) may eagerly fall to their knees in the presence of their corporate masters (and may indeed race one another to do so), but some of us remain free thinkers and expect to criticize any organization, profit-driven or not, when they misbehave.
And crippling a service to increase revinue is certainly misbehaving, whether or not that service is "free." (Our clicks, our eyes, that they are selling and making billions off of, are also free. If this exchange becomes unequitable because of Google's dominant position
No fucking way.
... or just about any other regime, for that matter. Food-for-oil scandals, the blind eye being turned toward [insert any of several hundred genocidal atrocities committed by member states over the last fifty years], and the empowerment of governments at every level over that of people, human rights' charter notwithstanding, and you get a taste of what will come should the UN begin to control human issues directly, including that of internet speech vis-a-vis the DNS domain name system.
ICANN sucks but the UN is a corrupt and filled with pompous idiots. Next thing you know, the Secretary General's son will own your domain name, and you'll have to pay his Swiss lords a monthly fee to use it.
I'll take the regular idiots at ICANN, thank you.
I concurr.
The UN as a mechanism to facilitate inter-government communication and consensus is invaluable. But it it a profound mistake for anyone to look to the UN for anything more than occasional, unreliable, passing help on any humanitarian issue, be it prevention of disease (by far their best effort of any), prevention of genocide (Dafur, Ruanda, Kosovo, etc.), or freedom.
People forget that the UN's constituency is governments, not people, and that the majority of those governments are corrupt, repressive, and kill scores of said people. Even if the US were a perfect democracy (it is anything but), its constituents are by and large repressive, corrupt, and often murderous regimes.
Bush's anti-UN stance is terrible -- the UN is the best mechanism for diplomacy and international consensus there is. But as a world government the UN would be far worse than the Bush regime
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned that Spanish has two past tenses: the imperfect and the preterite. It's somewhat similiar to what's being mentioned about Choktaw, only you're more likely to encounter someone who speaks the language.
German is similiar. It has two (I don't recall the technical term) tenses, one if which implies factual information and one that implies claimed information not necessarilly factual:
Er sagte, sie waere jung.
Er sagte, sie sei jung.
Both say "he said, she was young," but with different implications as to its veracity.
Thank you, now please go back to knowing that you cannot do anything and leave those that actually do something fight for what they feel is worth fighting for.
Thos who can, do. Those who can't, claim its impossible and that those who are doing are wasting everyone's time.
Congrats big-time to the European techies for standing up to the entrenched interests on this subject and, possibly, changing the course of history for the better. I do not pretend to know what the outcome of your efforts will be, but as one embittered American who has watched our democracy vanish at every level, from the grass roots on up to the lobbiests, I applaud your efforts and the positive results they have had thus far.
Well done, and please keep up the good work!
We've got a basic problem here: the best correlation for doing well for Bush is the presence of e-voting machines. The only way to debunk this is to come up with a variable that correlates even more strongly for Bush AND ALSO correlates independently with the presence of e-voting machines. Merely throwing variables up in the air, as I've seen throughout this ./ discussion, isn't going to help you do that most efficiently.
No, but Republican apologist snowjobs aren't intended to explain the results, or debunk the growing evidence that widespread election fraud via voting machines and Diebold tabulators have resulted in the second stolen presidential election in four years.
They are intended to befuddle the public into remaining quiescent and submissive. And they succeed beautifully in achieving that objective.
Hell, even the spineless "mainstream" American media won't touch this story with a 20 meter cattle prod, despite the mountain of evidence available, and the many voices trying to raise public awareness of what has happened. They're too busy curry favor with the president-elect's administration.
"This country contains people dummer than the common stump, even dumb enough to believe Creationist psuedo-science. This is a fact, not a theory, regarding the origin of many of the world's problems. These people should be approached with caution, studied carefully, and critically considered undependable, irratic, and quite dangerous."
And lest someone to the right of Adolf Hitler (slightly more than 50% of the voting public if election results are to be believed) get their panties in a knot, IAAA (I Am An American).
