If they go only after people who listen to Ludacris and other such crap...errr...rap... i'm cheering the RIAA. Anyone liking gangsta rap is on my personal list of societal enemies.
Not to sound racist, but OJ is not in jail because he's a black celebrity. If he was white, he'd be in jail. If he was poor black, he'd be in jail, although less likely (see Rodney King as an example if you think i just said that because I'm a racist). Depends on location, of course, but in NY/LA, being a "minority" allows you to play a race card and that enhances your chances, especiallly if Jesse Jackson and/or Al Sharpton manage to organize a riot on your behalf.
> Heck, I have a different email address for everything I sign up for online, why not have a different credit card for each merchant?:)
I know you ask in jest, but for those who don't know the right asnwer, here's why: BAD CREDIT RATING!
I have just requested my credit report this year, and in the list of parameters affecting your credit rating with major credit bureaus is "excessive lines of credit". It is HIGHLY recommended not to keep too many open credit cards if you want to have a good credit rating (for when you move out of Mom's basement and buy a house from all those dot-bomb money you didn't make so you need a mortgage:)
> Assuming some national emergency doesn't call off the elections in 2004, if Bush wins, I'm leaving that month.
Well... I just hope that you wouldn't follow the example of those actors who were yelling taht they are leaving USA if Bush wins in 2000, and unfortunately still keep polluting the country with their rotten breath and rotten brains. (baldwin, basinger, etc..)
Reporting are in with democrats? I'm sorry, half the time I read papers or watch American news these days it sounds basically like "Go Bush! Keep Stickin' it to 'em!"
Well, there are two types of polls that show your views to be complete BS: Polls of journalists and of readers. Let's see the results:
- 2003 Gallup Poll which says 60% of Americans believe the media are biased; of them 45% think the media too liberal, 15% say too conservative.
- A 1996 survey of 1,037 reporters at 61 newspapers found 61 percent self-identified as "Democrat or liberal" or "lean to Democrat or liberal," vs. only 15 percent Republican or leaning Republican.
- A 2001 survey of 301 "media professionals" by Princeton Survey Research Associates found 25 percent self-identified as "liberal," 59 percent as "moderate" and only 6 percent as "conservative."
I believe the facts just proved taht your are wrong, and if you think half the media is right-wing, it's perhaps because your're on the left of Comrade Zyuganov?
[ for those who don't keep up with Russian political life, Gennady Zyuganov is the leader of Russian Communist Party these days:) ]
Amen. From the article: "Naturally, it has a Sony Memory Stick Pro slot, but lacks the Compact Flash slot of some of Sony's other recent models."
May people (I for one) would never buy a PDA - no matter how great - if it has no CF card slot. And one that can be used for peripherals, as well as memory (like my current Handera). I do NOT want to pay separately for my memory cards for PDA and digital camera.
Acyually, of all the people I personally know who'd qualify for a "hacker" in one degree or another, and whose political affiliation I'm aware of, 7 are conservatives (including myself and my 3 best programmer friends), one is independent, and one is a wacked-in-the-head Naderist (what else would one expect from my cousin who WANTS to live in San Francisco:)
Probably the spread is due to the fact that I'm an immigrant from fUSSR, as are most of the people counted above, so being intelligent people we KNOW that left-wing ideology can lead to Bad Things from personal experience and thorough knowledge of history.
BTW, please note that a conservative isn't necessarily a Republican - I can't stand any kind of politician, I just find Demos to be more harmful). However, any smart conservative would almost always vote republican because it's the least of two evils.
> >creative genius is turned off almost like a tap if a man gets married and has children,regardless of age." > Lack of regular sex will do that to you...
Uhm... Sorry to disappoint you, kid, but according to all statistics i've ever seen, married men have MORE (and more regular) sex than singles.
Well, it sure was true in my case (since i have married a virgin, 0 is less than X for any value of X:) but still, i have more sex now being married than single men on the average do according to all the polls/statistics i've seen to date, so i'm still a valid proof.
Lack of married sex is a lie invented by bachelors trying to console themselves, if you ask me.
