but still next-to-nobody here watches the games. Team USA had a game last weekend, and the only broadcast I could find was on telemundo (which I don't recieve well enough to watch without getting a headache from it). maybe it was on cable, but I don't have cable. What was NBC broadcasting? Women's golf.
3. A possible sign that Valve should hire more people so they can release it sooner.
I bet Fred Brooks would have something to say about that. Oh wait, he wrote a book about it.
The last company that I worked for was behind on a project, and they started hiring people to catch up. They went out of business 4 months later becuase they couldn't make payroll.
i call bullshit. you can buy a complete system with an ethernet card from dell's "outlet store" for less than $250. if this person can't be bothered to spend a lousy $250 on a PC to RUN HER BUSINESS, and instead makes the incomprehensibly foolish choice to trust hotmail to do it for her, it's probably not a question of if her business would have failed anyway, but when-- because people who make poor choices don't usually stop after just one.
Yes, it's that David Goodstein
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 1
/*disclaimer: I went to CalTech, and took a class from this guy as a freshman */
Did any of you take physics in high school? I did. At least once a week, part of our class would consist of a viewing of the venerable Mechanical Universe series of videotapes, hosted by none other than Dr. David Goodstein.
By far, the most famous and exciting episode is the one where he shoots the stuffed monkey as it's falling from across the room with a rubber dart fired from one of those toy guns. The pinnacle of my freshman year at CalTech (well, apart from the trip to Tijuana... and those little blotters with the all-seeing eye on them...) OK OK, the school-sanctioned educational pinnacle was seeing Dr. Goodstein REPEAT the demo from the tape in real life, in front of a live audience. People acutally APPLAUDED when the dart hit the monkey. That's when I knew that even though I was doomed to be a nerd forever... there were other people even nerdier than me.
These days, the most popular target for thieves is laptops. Easy to carry, valuable, and it's the one piece of equipment the guards will expect people to carry out.
Is it wrong for me to want to teach my company why a zero-tolerance policy is a good idea by stealing laptops until it's implemented?
Good lord. Mods, please mark kangarooski's post +relevant, +informative, and +correct. This is what keeps me reading/. in the first place... among all the trolls, liars, and fools, occasionally you find the proverbial needle in the haystack.
The only reason you claim you're going to switch to Verizon is [...] because you feel you have a lower chance of being held accountable for your illegal activites.
sounds perfectly rational to me. Do you know anyone with a radar detector? These guys make a pretty good one. It helps people like you and me lower their chances of being held accountable for illegal activities (i.e. speeding). Do you ever speed? Have you ever been caught? Did the ticket encourage you not to speed, or did it just inconvenience you without causing you to change your behavior? People who buy radar detectors are making a rational choice: they PLAN to keep speeding (i.e. breaking the law), and want to mitigate the risk of being inconvenienced by a stupid law... which is essentially the position the poster is in. If you live in a state where radar detectors are legal, and you don't have a radar detector, yet you continue to speed, you're demonstrating your own inability to behave in a rational manner.
Or consider these guys, who make a product you can use to do the same thing- lower the chances that you can be held accountable for an illegal act. I will grant you that running a red light is somehow "more wrong" than speeding. Does this fact make the flashblocker spray "more good" or "more bad" than a radar detector?
Or these guys. They're about one step short of the folks in Berkeley where I live... for a couple of years there was an underground movement to chop the heads off any new parking meters that the city erected, and to jam or disable the meters that couldn't be physically removed. Notice a trend here?
no? Let me spell it out for you then: People don't like to obey laws, especially laws that put arbitrary limits on what they can do with their own property. In other words, if my car can go 120 MPH, I should be able to drive 120 MPH, and fuck the law for telling me that I can't. (Instead of chasing speeders, cops could bust people for driving 67 MPH in the left lane, or talking on the cell phone while driving, or passing on the right, or failing to move over when a faster vehicle comes up from behind...)
Companies that defend their customers' abilities to do what they want are rewarded by those customers in the marketplace. I guess techology is less mature than automobiles, but as the internet develops over the next 10 years, I think we're going to see a lot more radar detectors than speeding tickets.
If you really need a Win2K disk, email me and i'll "sell" you a copy. I'm not using mine, and I'd be happy to put a cd in the mail to you- you can paypal me the cost of the postage. I don't have copies of all the patches on disk, but whaddaya want for nuthin, a rubber biscuit?
not all his views, just the ones which can't be justified by empirical evidence that are in danger of being inacted as federal law.
and anyone whose beliefs and opinions are influenced by their reading habits is an idiot
no. Look: the bible is like a Harry Potter book, except people have been reading it longer. There are very intelligent adult people who are of voting age today who talk about quiddich and spells and magic- and some of them probably actually want to believe it could happen-- but if you met one of them on the street and they told you that they could use their wand to fight evil, or that they could fly to work on a broomstick, you'd think they were NUTS, or that they were lying, or that they were trying to fuck with your head. Why is it not OK to tell people that you can fly a broomstick, but it's perfectly kosher to tell people that Moses parted the sea?
I'm just suggesting that religion is basically the same thing: a quaint fiction that people believe in because it makes them feel better about that big empty emotional pit inside of themselves. If Ralph Nader announced tomorrow that he was revising his platform to include a pro-broomstick plank, nobody would take him seriously. But when some politician says "God bless you all," it's the same thing: a calculated ploy to win the votes of all the suckers who can't see the tactic for what it is.