Patent law, like copyright law, is essentially international in nature.
Wrong. Patent law is legislated and regulated at the national level. There are (limited) treaties for recognizing patents internationally, and allowing patent holders in one country to file for patents in another within a limited timeframe, but patent law per se is national, and varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
For example, the United States is IIRC the only country in the world that has legislated software patents, and I believe the only country in the world that recognizes patents on ways of doing business (go figure). Duration of patents varies from country to country as well, despite WTO efforts to "harmonize" (read: apply the most draconian conditions everywhere) patent law.
You can be granted patents in any number of different countries; it's possible that MS holds patents in the relevant countries, not just in the US.
That is currently not possible (see above: the US is the only country that recognizes software patents). It will only become possible if other countries (the EU, China, Japan, etc.) amend their patent laws to create software patents, something they are increasingly unlikely to do.
should have read:
the mainstream press in an unashamed curry-for-favors frenzy with the current administration to the point of refering to the appointment of the man who presided over the Abu Graib scandal and authored a memo on how the Geneva convention shouldn't be applied to prisoners as attorney-general, as a moderate and uncontroversial choice in direct opposition the objective fact ('moderate' may be subjective, but 'uncontroversial' is certainly contrary to the objective fact that he has been and remains a controversial figure, and a controversial appointment)
FCC, in its capacity as Internet regulators, introduces the "Great Homeland Firewall", which bars USA citizens from connecting to foreign sites deeemed dangerous and/or terrorist. Some people note that Democratic blogs also appear to be rejected by the FCC Firewall.
... and I really think I'm being optomistic, here. We could be out the last of our rights by the end of the next congressional term, the way things are going.
In all seriousness, this past weekend I had an interesting conversation with an expat couple my girlfriend knows, who have been living on a houseboat in France for the last several years (and who flew back to the states to vote).
They told us about how millions of American expats the world over were trying to contact their friends and associates in the United States, to coordinate their political efforts via web sites in the US, etc. only to have their emails bounce relentlessly, and the websites in the US be unreachable for weeks at a time. Phone converstations with friends revealed that these websites were, interestingly enough, perfectly reachable from within the US.
(Cue right-wing zealot's dismissal of "foreign" ISPs and "shoddy unamerican technology").
Of course, the problems all went away one day after the election.
These were not isolated incidents. They were widespread and widely documented.
I'm not sure what to make it (and I expect a dozen or so responses from Republicans denying, dismissing, or attempting to legitimize what appears to have been a concerted effort at blocking communications between US citizens by someone in a position to do so), but I do think it is very interesting that the blocking that is occuring is in the opposite direction you and most of us have assumed it would be. To our knowledge (bit honking caveate there) we aren't being blocked from obtaining information abroad, but folks outside the US are being blocked from obtaining information within the US, or contacting people via email/chatrooms/online fora within the US.
I can imagine several reasons why the powers that be might want to do this. None of them are good, and most are very chilling indeed.
In any event, it appears infrastructure similiar to China's Firewall is already in place, and may have been actively deployed for political purposes already. In context with other developments (Diebold election debacles, the mainstream press in an unashamed curry-for-favors frenzy with the current administration to the point of refering to the appointment of the man who presided over the Abu Graib scandal and authored a memo on how the Geneva convention shouldn't be applied to prisoners as attorney-general, the FCC asserting regulatory control over all things digital, and so) I'm inclined to revise my timetable for the complete decline of the US from 10-20 years to 1-3 years
If anyone knows (otherwise I'll go to the gentoo forums) when you install the PPC version does it give an option to install a bootloader (like GRUB/LILO etc.) to dual boot OS X, or is this something they expect you to do afterwards?
... but then becomes a bear to maintain over time (Gentoo a year later is as maintainable and easy to sync up as it was on day one ... and as current as the latest download).
... it has been a couple of years since I installed Gentoo, so I don't recall the specificis anymore. I do recall it being quite straightforward, however ... and it does still work fine today, two years (and countless "emerge --deep -u world"s) later.