> I'm am not violent by nature. I tend to avoid fights even though I'm 6' 2" 230lbs.
Uhm... you could afford to be easy-going. You weren't picked on by people just because they could.
Me, having gone through school where i was the youngest and very much the smallest kid in my class, i'd have been extatic if i had access to any sort of weaponry (althouh it was in USSR, but the experience of being a small nerd is the same). In at least one case, i'm quite sure i'd have used a gun if i had one (a decent guy i was friendly with was getting beaten into unconciousness by school gang in a locker room, and i couldn't do crap to help, since the guys doing the beating outweighed me by about twice).
A gun is a great equaliser. Training to be a reasonable shot is a lot easier than being able to fight, and i'd say that shooting abilities are not even nearly as diverse among people as physical size/strength. Hell, i'm half-blind and still managed to score 23 out of 25 points with AK on the range with no sweat.
P.S. Having shot AK-47s, all I can say is: Bad Idea for your theories. Close quarters, i'd say Uzi would work lots better. But hat's just my opinion.
Although you may see this determination to ensure that Debian is totally free as being a little extreme, it makes sense in the long term. There is a distinct possibility that some Linux vendors may close up shop, change their business direction or adjust their practices in some other way. Thus, the distribution you use today may not be around in 10 years.
This is not the case with Debian. The Debian project is entirely volunteer-run and doesn't seek to generate profit. This essentially means that, while the will is there to continue to improve Debian, the project will always progress, irrespective of economic matters.
What you're forgetting in your idealized model of the world is that Debian is maintained/written by the same kind of human beings who do it for any other software. And said human being are equally prone to the human weaknesses:
1) They need to eat. You forgot economics - the free time of Debian volunteers is not really ***free*** - it is just that the cost is their time/effort. It may not be PAID by the users, but it ain't FREE. Someone (them, or their family/parents, or donors, or taxpayers if the maintainer is on welfare) is paying for their food/board/entertainment/equipment/electricity. I f it's they themselves, then the time spent on Debian is the time they're not earning, so it's still not ***free***. It's jut not paid for - but it costs THEM in lost opportunity/effort/other things they could have done at that time.
2) Humans lose interest. As a matter of fact, i'm unsure of whether the paid development or unpaid is more stable in that regard - while Mr. Redhat Random Engineer's work is subject to the whims of the market (i.e. while the market is interested in his product, the company will get money, he will get paid, and he will thus have some incentive to keep developing it), the Mr. Debian Volunteer might change his mind about working on a project at any time at all as - aside from his interest - nothing entices him to sink his time/effort into it. In case you disagree, take a look at the amount of half-baked, never-finished dead projects and compare them with the in-evelopment ones. Or read a/. story couple of days old about some network-appliance distro author dropping his project with a big rant about how he ain't gonna do it no more 'cause good people didn't pay him enough donations.
This is a typical ignorant American opinion. Try travelling outside your own borders some day.
Uhm... no, your was a typical dumb left-wing opinion that anyone who disagrees with your ideas is a) ignorant and b) permanently lives in his trailer.
Well guess what, I donno about the original poster, but I share 100% of his opinion and, unlike you, i KNOW what socialism is as I experienced it first-hand, having lived both in USSR and USA. Matter off act, my opinion is largely BECAUSE, unlike you, I have experience of the topic we are discussing.
> How long would East Germany and the wall have lasted if Germans on both sides (sometimes members of the same family) could have talked to each other on a daily basis?
Most likely, as long as it did. That is, until USSR blew up economically and the Leader_with_Some_Brains (who happened to be Gorbachov at the time) decided that to ensure the survaval of the Party, cash infusions from the West would help, and decided to pay for it with giving abck of East Germany.
Oh, and the reason USSR's economy blew up is that it was socialist based, the type taht Kofui Annan likes so much and wants to institute world-wide. You connect the dots.
P.S. Oh, and I lived in USSR through the whole experience, so I know what i'm talking about.
You may be right, but not from my personal experience. Both my wife and me were waiting for the 5th book to be released since we finished the last page of the 4th.