Sure, people do good things in the name of religion. And people do bad things in the name of the same religion. But here's a hint: if you need some external authority to provide justification for whatever it is you are doing before people will buy into the idea, it's probably not worth doing in the first place.
It's the ACTIVISM that's intolerable.
EXACTLY. Which is why removing the privelege to cast a vote would go a long way towards correcting the situation. I don't mind you evangelizing all you want, as long as you and the poor bastards you convert can't affect the rights that I have or the taxes I pay.
Look, I know it will never happen. And I know that the world is past the point of no return, and that every human population will gradually genetically drift in the direction of idiocy, just because of population demographics and birth rates. But if you have another suggestion as to how to reverse the overall trend towards an irresponsible, overly litigious, and incompetant society, I'd be thrilled to hear it.
Oh, you take my words and how you **TWIST** them! I think we're in violent agreement here as far as "Christianity is about love and tolerance" takes us, which isn't very far if you have been following world affairs recently. Unfortunately the book isn't giving the orders- it's the guy who reads the book and interprets it for people that we need to be worried about. All that is necessary for a wicked leader to use good people to accomplish his wicked ends is for those good people to not question that wicked leader's orders.
I guess I'm not as much "anti-religious" as I am pro "question authority." I am outraged that there are people who can't think for themselves, and that religion allows those people to maintain a facade of functionality, while at the same time providing a legion of footsoldiers for egomaniacs and demagogues all over the world. Effectively, religion means that a very few political leaders can command a large percentage of the voting public with very little marginal effort. Again, I'd be OK with this, if religious people didn't have the same power to vote as i do.
Dude, we're all in the same world. Our beliefs will intersect whether I want it to or not.
I know our beliefs will intersect- unfortunately I'm not talking about conflicting beliefs. I'm talking about when your beliefs interfere with FACTS. Not *MY* facts, or my *interpretation* of the facts, but the facts as they stand in black and white.
Are all Christians mentally retarded? Dude, I think you just offended all the Christians out there who went to med school, or who are professors right now, etc. etc. Contrary to popular belief, I know Christians who are actually intelligent.
OK, I suspect I'm being trolled now... but I'll answer this one too. I'm not saying "Christians are stupid," I'm saying "Religious people are irrational." I'm very close to saying "Religious people are delusional," but I can't defend that position as easily so I'll let it go for now. I just googled for "irrational," so I'll save you the time and pick the most flattering definition:
" That which lies beyond the bounds of what can be comprehended, explained, justified or rejected by human reasoning and science. Antonym: rational (q.v.). NOTE: Irrational does not mean incorrect or impractical reasoning, but the total absence of any reasoning."
So you could take this definition, and claim that since I'm confined by the bounds of human reason, and your decisions are informed by {allah|jesus|ismael|god|moses|woden}, irrational is a perfect description because i should not expect to understand based only on my puny human brain-- and you didn't need to reason to arrive at a decision, because ALLMIGHTY GOD told you what to think. The problem with your interpretation is that the definition is taken from an economics dictionary, and it is used to describe a situation where people do unpredictable things because they don't have complete information, or because they don't understand the information that is available. In short, I don't think that religious people make bad decisions because they are malicious, or because they are not intelligent: I just think they don't take the time to understand the situation, because they're willing to let someone else tell them how to think.
What I pointed out in my other post is that I don't think people should bash Christians for trying to be good people or trying to reach perfection.
I'm not bashing Christians, or the adherents of any other religion for that matter, for trying to be good people. I'm not even bashing the Mormons who come to my house to tell me how I'm hellbound or the Jehova's Witnesses who hang out in the train station and try to save my poor soul. I just want all of you irrational people to start thinking for yourselves and keep your laws off my body.
It's not your beliefs that I have problems with. You're welcome to believe what you like. My problems start when your beliefs intersect with my lifestyle. I can't understand why your vote counts the same as mine, even though you have a demonstrated flaw in your ability to make rational decisions. And believe me- it's not just you! Anyone who will let some book, or even worse, some guy who has read some book, tell them how to think or feel shouldn't be allowed to vote.
We don't want Christians to be perfect. We want them to mind their own fucking business, stop pushing their unattainable ideologies and hypocritical morals on the rest of the world, and let us get on with our lives.
How often do you email an EDITABLE document to someone, have them edit it, then send it back?
My job is to negotiate contracts, so I do this 20 or 30 times a day... and based on the last 3 or 4 jobs I've had, this kind of behavior is the rule, rather than the exception. I've never sent anyone a PDF in the context of my job. What do you do for a living? (are you hiring:-?)
In fact, I refuse to do business with people who force me to look at their docs in PDF format. I'll often angrily close the tab when I click a link and Acrobat starts to load.
HTML, people. If you need to present something, and you need to protect your secrets so carefully that an NDA isn't good enough, or you spent so much hard work on whatever your stupid document is that don't want me to be able to make edits or to have cut/paste access to the content, send me a goddamn hard copy. If you want to communicate efficently, either post your content in HTML or send me a.doc or.txt or.swx or whatever the OO.o format is.
(yes, I hate all-flash sites too-- go to hell, BMW. GO TO HELL! Thank goodness for the flashblock xpi for mozilla- it makes the web usable again).
Step 3: They crack a bunch of piracy rings. This is totally in line with the spirit and proper use of copyright. If some company were doing something similar with GPL software, we'd go after them and we would win. Please try to retain what remains of your credibility - don't bitch when organized, premeditative law breakers get their comeuppance.