I dualboot Gentoo and Mac OS X 10.3 on a 17" powerbook with no problem whatsoever. As to your question "do they expect you to do it later," I think you may not be aware that the Gentoo installation process is manual (following a very well documented, step by step procedure, but nevertheless, manual). This is in contrast to Mandrake, for example, that gives you a nice install gui and sets stuff up for you automagically
So your question is a little orthogonal to the situation, making a "yes/no" answer unrevealing.
Summary: Following the Gentoo docs, you will have a bootable Gentoo system that supports dual booting with Mac OS X. Configuration specifics for the bootloader may need to be cross-referenced with a dualboot HOWTO
Take a look at Miami-Dade ... IIRC, they are using touch-screens there.
... though Diebold made sure to design their equipment to be impossible to audit, a deliberate design decision in stark contrast to the ATMs they manufacture as their core business.
... again, as a deliberate design decision, in contrast with other banking equipment Diebold manufactures.
... abdicating fully their position as our democracies watchdog and a check and balance on the government.
Miami-Dade was supposed to be incredibly Democratic and they only got a 54-46 margin.
Very suspect.
I agree with your conclusion, but not with your reason.
The Diebold touchscreens are a bit of a red herring. Yes, they are a concern and should be audited (and auditable)
The Diebold tabulators are the real concern. Like the touchscreen machines, they produce no paper trail and are difficult or impossible to audit
The tabulators are the big computers that collect millions of votes and tallies them up. They are used to count votes from touch screens, as well as from other precincts using everything from op-scan sheets to punch cards. A two digit back door code will let you change voting totals, with absolutely no evidence that you've done so.
In every other country, when exit polls differ significantly from the official results, it is generally considered a pretty strong indicator of voter fraud. In the United States, CNN simply changes their polling data to match the official result
I have no idea if the elections in Ohio and Florida were rigged, or if Bush won legitimately. I truly hope it is the latter. I don't expect the US to emerge from four more years with much intact in the way of its economy and influence in the world, much less with many of the social gains of the last quarter century still intact, but it would be far worse for America if Bush stole this election than if he won it legitimately.
The problem is, with machines that are designed to be impossible to audit, and with tabulators that have a software feature designed to facilitate fraud, we can't know.
Ever.
And that is terribly disturbing.
To any critically thinking mind, the legitimacy of this entire election is serious doubt, and would have been irrespective of who won. Using unauditable equipment in an election undermines the entire process at its most fundamental level, and does more to destabilize the political climate in America than a thousand bin Ladens could possibly ever achieve.
Diebold and others who produce similarly shoddy election equipment need to be put out of business, immediately and perminently.
All in all it appears likely Bush did win the popular vote and as much as I'd wish the win was due to rigging it appears there is a good chance that it just indicates the majority of Americans actually like Bush and by my standards that suggests they are not good people. Its also apparent that evangelicals now completely dominate America government and that is really not good unless you are one.
... our strength always came from our trade with other nations and our diplomacy, of which our military was a key component, but not the major component.
It's not even good if you are an evangelical.
Each of these fools (even my Mormon-converted family) thinks it will be their religion that comes out on top once they've managed to turn our secular nation into a theocratic state.
Whatever religion becomes the defacto religion of government (right now it is clearly the Methodists, but who knows where it will be by the time the last of the separation of church and state has been eroded), most evangelicals will discover they don't belong to the ruling sect.
As a result, they will discover that their own freedom of religion is significantly reduced, perhaps eliminated altogether. It won't just be non-Christians who are discriminated against and disempowered, it will be a big chunk of the Christians themselves, including those evangelicals that don't happen to belong to The President's Church.
For that matter, a fair number of people belonging to The President's Church will probably find their freedoms a thing of the past as well.