Eric Flint (and his publisher Jim Baen of Baen Books agree with you. I agree with them - if it's a good enough book then I'll buy it (as happened with Flint), if not, I'd rather read it from the library or not read it at all. I have enought entertainment avialable (Internet+cable+games) for me not to require reading a book unless I consider it extraordinary.
> Tonya Grotter (which with the data given may or may not be a derivative work) with Harry Potter in Calcutta.
OK, 1) TG (which i've started reading and at some point might actually bother finishing) is a derivative work in a sense that it builds on ideas/plots of HP. It is an adaptation, NOT a translation, and details (from minor to major) are very different. Oh, and from the bits I've read so far, the quality is worse than Rowling, even though I gain an extra kick out of it because i'm quite familiar with both russian and world mythology, and reading the adaptation while comparing with original is more fun than just reading TG would be to russian-only speaker.
2) Competition: based on the above, TG is NOT in direct competition with HP in russian market, although Russian translations of HP according to what i've heard are not very good - or consistent between books - so they may not sell well in the first place. BTW, the same story with translations exists with Tolkien, producing billions of Russian Tolkienist jokes based on different details in different translations. My favourite translatable one was: "Do you know the origin of the Orks? They were elves before the translations".
3) Nitpick: "tAnya Grotter", not tOnya.
-DVK
Re:Does it have Heinlein's extreme right-wing view
on
Altered Carbon
·
· Score: 1
Well, a couple of other replies already dealt with your mistaken opinion of Heinline as "right-wing", so I wouldn't expand on that.
But what i'd like to suggest would be to learn to enjoy a work of fiction SEPARATELY from its political message.
As an example, I thoroughly enjoy reading Eric Flint (especially 1632 series), even though some of his books - especially "1632" itself - are in-your-face left-ing pro-union texts which are as opposite to my own political views as "Stranger in a strange land" would be to the Pope's morals.
> It's this stupid "Business as competition" mentality (with "Business as war" at the most extreme), coupled with plain old greed, that led to Enron, WorldCom, Microsoft, and the RIAA/MPAA.
No, it's the stupid "I want to make money investing" mentality of any investor (including you if you have any stocks/funds/401k/etc..) that leads to the need for the company to "perform better than your competition". Because if you don't, first, you lose market share to those who do, and second, you lose your investors to them.
EVERYTHING is a competition, or rather a game, when it comes to living things, ourselves included. Get over it. The only thing you can change is which game you play (some have less-cutthroat optimal strategies than others).
"It's evolution, stupid".
Oh, and what led to Enron was the fact that the game was fscked-up: the risk of their strategy (lying and cheating) was not bigger than the risk of not employing it. Devise a system of punishment that sufficiently penalizes Ken Lays of the world, and you change the rules of the game to favor more honest companies - not because of some moral issues but because being dishonest would no longer pay off.
> 5.... Meanwhile, millions more americans will be on welfare and also starving to death.
If there's anyone on welfare in America, today or in the future, the fault is with left-leaning feel-good liberals like yourself. People who think that irresponsibility should be rewarded, and hard work taxed to pay for those rewards. That women who're "poor" should be rewarded for being too stupid to do family plannning (and to fuck around before getting married) by me paying for their kids' welfare/food/education/medicine, while I have to put off having my first kid so that my wife can finish college because I know that even my reasonably decent salary can't support the level of life and education I'd like to give my child unless my wife works too, because ~40% of my income is taken away by taxes and a large part is being put aside so when i'm retired i don't have to rob other people like myself by getting paid their taxed money.
Let the modding down begin, for it's a lot easier to mod down someone you disagree with politically than to reply with reasonable arguments.
> Not everything a communist country does has to be a "politically correct ploy for world destruction."
Actually, if you would bother learning anything about communist countries (like reading Lenin/early Trotsky/etc...), you would know that what you just said is a complete BS according to people who built the philosophical foundation of every connumist country in the world.
And if you bother learing more about space race, you'd notice that most of USSR space effort (and likely most of USA, although my knowledge of it is smaller) was military-oriented. Up to and including Energia/Buran and Mir (offshoots of military station named IIRC Almaz).