I don't see any posts from anyone who is especially upset by the loss of the few w4r3Z studios, or from anyone who thinks that crackers redistributing copyrighted works is morally right (Although I think that I could make a good case for various rzr1911 no-cd cracks being protected by "fair-use" precedent because they allow me to play games on my laptop that I have purchased legally without having to lug my damn cd-rom drive on the plane... if you're reading this, thanks guys:-)
No, what I see is that people are sad that John Ashcroft and his merry band of keystone cops are wasting our tax money by chasing these small-time geeks, instead of investigating how Karl Rove is committing treason, or how Scalia and Cheney are whispering sweet executive priveleges in each other's ears, or why businesses that George W. Bush works for have a nasty habit of going bankrupt, or whether Ken Lay was complicit in bankrupting Enron and precisely what ties he had to the Bush family, or how MCI managed to defraud MILLIONS OF CUSTOMERS and simulataneously compromise US goverment communications security, or how Diebold has committed election fraud and intends to do so again in November, or whether Halliburton intentionally conspired to defraud the government by overcharging on sweetheart Iraq contracts, or whether John Negroponte is fit to represent the United States by holding public office after being complicit in the murders of children and women (some of the women were NUNS, for christsake) in Nicaragua and Honduras.
No, we don't hear announcements about those investigations... BECAUSE THEY'RE NOT HAPPENING. They're not happening because John is allowing his enforcement agenda to be set by political interests, and the political interests in power are the ones who are responsible for your steps 1 and 2 as well as 3. These are all facets of the same gem; symptoms of the same disease: Moneyed corporations can buy selective enforcement of laws that promote their ideology or business interest.
Wake up, Johnny-boy. What's more damaging to the long-term security of the nation, (a)people who steal WarcraftIII or (b)people who steal presidential elections? You're supposed to enforce the laws of this great country. Quit picking the low-hanging fruits of echelon that the Israelis hand to you and go after something a little more challenging. While you're wondering WWJD and trying to make your corporate sponsors happy, Elliot Spitzer is making you look like fucking Mary Poppins.
And today, getting fired is the best possible thing that could happen to me. The job market is recovering, my company is run by stupid monkeys from Texas, and I hate my customers. *sigh* if only it was so easy...
And the fastball: how old was the old, inflexible professor? Over 35? Where does he work? I'm thinking he's too old and tired to be employable at his advanced stage in life.So why listen to his unemployable brain? If he is working, at his sad time of life, then where's he getting off making such a comment? If he isn't working in the private sector today, in his golden years, then how does he justify teaching you?
I think that the only issue with Open Source boils down to this: The things that nobody wants to do, but somebody has to. Nobody wants to think about documentation.
I will second that opinion, and run with it a little. But first let me say that this is a self-perpetuating situation: geek1 is using OSS and needs a program to do xyz->geek1 looks on freshmeat->geek finds program for xyy written by geek2 using OSS->geek1 mods xyy program to be xyz program and reposts to freshmeat, playing geek2 to someone else's geek1, writing minimal docs that only a geek can understand. The only way to break this cycle of unintelligible geek-oriented documentation is to have some large company ( *cough* Novell *cough* ) start paying people to write OSS docs with pretty screenshots and small words aimed at Mary Lou and Jimmy Wal-Mart Shopper-- otherwise, it will never get done.
I don't write new code becuase of the bragging rights, or becuase of the potential for 3. PROFIT!!! the reason I modify software is that I have a problem that I can't solve with the software that is currently available.
I write new code because I can't make the stuff I found on freshmeat or sourceforge do what I want it to do: it doesn't play nice with my db format, or it messes up the layout on my web pages, or it won't take my track list from xmms as a template for the order of tracks on the cd (*) So I write a little code, or tinker with what's already there, to meet my specific need. And if I come up with a solution that I think is elegant, maybe I'll submit my changes to the guy who is listed as the main contact at the place I got it from.
But your job is to provide the "service layer",
No, my job is something else entirely, and my job deals with software only tangentially. I use OSS at home because it's more secure, more flexible and more stable than Microsoft. I made the jump from windows98 because I needed a NAT box, and I didn't have any money to buy a standalone router, but I did need internet access through one DSL line for 3 computers at the same time. I solved that problem with OSS, but I didn't take the time to write documentation for it-- I HAVE OTHER THINGS I'D RATHER BE DOING. I don't get paid to write software, or write docs for someone else's software. Once my specific problem is solved, I don't care if anyone else uses the code I write... I just get on with my life.
And I argue that this is where the problem with documentation lies- if I write software that is good enough to solve my problem, then I use it, no docs required. Since I know what problem it's supposed to solve, and how it solves the problem, I don't need documentation. And since I don't care if anyone else uses my mods, I'm not going to go out of my way to write docs that no one will ever read, so that this hypothetical imaginary someone else who wants to use my software to take xmms playlists and use them to order tracks to burn cd's can do so without parsing the raw code for themselves. I think that in general people write docs for OSS only when the user base for a given program is large enough that it takes less time to write a howto than it would take to respond to questions individually. Before that threshold, it's just not worth the effort to write good docs! After all, my problem is solved, remember?