It truly is appalling how low America has sunk. We really do deserve the political, social, economic, and cultural isolation the Bush administration is bringing down on America. It is ironic that we fought the Korean War and the Vietnam War because we bought into the notion of the "Domino Theory," in which the Communists (the "Al Q'aida" boogeyman of the day) would economically and politically isolate America, until the rest of the world was a part of their economy and we stood alone. Were that to happen, America would dwindle to insignificance
Now we are isolating ourselves more effectively than the Communists ever dreamed of doing, and it appears the average American voter has been frightened enough, hateful enough, bigoted enough, or just plain stupid enough to embrace the policies and the idiots who are doing this to us.
We've earned the consiquence of our own foolishness. I just hope they aren't as severe as I fear they'll be.
Here in Chicago's 49th precinct I just got done standing in line for one hour and forty minutes. In the past I've voted in this precinct, and for both midterm and presidential elections I've never had to wait more than a couple of minutes.
Truly, the voter turnout is astounding, and the number of young people voting unprecidented. Eyeballing the couple of hundred people in line before and after me, I'd say between two thirds and three quarters of the people voting were under 30.
This bodes well for Kerry, assuming the Diebold Tabulators don't change a chunk of our votes to Bush (Not sure if they're used to count Illinois votes, but they are used in a number of states that are not using the Diebold touch screens, and the tabulators can be used to change tens of thousands of votes in a few keystrokes, simply by entering a two digit back-door code. All without a papertrail, and no way to effectively retrieve the altered data. Welcome to American Democracy 21st century style).
What say you /.? Do those that truely have no idea or opinion really need to get out and vote?
... as long as they vote for My Guy(tm).
Sure
This annoyed me too at first. Try ALT-click.
I discovered it by accident. I have no idea why they changed CTRL-click to ALT-click in Firefox vs. Mozilla, but they did.
The other two points I don't miss in the least, as I (a) don't run windows (I value my sanity), and (b) have no phobia of entering text into the location bar.
Really, CTRL-click was something I couldn't live without, so I was very glad to stumble on ALT-click.
I find it facinating that everyone just assumes that women in ancient Egypt were subservient. Where is the evidence for this? Contrary to public opinion, as a simple search on the role of women in ancient Egypt on Google will attest, the historical record suggests that woman in Egypt had legal parity with men.
... just as weomen hardly enjoy equal rights today in Pakistan, despite the fact that the country has had a female leader (who even as prime minister was not allowed to look into the eyes of a male).
... it leads me to believe that most of the "women" in game were actually men in drag. Although perhaps not ... it will be interesting to watch how women in the United States react when, as a consiquence of their inaction and apathy, the "unthinkable" happens and they lose their freedom of choice under Roe v. Wade and find their bodies chattal of the state for nine months again -- something most people like to believe will never happen, but the current administration for whom some many women are naively voting has publicly stated as one of their objectives. Will they riot, as so many psuedo-women have in game? Or will they engage in more intelligent civil disobedience and political activity, as they have so many times in the past to achieve parity under the law. My money, based on historical evidence, is on the latter ... which again is why I suspect so many of the "women" in this game were in fact played by men. Rioting has generally been, in most historical contexts anyway, such a "male" response.
That is debated among historians. While Egypt did have female rulers, it does not appear that women were equal among the working masses
What isn't debated among historians is that women in many other parts of the world in that day and age were not treated at all equally, and indeed were treated as property/slaves/etc by many cultures.
Had you RTFAed, you would have noticed that the character being played was not from Egypt, he was from a distant land. Historically, the odds that said culture would be sexist as hell (to put it mildly) were quite high.
As others noted, the players took modern day equal rights for granted. Something they really shouldn't be doing, in reality today with Bush et. al. bent on rolling women's rights back to pre-1960s status, and certainly not in a role playing game set in ancient Egypt.
Riotinig (in game or otherwise) is so asinine
Perhaps Pike's background with non-academic (i.e. commercial) research centers causes him to think about patents in a different light than, say, Stallman's background in working at MIT in the '70s (an academic research center, among other things).
Well, since he dodged the question with a disingenuous slam of the questioner, using his disagreement with the questioner's analogy as cover to do so, we really don't know the answer to that. Based on his unwillingness to answer the question and defend his point of view (which one may surmise based on previous behavior and his dismissal of software patents as an issue worthy of addressing, is pro-software patent) we can guess that his perspective does differ from most in both the industry and academia (including Stallman), but with his refusal to answer the question we really don't know.