The poster you replied to was just being realistic.
Uhm... considering the fact that Chinese aren't doing anything with their state-sponsored solution that USA didn't achieve with their ***state***-sponsored solutions (and that there's no market in space now so the best market solution for deep space ATM is doing nothing), i don't see what your point is.
OK, first of all, my own hiring preferences (as math/CS major, working as a programmer, who has participated in hiring process on both sides:)
If you're better than an alternate candidates professionally, and your body mods are not of the "i'm a super-satanist-goth-punk-nazi-druggie-hippie-wanna be" variety, I would hire you. If it's a choice between two candidates who are exactly teh same professionallly and otherwise, I am less likely to go for body-mod person, although this only kicks in after some threshold was crossed (i.e. a small earring is not body-mod;) However, if you look completely out of this world, you are not likely to get my approval unless I have firm proof (reference from someone I know, for example), that you're not only good profesisonally, but would work out OK as a person.
The reason for the above rules is in how I view body mods: 1) Most people who get them do so to "show their individuality" because they got no other way to distinguish themselves as people. Probably not all, but most I encountered. 2) An "out there" body mod made with "fuck what you think of me" attitude is likely indicative of general "fuck what you think of me" attitude in other areas of life/work. 3) They IMHO are, for most part aesthetically non-appealing. 4) I like to express myself too. But I don't do what I consider my forms of self-expression at work. Why do you think other people should be subjected to yours? (see also #2). 5) I have strong aversion to doing anything irreversible when one doesnt need to do so. IMHO, that attitude is a sign of wisdom, and vice versa. Thus, I consider someone decorating themselves with a removable (stick-on?) tattoo to be more likely to be wise than the guy sporting a snake around his knuckles and split toungue. BTW, if you're smart enough to get a tattoo not visible under normal cloths, you're in the former (wiser) category. I don't care what's tattooed on your butt, as long as you're not my wife (and she shares my opinion of body mods so that's not likely to ever happen:)
Slashdot Mirror
If they go only after people who listen to Ludacris and other such crap...errr...rap... i'm cheering the RIAA. Anyone liking gangsta rap is on my personal list of societal enemies.
-DVK
Not to sound racist, but OJ is not in jail because he's a black celebrity.
If he was white, he'd be in jail.
If he was poor black, he'd be in jail, although less likely (see Rodney King as an example if you think i just said that because I'm a racist). Depends on location, of course, but in NY/LA, being a "minority" allows you to play a race card and that enhances your chances, especiallly if Jesse Jackson and/or Al Sharpton manage to organize a riot on your behalf.
-DVK
> Heck, I have a different email address for everything I sign up for online, why not have a different credit card for each merchant? :)
:)
I know you ask in jest, but for those who don't know the right asnwer, here's why:
BAD CREDIT RATING!
I have just requested my credit report this year, and in the list of parameters affecting your credit rating with major credit bureaus is "excessive lines of credit". It is HIGHLY recommended not to keep too many open credit cards if you want to have a good credit rating (for when you move out of Mom's basement and buy a house from all those dot-bomb money you didn't make so you need a mortgage
-DVK
> Assuming some national emergency doesn't call off the elections in 2004, if Bush wins, I'm leaving that month.
Well... I just hope that you wouldn't follow the example of those actors who were yelling taht they are leaving USA if Bush wins in 2000, and unfortunately still keep polluting the country with their rotten breath and rotten brains. (baldwin, basinger, etc..)
-DVK
Well, there are two types of polls that show your views to be complete BS: Polls of journalists and of readers. Let's see the results:
- 2003 Gallup Poll which says 60% of Americans believe the media are biased; of them 45% think the media too liberal, 15% say too conservative.
- A 1996 survey of 1,037 reporters at 61 newspapers found 61 percent self-identified as "Democrat or liberal" or "lean to Democrat or liberal," vs. only 15 percent Republican or leaning Republican.
- A 2001 survey of 301 "media professionals" by Princeton Survey Research Associates found 25 percent self-identified as "liberal," 59 percent as "moderate" and only 6 percent as "conservative."