(*) the program I had these issues with was x-cd-roast, an excellent GUI frontend for cdrecord maintained by Thomas Niederreiter. I know, I know, I could just use **insert program name here** instead, but I tried 3 or 4 other guis, and was using fvwm2 instead of KDE, and... it ended up being easier to just write a script to translate the.m3u file to the.lst file that xcdroast wanted. If I'm wrong, and someone out there wants my script, reply here and I'll send it to you:-)
$3200. That's a fucking FORTUNE to most people and it's a month's rent to other people. Come on, three grand is peanuts. If you found a good spot, I bet you could hustle three grand in a week's worth of panhandling-- especially if you had a guitar. Next time you see a guy playing an instrument during the morning commute in the station of your favorite method of light rail transport, spend 10 minutes and count how many singles he has in the case. And then spend 3 hours watching him from a different vantage point, and watch how he stops periodically to collect the money so that it looks like he's only collected five or ten dollars... more people are likely to feel sorry for him... lather, rinse, repeat.
No. You don't have to keep extra people on retainer... You just hire additional people, and you don't give anyone 40 hours. If you have 5 people doing 40-hour weeks, it is mathematically the same as 10 people doing 20-hour weeks. Yeah, all those 10 people are going to need second jobs to make ends meet... but that's not your problem now, is it?
You just hire extra people, cut everyone's hours below 30, and don't schedule anyone for more than, say, 5 hrs a day. That way, if someone goes WAAAAAAAAY over on any one day, you still don't pay overtime. This has the added financial bonus of keeping all 10 of those half-time people off your employee benefits programs, which represents additional benefits for your shareholders.
Yeah, it sucks for the workers. And no, I'm not suggesting that it's OK to treat Wal-Mart employees this way because everyone knows that Wal-Mart is anti-labor and so you deserve what you get if you apply for a job there. I'm just suggesting that any halfway competent manager should be able to avoid overtime entirely with a little bit of planning and the willpower to continuously screw over his/her employees.
Wasn't Gateway the first to offer the $3000 42-inch plasma TV? I know that the gateway store near my house has a couple of these suckers on display. If they're closing the store, maybe I can get a good deal on the display models...
everyone I have ever known outside of an academic setting and most of those in an academic setting who aspire to "climb the ladder" are out for prestige, which is just a different metric for the same BS power and money type of succes that most slashdotters view as evil and corrupting.
if there is some way to make an assload of money working in a company that you haven't started yourself without "climbing the ladder," please tell me about it. If I could be making $100k/yr cloning cells and only talking to 2 other people for 7 hours a day like I used to do for biotech job that paid me $28k/yr, you can bet your ass I'd be there now. I could give a shit about power or influence... I just want more money. Sadly, Tony Montana was right: the two do seem to go together.
I challenge you to find one/.er who wants to do the same job they do now for LESS money... or even the exact same job a year from now, for the exact same salary. Everybody wants more. I don't think there's anything inherently BS or evil about wanting to be enormously wealthy. It's how some people choose to accomplish that end that many of us take issue with.
I don't entirely blame the MBAs, either; some top-tier MBA programs seem to actively train people to be arrogant and glib, presumably because clear thought and honest self-appraisal are mainly handicaps when playing the primate dominance games that upper managers seem to spend most of their time on.
And let's be honest here, folks. Going to B-school isn't like working on a PhD where the focus is on LEARNING, or even law or med school where the focus is on passing the boards so you can work in the industry. B-school is like a country club for wannabe-yuppies... you pay $50k for the priveledge of meeting people who, for the most part, think exactly like you do. Once you're accepted, you hang out and party and get drunk a lot with the same ~300 people for the 2 years you spend together, and then you graduate, and then you spend the rest of your life calling each other when you need a job.
I mean for christ's sake, GWB has an MBA-- nuff said.
Turns out they didn't check for ID either. I hope I feel safer in November.
is this a troll?
*KGB VOICE* Comrade, where are your papers? */KGB VOICE*
NOBODY checks ID when you go to vote. See, back in the day, like 40 or 50 years ago, we didn't like them minorities to have a say in their own futures. So what we did was come up with these "literacy tests," on the theory that you had to be able to read to be able to understand a ballot. Literacy tests, poll taxes, and character vouchers were used to disenfranchise voters throughout the US, but especially to deny the vote to blacks in the south, where the Klan still claimed much of the white elite (who end up working the polls on election day) as members.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a reaction to a heinous act of police violence against black voters engaged in a march for civil rights in Selma, Alabama. The Act says that states may require a citizen to present reasonable identification upon registering to vote in that voter's first federal election, but that no state can make additional demands on citizens to prove eligibility to vote. Most of the time this is interpreted to mean that when you show up to vote, if the name you give is on the list of registered voters, it's against the law for them to ask you for your ID, or for any other proof that you are who you say you are.
Take off your tinfoil hat for a minute, and try on the shoes of Fannie Lou Hamer-- this is a Good Thing.
why E-Voting is inevitable, and why we should all just suck it up and work to make the system better...
why work to make the system better? I think all of our time would be much better spent working to exploit the holes that have been demonstrated, in an open election. What better demonstration of process failure than Larouche winning in November with 97% of the vote?
Now, even though I don't use my phone that much, my friends and family call me on it all the time (what can I say, people around here just have not adjusted to the idea of cell phones being the number one form of voice communication).
Let me suggest an experiment. Cut off your land-line phone number, and see if the people who used to call you there start calling you on your cell phone.
Because I don't use the phone much, my phone bill is ridiculously low, like less than $16 a month (including taxes and fees but not including the DSL charge).