Maybe because he's getting tired of this issue? Maybe he wants to focus on actual code instead of politics?
... dismissing the issue on such a weak pretense clearly amounts to taking sides on the issue, namely the side of the status quo, i.e. pro software patents.
And how, pray tell, is he going to do that when all but the most trivial code runs afoul of patents and is vulnerable to litigation? (According to many analysts, this is already the case.)
Refusing to answer the question and using disagreement with the analogy used by the questioner as cover is an exceedingly political answer (and a tried and true method of dodging uncomfortable questions used by virtually every political candidate for office in recent years, as alluded to the "is he running for office" comment)
Hardly a non-political stance, merely a disingenuous one.
until the goverment says why they raided the place everyone is really just crying wolf.
... abuse of power is abuse of power, regardless.
Um, no. Having the government abscond with people's property without cause or justification, and stonewalling as to why, does not imply no cause for concern, nor is anyone "crying wolf" when they announce to the world that the government has seized their property and silenced their voices without announcing why and without proper due process (which, in case you were sleeping through twelve years of civics classes, includes being told what one is accused of doing wrong).
They might have had a perfectly legit reason or they may have been poltical tools
With no notification to the accused of what they are accused of, it is abuse of power and in violation of acceptable norms in every western liberal democracy. It is irrelevant as to whether the motive was political, legal, or personal
We don't know yet and may not know for a long time but so far I'm not inclined to start screaming about censorship just yet.
Not surprising. You represent the school of thought that is primarilly responsible for these sorts of actions, and the erosion of our fundamental rights they imply.
But nevermind, I'm sure you'll scream loudly about how burying your head in the sand is "realistic" and "sophisticated," while those of us who point to such obvious abuses as these are dismissed as the "tin foil hat" crowd. This has happened numerous times in history, and is happening again, proving once more that those who ignore history are indeed doommed to repeat it. Unless, of course, IHBT.
Kind of makes a mockery of the word "justice" doesn't it? When Justice depends on who is in office then the dept of justice is nothing but orwellian doublespeak.
... this time probably by entering a two digit code in the Deibold tabulators and changing the unauditable totals to something more in line with their desires.
... with the currect Conservative/Reactionary group running things, we're already doomed.
Please people make it a point to re-read 1984 before the election.
Why? Diebold tabulators are being used in more than a dozen states this election. The outcome has already been predecided, the question is merely the means. Either g.W. bush will win the election "fairly" (assuming smearing the war record of veterans and lying perpetually to the American people can be construed as "fair") or his party and its right-wing supporters will flat out steal the election again
Either way, America has four more years of incomeptence to look forward to. The real test, and why everyone should vote against Bush anyway, is whether the American people will hand a victory to him, or whether he will be forced to defraud our democracy again to get it. We owe it to ourselves to force them to show their true colors, and to not make hanging on to power easy, but don't kid yourself
Microsoft, as appalling and disgusting as they are, and as destructive as they have been and will continue to be to our industry, our digital freedoms, and ultimately our rights to free expression in this technological age, are nothing compared to the corrupt regime that has not only let them off the hook, but is actively wrecking this country and its founding institutions on far too many levels to even begin elucidating in this post.
Vote by all means: let the world know we didn't choose this incompetent thug this time any more than we did the last time, but don't kid yourself on who is going to be in the White House after it's all over.
The grandparent's comment was that this is not theft. So yes, he was wrong.
... examples include fraudsters who are caught with credit cards in people's names they haven't yet used to commit theft with. So the term is being used in a manner consistent with the implied meaning of "theft of identity" and not the one implied in the semantic games that have followed meaning "theft by means of identity."
... the term is a crappy one, as muddled and incoherent as the term "intellectual property," and anyone wishing to think and communicate clearly ought to consider avoiding it.
Yes, he's right in saying it's fraud, as are you. But your comment is more accurate "it's also fraud".