I believe the facts just proved taht your are wrong, and if you think half the media is right-wing, it's perhaps because your're on the left of Comrade Zyuganov? :) ]
[ for those who don't keep up with Russian political life, Gennady Zyuganov is the leader of Russian Communist Party these days
-DVK
Amen. From the article: "Naturally, it has a Sony Memory Stick Pro slot, but lacks the Compact Flash slot of some of Sony's other recent models."
May people (I for one) would never buy a PDA - no matter how great - if it has no CF card slot. And one that can be used for peripherals, as well as memory (like my current Handera). I do NOT want to pay separately for my memory cards for PDA and digital camera.
-DVK
> We all know Republicans can't hack.
:)
Acyually, of all the people I personally know who'd qualify for a "hacker" in one degree or another, and whose political affiliation I'm aware of, 7 are conservatives (including myself and my 3 best programmer friends), one is independent, and one is a wacked-in-the-head Naderist (what else would one expect from my cousin who WANTS to live in San Francisco
Probably the spread is due to the fact that I'm an immigrant from fUSSR, as are most of the people counted above, so being intelligent people we KNOW that left-wing ideology can lead to Bad Things from personal experience and thorough knowledge of history.
BTW, please note that a conservative isn't necessarily a Republican - I can't stand any kind of politician, I just find Demos to be more harmful). However, any smart conservative would almost always vote republican because it's the least of two evils.
-DVK
When you sign up for ISP account, yuo sign a contract called "Terms of Service". You aren't allowed anythingt prohibited in it.
:)
AINAL, so someone with mopre legal clue please correct/confirm
-DVK
> >creative genius is turned off almost like a tap if a man gets married and has children,regardless of age."
:) but still, i have more sex now being married than single men on the average do according to all the polls/statistics i've seen to date, so i'm still a valid proof.
> Lack of regular sex will do that to you...
Uhm... Sorry to disappoint you, kid, but according to all statistics i've ever seen, married men have MORE (and more regular) sex than singles.
Well, it sure was true in my case (since i have married a virgin, 0 is less than X for any value of X
Lack of married sex is a lie invented by bachelors trying to console themselves, if you ask me.
-DVK
> I'm am not violent by nature. I tend to avoid fights even though I'm 6' 2" 230lbs.
Uhm... you could afford to be easy-going. You weren't picked on by people just because they could.
Me, having gone through school where i was the youngest and very much the smallest kid in my class, i'd have been extatic if i had access to any sort of weaponry (althouh it was in USSR, but the experience of being a small nerd is the same).
In at least one case, i'm quite sure i'd have used a gun if i had one (a decent guy i was friendly with was getting beaten into unconciousness by school gang in a locker room, and i couldn't do crap to help, since the guys doing the beating outweighed me by about twice).
A gun is a great equaliser. Training to be a reasonable shot is a lot easier than being able to fight, and i'd say that shooting abilities are not even nearly as diverse among people as physical size/strength. Hell, i'm half-blind and still managed to score 23 out of 25 points with AK on the range with no sweat.
P.S. Having shot AK-47s, all I can say is: Bad Idea for your theories. Close quarters, i'd say Uzi would work lots better. But hat's just my opinion.
-DVK
This is not the case with Debian. The Debian project is entirely volunteer-run and doesn't seek to generate profit. This essentially means that, while the will is there to continue to improve Debian, the project will always progress, irrespective of economic matters.
What you're forgetting in your idealized model of the world is that Debian is maintained/written by the same kind of human beings who do it for any other software. And said human being are equally prone to the human weaknesses:
1) They need to eat.
You forgot economics - the free time of Debian volunteers is not really ***free*** - it is just that the cost is their time/effort. It may not be PAID by the users, but it ain't FREE. Someone (them, or their family/parents, or donors, or taxpayers if the maintainer is on welfare) is paying for their food/board/entertainment/equipment/electricity.