That's $16/month, or $180/yr, that you could be spending on cigarettes or iTunes. Your mom isn't going to stop talking to you just because your phone number changes:-)
{My mom doesn't have to use the phone to call me because I still live in her basement, you insensitive clod!}
Slashdot Mirror
but still next-to-nobody here watches the games. Team USA had a game last weekend, and the only broadcast I could find was on telemundo (which I don't recieve well enough to watch without getting a headache from it). maybe it was on cable, but I don't have cable. What was NBC broadcasting? Women's golf.
3. A possible sign that Valve should hire more people so they can release it sooner.
I bet Fred Brooks would have something to say about that. Oh wait, he wrote a book about it.
The last company that I worked for was behind on a project, and they started hiring people to catch up. They went out of business 4 months later becuase they couldn't make payroll.
sometimes hiring more people isn't the answer.
i call bullshit. you can buy a complete system with an ethernet card from dell's "outlet store" for less than $250. if this person can't be bothered to spend a lousy $250 on a PC to RUN HER BUSINESS, and instead makes the incomprehensibly foolish choice to trust hotmail to do it for her, it's probably not a question of if her business would have failed anyway, but when-- because people who make poor choices don't usually stop after just one.
/*disclaimer: I went to CalTech, and took a class from this guy as a freshman */
Did any of you take physics in high school? I did. At least once a week, part of our class would consist of a viewing of the venerable Mechanical Universe series of videotapes, hosted by none other than Dr. David Goodstein.
By far, the most famous and exciting episode is the one where he shoots the stuffed monkey as it's falling from across the room with a rubber dart fired from one of those toy guns. The pinnacle of my freshman year at CalTech (well, apart from the trip to Tijuana... and those little blotters with the all-seeing eye on them...) OK OK, the school-sanctioned educational pinnacle was seeing Dr. Goodstein REPEAT the demo from the tape in real life, in front of a live audience. People acutally APPLAUDED when the dart hit the monkey. That's when I knew that even though I was doomed to be a nerd forever... there were other people even nerdier than me.
These days, the most popular target for thieves is laptops. Easy to carry, valuable, and it's the one piece of equipment the guards will expect people to carry out.
Is it wrong for me to want to teach my company why a zero-tolerance policy is a good idea by stealing laptops until it's implemented?
Good lord. Mods, please mark kangarooski's post +relevant, +informative, and +correct. This is what keeps me reading /. in the first place... among all the trolls, liars, and fools, occasionally you find the proverbial needle in the haystack.
The only reason you claim you're going to switch to Verizon is [...] because you feel you have a lower chance of being held accountable for your illegal activites.
sounds perfectly rational to me. Do you know anyone with a radar detector? These guys make a pretty good one. It helps people like you and me lower their chances of being held accountable for illegal activities (i.e. speeding). Do you ever speed? Have you ever been caught? Did the ticket encourage you not to speed, or did it just inconvenience you without causing you to change your behavior? People who buy radar detectors are making a rational choice: they PLAN to keep speeding (i.e. breaking the law), and want to mitigate the risk of being inconvenienced by a stupid law... which is essentially the position the poster is in. If you live in a state where radar detectors are legal, and you don't have a radar detector, yet you continue to speed, you're demonstrating your own inability to behave in a rational manner.
Or consider these guys, who make a product you can use to do the same thing- lower the chances that you can be held accountable for an illegal act. I will grant you that running a red light is somehow "more wrong" than speeding. Does this fact make the flashblocker spray "more good" or "more bad" than a radar detector?
Or these guys. They're about one step short of the folks in Berkeley where I live... for a couple of years there was an underground movement to chop the heads off any new parking meters that the city erected, and to jam or disable the meters that couldn't be physically removed. Notice a trend here?
no? Let me spell it out for you then: People don't like to obey laws, especially laws that put arbitrary limits on what they can do with their own property. In other words, if my car can go 120 MPH, I should be able to drive 120 MPH, and fuck the law for telling me that I can't. (Instead of chasing speeders, cops could bust people for driving 67 MPH in the left lane, or talking on the cell phone while driving, or passing on the right, or failing to move over when a faster vehicle comes up from behind...)
Companies that defend their customers' abilities to do what they want are rewarded by those customers in the marketplace. I guess techology is less mature than automobiles, but as the internet develops over the next 10 years, I think we're going to see a lot more radar detectors than speeding tickets.
If you really need a Win2K disk, email me and i'll "sell" you a copy. I'm not using mine, and I'd be happy to put a cd in the mail to you- you can paypal me the cost of the postage. I don't have copies of all the patches on disk, but whaddaya want for nuthin, a rubber biscuit?
Wait, so his views interfere with your lifestyle
not all his views, just the ones which can't be justified by empirical evidence that are in danger of being inacted as federal law.
and anyone whose beliefs and opinions are influenced by their reading habits is an idiot
no. Look: the bible is like a Harry Potter book, except people have been reading it longer. There are very intelligent adult people who are of voting age today who talk about quiddich and spells and magic- and some of them probably actually want to believe it could happen-- but if you met one of them on the street and they told you that they could use their wand to fight evil, or that they could fly to work on a broomstick, you'd think they were NUTS, or that they were lying, or that they were trying to fuck with your head. Why is it not OK to tell people that you can fly a broomstick, but it's perfectly kosher to tell people that Moses parted the sea?
I'm just suggesting that religion is basically the same thing: a quaint fiction that people believe in because it makes them feel better about that big empty emotional pit inside of themselves. If Ralph Nader announced tomorrow that he was revising his platform to include a pro-broomstick plank, nobody would take him seriously. But when some politician says "God bless you all," it's the same thing: a calculated ploy to win the votes of all the suckers who can't see the tactic for what it is.