You are both correct on semantic technicalities, however, the (great-great?) grandparent post is correct in its overall argument that the implied meaning of "Identity Theft" isn't "theft through fraudulant assumption of someone else's identity" but rather "Theft of someone's identity", which is a nonsensical notion that results in muddy thinking at best. No one's identity is being "stolen" (I don't lose my identity if someone engages in fraudulant activity pretending to be me, I lose my good credit rating and a great deal of time, but nevertheless, that isn't 'theft' of my identity, it is fraudulantly assuming my identity. There is a real difference, and our use of language should reflect that fact.).
Indeed, people refer to "Identity Theft" even when nothing of value has been stolen (yet)
Fraud and theft are indeed both occuring, but "Identity Theft" (theft of identity) is not. The great-great grandparent post is correct
In communist China, you kill AIDS!
in Bush's America, AIDS kills YOU!
doh!
wow, you must be some kind of mind-reader or possess some special ability to figure that all from the parent comment.
You must explain this to me.
No magic or telepathy is required. It's called basic reading comprehension. Try it sometime.
If your science teaches you anything let it be that todays science facts will always be overturned tomorrows science; don't build of your science a religion as brittle and baseless as that you think you are attacking.
You are engaging in numerous logical fallacies that make your argument completely irrelevant to this, the real world.
1. It isn't "my" science. This terminology is intended to dismiss and diminish the evidence I passed along from very reputable, scientific sources in the form of a URL link by implicity implying it is "my hypothesis," or that I adhere to science in a manner analogous to how you adhere to religion (hint: faith != reason).
2. You imply science teaches something it does not: that "today's facts will always be overturned" (emphesis mine). This is not true. Facts are never "overturned." Emperical data is emperical data: it doesn't go away even when new data are discovered. Theories and interpretation may change, new data may shed new light on how best to interpret the older data, or a flaw in the collection of the older data may be discovered (this is comapratively rare, however), but "facts" as such do not change.
The implication is that all scientific theories are discarded. This is not a falsifiable statement (we have plenty of theories which have not been discarded and appear to have proven themselves over time, with the occasional refinement in precision, but without violating causality we cannot know if any theories will stand up over the next million or billion years of scientific inquiry, nor can we know if we will develope a new theory, in a new discipline, that stands up to indefinite scrutiny and is never discarded). As the hypothesis you've made (and fallaciously ascribed to "my science") is nonfalsifiable it is by definition not addressed by the scientific method (which requires hypotheses to be falsifiable). Therefor, science says no such thing. QED.
3. Any scientific theory is subject to revision or rejection if new evidence shows it to be erroneous. As noted before, these are not new facts (emperical data), but new interpretations of existing and/or additional facts. However, you argue that because a theory may be later disproven or discarded, that all theories (including the five or so that appear with overwhelming evidence to disprove the fundamental precepts of the Book of Mormon) will be discarded at some later date. Again, this is a logical fallacy: the one does not necessarily follow from the other.
4. You further imply that, because there is a vanishingly small possibility that one of the numerous genetic analyses which disprove the notion that Native Americans are descended from Israelis might be flawed, or the theory interpreting the data might later be refined or discarded, that it and the several corroberating, unrelated data (and independent theories which are used to interpret those unrelated data) are as likely to be discarded as not, and the arguments therefor "fragile." This ignores the rather obvious fact that the likelihood of even one of the several methods by which the premis of the Book of Mormon has been disproven is vanishingly small, particularly given to corraboration with other, unrelated fields of study that have reached the same conclusion indepently of one another, and that the liklihood of all of the various studies being likewise incorrect is so small as to be laughable. And that assumes a randomness to the results (this isn't a roll of the dice, after all, this is meticulous, careful study), which simply isn't the case.
5. Finally, you state:
A superficial and brief understanding of DNA and mormon scripture may result in almost any opinion
which has nothing whatsoever to do with the scientific evidence presented, in which studies performed by experts in the field, independent of one another, have all reached the same conclusion through different paths, applying different areas of genetic science applied to