2) Humans lose interest. As a matter of fact, i'm unsure of whether the paid development or unpaid is more stable in that regard - while Mr. Redhat Random Engineer's work is subject to the whims of the market (i.e. while the market is interested in his product, the company will get money, he will get paid, and he will thus have some incentive to keep developing it), the Mr. Debian Volunteer might change his mind about working on a project at any time at all as - aside from his interest - nothing entices him to sink his time/effort into it.
In case you disagree, take a look at the amount of half-baked, never-finished dead projects and compare them with the in-evelopment ones. Or read a
-DVK
Uhm... no, your was a typical dumb left-wing opinion that anyone who disagrees with your ideas is a) ignorant and b) permanently lives in his trailer.
Well guess what, I donno about the original poster, but I share 100% of his opinion and, unlike you, i KNOW what socialism is as I experienced it first-hand, having lived both in USSR and USA. Matter off act, my opinion is largely BECAUSE, unlike you, I have experience of the topic we are discussing.
So go back under your bridge, Comrade Troll.
-DVK
> How long would East Germany and the wall have lasted if Germans on both sides (sometimes members of the same family) could have talked to each other on a daily basis?
Most likely, as long as it did. That is, until USSR blew up economically and the Leader_with_Some_Brains (who happened to be Gorbachov at the time) decided that to ensure the survaval of the Party, cash infusions from the West would help, and decided to pay for it with giving abck of East Germany.
Oh, and the reason USSR's economy blew up is that it was socialist based, the type taht Kofui Annan likes so much and wants to institute world-wide. You connect the dots.
P.S. Oh, and I lived in USSR through the whole experience, so I know what i'm talking about.
-DVK
You may be right, but not from my personal experience. Both my wife and me were waiting for the 5th book to be released since we finished the last page of the 4th.
-DVK
Eric Flint (and his publisher Jim Baen of Baen Books agree with you.
I agree with them - if it's a good enough book then I'll buy it (as happened with Flint), if not, I'd rather read it from the library or not read it at all. I have enought entertainment avialable (Internet+cable+games) for me not to require reading a book unless I consider it extraordinary.
-DVK
> Tonya Grotter (which with the data given may or may not be a derivative work) with Harry Potter in Calcutta.
OK,
1) TG (which i've started reading and at some point might actually bother finishing) is a derivative work in a sense that it builds on ideas/plots of HP. It is an adaptation, NOT a translation, and details (from minor to major) are very different. Oh, and from the bits I've read so far, the quality is worse than Rowling, even though I gain an extra kick out of it because i'm quite familiar with both russian and world mythology, and reading the adaptation while comparing with original is more fun than just reading TG would be to russian-only speaker.
2) Competition: based on the above, TG is NOT in direct competition with HP in russian market, although Russian translations of HP according to what i've heard are not very good - or consistent between books - so they may not sell well in the first place.
BTW, the same story with translations exists with Tolkien, producing billions of Russian Tolkienist jokes based on different details in different translations. My favourite translatable one was: "Do you know the origin of the Orks? They were elves before the translations".
3) Nitpick: "tAnya Grotter", not tOnya.
-DVK
Well, a couple of other replies already dealt with your mistaken opinion of Heinline as "right-wing", so I wouldn't expand on that.
But what i'd like to suggest would be to learn to enjoy a work of fiction SEPARATELY from its political message.
As an example, I thoroughly enjoy reading Eric Flint (especially 1632 series), even though some of his books - especially "1632" itself - are in-your-face left-ing pro-union texts which are as opposite to my own political views as "Stranger in a strange land" would be to the Pope's morals.
Just my 2 bytes worth.
-DVK
> It's this stupid "Business as competition" mentality (with "Business as war" at the most extreme), coupled with plain old greed, that led to Enron, WorldCom, Microsoft, and the RIAA/MPAA.
No, it's the stupid "I want to make money investing" mentality of any investor (including you if you have any stocks/funds/401k/etc..) that leads to the need for the company to "perform better than your competition". Because if you don't, first, you lose market share to those who do, and second, you lose your investors to them.
EVERYTHING is a competition, or rather a game, when it comes to living things, ourselves included. Get over it. The only thing you can change is which game you play (some have less-cutthroat optimal strategies than others).
"It's evolution, stupid".