Sure, people do good things in the name of religion. And people do bad things in the name of the same religion. But here's a hint: if you need some external authority to provide justification for whatever it is you are doing before people will buy into the idea, it's probably not worth doing in the first place.
It's the ACTIVISM that's intolerable.
EXACTLY. Which is why removing the privelege to cast a vote would go a long way towards correcting the situation. I don't mind you evangelizing all you want, as long as you and the poor bastards you convert can't affect the rights that I have or the taxes I pay.
Look, I know it will never happen. And I know that the world is past the point of no return, and that every human population will gradually genetically drift in the direction of idiocy, just because of population demographics and birth rates. But if you have another suggestion as to how to reverse the overall trend towards an irresponsible, overly litigious, and incompetant society, I'd be thrilled to hear it.
I guess I'm not as much "anti-religious" as I am pro "question authority." I am outraged that there are people who can't think for themselves, and that religion allows those people to maintain a facade of functionality, while at the same time providing a legion of footsoldiers for egomaniacs and demagogues all over the world. Effectively, religion means that a very few political leaders can command a large percentage of the voting public with very little marginal effort. Again, I'd be OK with this, if religious people didn't have the same power to vote as i do.
Dude, we're all in the same world. Our beliefs will intersect whether I want it to or not.
I know our beliefs will intersect- unfortunately I'm not talking about conflicting beliefs. I'm talking about when your beliefs interfere with FACTS. Not *MY* facts, or my *interpretation* of the facts, but the facts as they stand in black and white.
Are all Christians mentally retarded? Dude, I think you just offended all the Christians out there who went to med school, or who are professors right now, etc. etc. Contrary to popular belief, I know Christians who are actually intelligent.
OK, I suspect I'm being trolled now... but I'll answer this one too. I'm not saying "Christians are stupid," I'm saying "Religious people are irrational." I'm very close to saying "Religious people are delusional," but I can't defend that position as easily so I'll let it go for now. I just googled for "irrational," so I'll save you the time and pick the most flattering definition:
- " That which lies beyond the bounds of what can be comprehended, explained, justified or rejected by human reasoning and science. Antonym: rational (q.v.). NOTE: Irrational does not mean incorrect or impractical reasoning, but the total absence of any reasoning."
So you could take this definition, and claim that since I'm confined by the bounds of human reason, and your decisions are informed by {allah|jesus|ismael|god|moses|woden}, irrational is a perfect description because i should not expect to understand based only on my puny human brain-- and you didn't need to reason to arrive at a decision, because ALLMIGHTY GOD told you what to think. The problem with your interpretation is that the definition is taken from an economics dictionary, and it is used to describe a situation where people do unpredictable things because they don't have complete information, or because they don't understand the information that is available. In short, I don't think that religious people make bad decisions because they are malicious, or because they are not intelligent: I just think they don't take the time to understand the situation, because they're willing to let someone else tell them how to think.What I pointed out in my other post is that I don't think people should bash Christians for trying to be good people or trying to reach perfection.
I'm not bashing Christians, or the adherents of any other religion for that matter, for trying to be good people. I'm not even bashing the Mormons who come to my house to tell me how I'm hellbound or the Jehova's Witnesses who hang out in the train station and try to save my poor soul. I just want all of you irrational people to start thinking for yourselves and keep your laws off my body.
It's not your beliefs that I have problems with. You're welcome to believe what you like. My problems start when your beliefs intersect with my lifestyle. I can't understand why your vote counts the same as mine, even though you have a demonstrated flaw in your ability to make rational decisions. And believe me- it's not just you! Anyone who will let some book, or even worse, some guy who has read some book, tell them how to think or feel shouldn't be allowed to vote.
We don't want Christians to be perfect. We want them to mind their own fucking business, stop pushing their unattainable ideologies and hypocritical morals on the rest of the world, and let us get on with our lives.
How often do you email an EDITABLE document to someone, have them edit it, then send it back?
:-?)
.doc or .txt or .swx or whatever the OO.o format is.
My job is to negotiate contracts, so I do this 20 or 30 times a day... and based on the last 3 or 4 jobs I've had, this kind of behavior is the rule, rather than the exception. I've never sent anyone a PDF in the context of my job. What do you do for a living? (are you hiring
In fact, I refuse to do business with people who force me to look at their docs in PDF format. I'll often angrily close the tab when I click a link and Acrobat starts to load.
HTML, people. If you need to present something, and you need to protect your secrets so carefully that an NDA isn't good enough, or you spent so much hard work on whatever your stupid document is that don't want me to be able to make edits or to have cut/paste access to the content, send me a goddamn hard copy. If you want to communicate efficently, either post your content in HTML or send me a
(yes, I hate all-flash sites too-- go to hell, BMW. GO TO HELL! Thank goodness for the flashblock xpi for mozilla- it makes the web usable again).
Step 3: They crack a bunch of piracy rings. This is totally in line with the spirit and proper use of copyright. If some company were doing something similar with GPL software, we'd go after them and we would win. Please try to retain what remains of your credibility - don't bitch when organized, premeditative law breakers get their comeuppance.
:-)
I don't see any posts from anyone who is especially upset by the loss of the few w4r3Z studios, or from anyone who thinks that crackers redistributing copyrighted works is morally right (Although I think that I could make a good case for various rzr1911 no-cd cracks being protected by "fair-use" precedent because they allow me to play games on my laptop that I have purchased legally without having to lug my damn cd-rom drive on the plane... if you're reading this, thanks guys
No, what I see is that people are sad that John Ashcroft and his merry band of keystone cops are wasting our tax money by chasing these small-time geeks, instead of investigating how Karl Rove is committing treason, or how Scalia and Cheney are whispering sweet executive priveleges in each other's ears, or why businesses that George W. Bush works for have a nasty habit of going bankrupt, or whether Ken Lay was complicit in bankrupting Enron and precisely what ties he had to the Bush family, or how MCI managed to defraud MILLIONS OF CUSTOMERS and simulataneously compromise US goverment communications security, or how Diebold has committed election fraud and intends to do so again in November, or whether Halliburton intentionally conspired to defraud the government by overcharging on sweetheart Iraq contracts, or whether John Negroponte is fit to represent the United States by holding public office after being complicit in the murders of children and women (some of the women were NUNS, for christsake) in Nicaragua and Honduras.
No, we don't hear announcements about those investigations... BECAUSE THEY'RE NOT HAPPENING. They're not happening because John is allowing his enforcement agenda to be set by political interests, and the political interests in power are the ones who are responsible for your steps 1 and 2 as well as 3. These are all facets of the same gem; symptoms of the same disease: Moneyed corporations can buy selective enforcement of laws that promote their ideology or business interest.
Wake up, Johnny-boy. What's more damaging to the long-term security of the nation, (a)people who steal WarcraftIII or (b)people who steal presidential elections? You're supposed to enforce the laws of this great country. Quit picking the low-hanging fruits of echelon that the Israelis hand to you and go after something a little more challenging. While you're wondering WWJD and trying to make your corporate sponsors happy, Elliot Spitzer is making you look like fucking Mary Poppins.
And today, getting fired is the best possible thing that could happen to me. The job market is recovering, my company is run by stupid monkeys from Texas, and I hate my customers. *sigh* if only it was so easy...
oh, come on. You must know it as well as I do:
Those who Can, Do. Those who Can't, Teach.
fastball *crack!* outta the park...
I think that the only issue with Open Source boils down to this: The things that nobody wants to do, but somebody has to. Nobody wants to think about documentation.
.m3u file to the .lst file that xcdroast wanted. If I'm wrong, and someone out there wants my script, reply here and I'll send it to you :-)
I will second that opinion, and run with it a little. But first let me say that this is a self-perpetuating situation: geek1 is using OSS and needs a program to do xyz->geek1 looks on freshmeat->geek finds program for xyy written by geek2 using OSS->geek1 mods xyy program to be xyz program and reposts to freshmeat, playing geek2 to someone else's geek1, writing minimal docs that only a geek can understand. The only way to break this cycle of unintelligible geek-oriented documentation is to have some large company ( *cough* Novell *cough* ) start paying people to write OSS docs with pretty screenshots and small words aimed at Mary Lou and Jimmy Wal-Mart Shopper-- otherwise, it will never get done.
I don't write new code becuase of the bragging rights, or becuase of the potential for 3. PROFIT!!! the reason I modify software is that I have a problem that I can't solve with the software that is currently available.
I write new code because I can't make the stuff I found on freshmeat or sourceforge do what I want it to do: it doesn't play nice with my db format, or it messes up the layout on my web pages, or it won't take my track list from xmms as a template for the order of tracks on the cd (*) So I write a little code, or tinker with what's already there, to meet my specific need. And if I come up with a solution that I think is elegant, maybe I'll submit my changes to the guy who is listed as the main contact at the place I got it from.
But your job is to provide the "service layer",
No, my job is something else entirely, and my job deals with software only tangentially. I use OSS at home because it's more secure, more flexible and more stable than Microsoft. I made the jump from windows98 because I needed a NAT box, and I didn't have any money to buy a standalone router, but I did need internet access through one DSL line for 3 computers at the same time. I solved that problem with OSS, but I didn't take the time to write documentation for it-- I HAVE OTHER THINGS I'D RATHER BE DOING. I don't get paid to write software, or write docs for someone else's software. Once my specific problem is solved, I don't care if anyone else uses the code I write... I just get on with my life.
And I argue that this is where the problem with documentation lies- if I write software that is good enough to solve my problem, then I use it, no docs required. Since I know what problem it's supposed to solve, and how it solves the problem, I don't need documentation. And since I don't care if anyone else uses my mods, I'm not going to go out of my way to write docs that no one will ever read, so that this hypothetical imaginary someone else who wants to use my software to take xmms playlists and use them to order tracks to burn cd's can do so without parsing the raw code for themselves. I think that in general people write docs for OSS only when the user base for a given program is large enough that it takes less time to write a howto than it would take to respond to questions individually. Before that threshold, it's just not worth the effort to write good docs! After all, my problem is solved, remember?
(*) the program I had these issues with was x-cd-roast, an excellent GUI frontend for cdrecord maintained by Thomas Niederreiter. I know, I know, I could just use **insert program name here** instead, but I tried 3 or 4 other guis, and was using fvwm2 instead of KDE, and... it ended up being easier to just write a script to translate the
$3200. That's a fucking FORTUNE to most people and it's a month's rent to other people. Come on, three grand is peanuts. If you found a good spot, I bet you could hustle three grand in a week's worth of panhandling-- especially if you had a guitar. Next time you see a guy playing an instrument during the morning commute in the station of your favorite method of light rail transport, spend 10 minutes and count how many singles he has in the case. And then spend 3 hours watching him from a different vantage point, and watch how he stops periodically to collect the money so that it looks like he's only collected five or ten dollars... more people are likely to feel sorry for him... lather, rinse, repeat.