Oh, and what led to Enron was the fact that the game was fscked-up: the risk of their strategy (lying and cheating) was not bigger than the risk of not employing it. Devise a system of punishment that sufficiently penalizes Ken Lays of the world, and you change the rules of the game to favor more honest companies - not because of some moral issues but because being dishonest would no longer pay off.
-DVK
From my "submitted articles" page:
2003-06-23 19:23:20 Mars Express problems - the Curse of Mars again? (articles,space) (rejected)
This story:
"ESA's Beagle 2 Hits Signal Snag"
Posted by michael on Tue June 24, 16:22
Great going, editors!
ATM=At The Moment.
Invalid Pun.
Core dumped.
> 5. ... Meanwhile, millions more americans will be on welfare and also starving to death.
If there's anyone on welfare in America, today or in the future, the fault is with left-leaning feel-good liberals like yourself. People who think that irresponsibility should be rewarded, and hard work taxed to pay for those rewards.
That women who're "poor" should be rewarded for being too stupid to do family plannning (and to fuck around before getting married) by me paying for their kids' welfare/food/education/medicine, while I have to put off having my first kid so that my wife can finish college because I know that even my reasonably decent salary can't support the level of life and education I'd like to give my child unless my wife works too, because ~40% of my income is taken away by taxes and a large part is being put aside so when i'm retired i don't have to rob other people like myself by getting paid their taxed money.
Let the modding down begin, for it's a lot easier to mod down someone you disagree with politically than to reply with reasonable arguments.
-DVK
> Not everything a communist country does has to be a "politically correct ploy for world destruction."
Actually, if you would bother learning anything about communist countries (like reading Lenin/early Trotsky/etc...), you would know that what you just said is a complete BS according to people who built the philosophical foundation of every connumist country in the world.
And if you bother learing more about space race, you'd notice that most of USSR space effort (and likely most of USA, although my knowledge of it is smaller) was military-oriented. Up to and including Energia/Buran and Mir (offshoots of military station named IIRC Almaz).
The poster you replied to was just being realistic.
-DVK
Uhm... considering the fact that Chinese aren't doing anything with their state-sponsored solution that USA didn't achieve with their ***state***-sponsored solutions (and that there's no market in space now so the best market solution for deep space ATM is doing nothing), i don't see what your point is.
OK, first of all, my own hiring preferences (as math/CS major, working as a programmer, who has participated in hiring process on both sides :)
a be" variety, I would hire you. If it's a choice between two candidates who are exactly teh same professionallly and otherwise, I am less likely to go for body-mod person, although this only kicks in after some threshold was crossed (i.e. a small earring is not body-mod ;)
:)
If you're better than an alternate candidates professionally, and your body mods are not of the "i'm a super-satanist-goth-punk-nazi-druggie-hippie-wann
However, if you look completely out of this world, you are not likely to get my approval unless I have firm proof (reference from someone I know, for example), that you're not only good profesisonally, but would work out OK as a person.
The reason for the above rules is in how I view body mods:
1) Most people who get them do so to "show their individuality" because they got no other way to distinguish themselves as people. Probably not all, but most I encountered.
2) An "out there" body mod made with "fuck what you think of me" attitude is likely indicative of general "fuck what you think of me" attitude in other areas of life/work.
3) They IMHO are, for most part aesthetically non-appealing.
4) I like to express myself too. But I don't do what I consider my forms of self-expression at work. Why do you think other people should be subjected to yours? (see also #2).
5) I have strong aversion to doing anything irreversible when one doesnt need to do so. IMHO, that attitude is a sign of wisdom, and vice versa. Thus, I consider someone decorating themselves with a removable (stick-on?) tattoo to be more likely to be wise than the guy sporting a snake around his knuckles and split toungue. BTW, if you're smart enough to get a tattoo not visible under normal cloths, you're in the former (wiser) category. I don't care what's tattooed on your butt, as long as you're not my wife (and she shares my opinion of body mods so that's not likely to ever happen
Just my $2
-DVK
Depends on the scale of your company. A big one (mine is an example), would ship off SAs/DBAs first.
-DVK