No. You don't have to keep extra people on retainer... You just hire additional people, and you don't give anyone 40 hours. If you have 5 people doing 40-hour weeks, it is mathematically the same as 10 people doing 20-hour weeks. Yeah, all those 10 people are going to need second jobs to make ends meet... but that's not your problem now, is it?
You just hire extra people, cut everyone's hours below 30, and don't schedule anyone for more than, say, 5 hrs a day. That way, if someone goes WAAAAAAAAY over on any one day, you still don't pay overtime. This has the added financial bonus of keeping all 10 of those half-time people off your employee benefits programs, which represents additional benefits for your shareholders.
Yeah, it sucks for the workers. And no, I'm not suggesting that it's OK to treat Wal-Mart employees this way because everyone knows that Wal-Mart is anti-labor and so you deserve what you get if you apply for a job there. I'm just suggesting that any halfway competent manager should be able to avoid overtime entirely with a little bit of planning and the willpower to continuously screw over his/her employees.
Wasn't Gateway the first to offer the $3000 42-inch plasma TV? I know that the gateway store near my house has a couple of these suckers on display. If they're closing the store, maybe I can get a good deal on the display models...
*de-computers, runs to store....*
everyone I have ever known outside of an academic setting and most of those in an academic setting who aspire to "climb the ladder" are out for prestige, which is just a different metric for the same BS power and money type of succes that most slashdotters view as evil and corrupting.
/.er who wants to do the same job they do now for LESS money... or even the exact same job a year from now, for the exact same salary. Everybody wants more. I don't think there's anything inherently BS or evil about wanting to be enormously wealthy. It's how some people choose to accomplish that end that many of us take issue with.
if there is some way to make an assload of money working in a company that you haven't started yourself without "climbing the ladder," please tell me about it. If I could be making $100k/yr cloning cells and only talking to 2 other people for 7 hours a day like I used to do for biotech job that paid me $28k/yr, you can bet your ass I'd be there now. I could give a shit about power or influence... I just want more money. Sadly, Tony Montana was right: the two do seem to go together.
I challenge you to find one
I don't entirely blame the MBAs, either; some top-tier MBA programs seem to actively train people to be arrogant and glib, presumably because clear thought and honest self-appraisal are mainly handicaps when playing the primate dominance games that upper managers seem to spend most of their time on.
And let's be honest here, folks. Going to B-school isn't like working on a PhD where the focus is on LEARNING, or even law or med school where the focus is on passing the boards so you can work in the industry. B-school is like a country club for wannabe-yuppies... you pay $50k for the priveledge of meeting people who, for the most part, think exactly like you do. Once you're accepted, you hang out and party and get drunk a lot with the same ~300 people for the 2 years you spend together, and then you graduate, and then you spend the rest of your life calling each other when you need a job.
I mean for christ's sake, GWB has an MBA-- nuff said.
Turns out they didn't check for ID either. I hope I feel safer in November.
is this a troll?
*KGB VOICE* Comrade, where are your papers? */KGB VOICE*
NOBODY checks ID when you go to vote. See, back in the day, like 40 or 50 years ago, we didn't like them minorities to have a say in their own futures. So what we did was come up with these "literacy tests," on the theory that you had to be able to read to be able to understand a ballot. Literacy tests, poll taxes, and character vouchers were used to disenfranchise voters throughout the US, but especially to deny the vote to blacks in the south, where the Klan still claimed much of the white elite (who end up working the polls on election day) as members.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a reaction to a heinous act of police violence against black voters engaged in a march for civil rights in Selma, Alabama. The Act says that states may require a citizen to present reasonable identification upon registering to vote in that voter's first federal election, but that no state can make additional demands on citizens to prove eligibility to vote. Most of the time this is interpreted to mean that when you show up to vote, if the name you give is on the list of registered voters, it's against the law for them to ask you for your ID, or for any other proof that you are who you say you are.
Take off your tinfoil hat for a minute, and try on the shoes of Fannie Lou Hamer-- this is a Good Thing.
why E-Voting is inevitable, and why we should all just suck it up and work to make the system better...
why work to make the system better? I think all of our time would be much better spent working to exploit the holes that have been demonstrated, in an open election. What better demonstration of process failure than Larouche winning in November with 97% of the vote?
now if there was only some way to prevent them from voting or holding elected office. I envision a check-box on the front of the ballot: and any ballots where "yes" is checked are immediately discarded. I'm tired of being punished for other peoples' ignorance.
Now, even though I don't use my phone that much, my friends and family call me on it all the time (what can I say, people around here just have not adjusted to the idea of cell phones being the number one form of voice communication).
:-)
Let me suggest an experiment. Cut off your land-line phone number, and see if the people who used to call you there start calling you on your cell phone.
Because I don't use the phone much, my phone bill is ridiculously low, like less than $16 a month (including taxes and fees but not including the DSL charge).
That's $16/month, or $180/yr, that you could be spending on cigarettes or iTunes. Your mom isn't going to stop talking to you just because your phone number changes
{My mom doesn't have to use the phone to call me because I still live in her basement, you insensitive clod!}