This is funny to me because, while Moore's documentary may have generated those warm, goose-bumpy feelings this weekend in enough of the judges to win Fahrenheit 911 the Palme D'Or, I'm betting than 20 (or even 10 or 5) years from now, Moore's film will be to political documentaries what Hackers now is to hacking movies, or what Doc Brown's pronunciation of "1.21 gigawatts!" sounds like today.
Sure, it looked and sounded good at the time, but now it's so dated and so wrong on so many levels that one can't help but treat it as a comedy! But there's still a lot for time to tell on Moore's latest film, so we'll see.
Until the rest of the 150 million or so people who haven't been utterly brainwashed by this administration...
First, I can almost guarantee you that at least 150 million Americans don't even care one way or the other:
Over 80 million are under age 20.
Over 35 million are over age 65.
Now being under 20 or over 65 does not mean you don't care, but most Americans in those age groups have other agendas that have nothing to do with global politics. Then consider that about 1/5 of the population that are neither minors nor seniors (ages 20-64, over 166 million) aren't even registered to vote, and millions more are registered but don't vote or care, and we're lucky extremely lucky if 150 million Americans are paying attention to anything Michael Moore or his supporters or opposition have to say.
So then you consider that this country is roughly split among those that actually have opinions on the matter, and you're lucky if you've got 60 million -- 20% of the population -- on either side (why not 150/2=75 million? because a number of us don't choose sides).
Finally, to the brainwashing... That works both ways. Those who disagree with me are just as brainwashed by whatever they think as I am brainwashed by whatever I think. More to the point: there is no such thing as "brainwashing". We simply perceive the facts as they are delivered to us, and we make our own judgments based on our own personal values and reasons.
Disagreeing or agreeing with any president's administration provides no one with any higher moral authority. Our political ideals have no effect on our qualifications as American citizens.
I assume that you'll be mouthing off again in this forum or another quite soon, so do everyone involved a favor and have your facts straight before you start slinging your uninformed opinion around.
Hopefully this movie will open in the US and will cause some people to open their eyes.
[...]
...and hopefully people will realize what an anti-American, unpatriotic worm Michael Moore is. But notice that I don't call him worthless, because he certainly serves a valuable purpose:
Whether you agree or disagree with the message he attempts to deliver, he alerts us to the fact that we are our own worst enemy. Of course, those of us who disagree with Moore simply think he should fight his war from another continent... which, I suppose, is what he's doing at Cannes.
Don't get me wrong. I think Moore's mind is a brilliant one. We do need people like Michael Moore to stand up for what they believe even when it goes against the current administration, because it is that freedom which makes our country so great. But I respectfully disagree with his motives and methods, and I believe he (like everyone else among us, including myself) is ignorant of the details that generate the interpretive big picture that he sees.
That is, the intricate, day-to-day, small-ball details -- the ones that add up to what everyone sees, hears, and reads in the mass media -- will never be known by anyone, because no one among us comes close enough to omniscience or omnipresence to possibly have any idea what motives drive the events of the world. We only know what we perceive, and from that we drive our opinions outword... despite that we have little basis in fact for them.
If not for the computer and the internet, it would seem like only yesterday. But because the computer and the internet are such integral parts of so many of our lives these days, we are all vaguely reminiscent (or not) of a time long ago when the browser war was between one evil and another, and countless users sought to install only one or the other. Or, at least we had a favorite.
Now there are several other options, still including MSIE and (sort of) Netscape, but more importantly also including Mozilla (Netscape's hipper cousin) and Opera. Then you consider other platforms, and there are viable alternatives like Safari and Konqueror, plus others that I'm sure I'm leaving out.
My guess is that more than 95% of the people who read this have at least two web browsers installed, and everyone probably has a preference between the two or among the several. I actually use several, because not only do I use MSIE, Mozilla (Firefox!), and Opera in Windows XP, but I also use Konqueror in Linux and Safari and IE5 on the Macs at the office (mostly for web development testing purposes).
This is a very small, badly dithered picture of the web browser timeline. It is not meant to be detailed or even all that accurate. Instead, it is only meant to serve as a reminder of a less chaotic but equally fun time, and as a bridge between our simpler past and brighter present. Well, at least with regard to web browsers.
I work in tech support for a small college, and this is a story I actually just heard today about one of my co-workers. It happened earlier this week.
She was called into the President's office because they were upgrading his computer, probably involving an upgraded OS. I don't know those details because they weren't important. What's important is that the process involved a new keyboard, and so the techie had put the keyboard on the desk and was trying to get through whatever process she was following on screen with the mouse.
At some point she determined that she needed to restart the computer, so she pressed Ctrl-Alt-Del. Nothing happened. She pressed it again and complained that nothing was happening, and nothing continued to happen. The President's secretary looked on patiently and discovered the problem -- the keyboard was not plugged in. So the secretary softly explained that the keyboard wasn't plugged in, and the techie snapped (in a nice but frustrated way), "no, it should still work!" (WTF?)
You can imagine that it wasn't long before the secretary had her convinced that a keyboard will not affect anything on any computer that it isn't connected to.
...is Ben Sheets' near-perfect game just two days earlier against the same Braves team. Such a miserable offensive performance by the Braves against Sheets should have left them eager to pound the ball against Johnson on Tuesday. And, in comparison, they did.
Sunday: Ben Sheets of the Milwaukee Brewers allowed three hits and struck out 18 Braves in a complete game win over Atlanta. With 18 strikeouts, one walk, three hits, and one sacrifice bunt, Braves batters retreated to the dugout without putting the ball in play or reaching base 18 out of 31 times (58.1%).
Tuesday: Randy Johnson's game may have been perfect (meaning no Braves reached first base safely for any reason), but his 13 strikeouts mean that the Braves retreated to the dugout without putting the ball in play or reaching base only 13 out of 27 times (48.1%).
So while Johnson's game is defined as "perfect" by MLB, it was slightly more reliant on the Braves hitting the ball directly at the defense, while Sheets' near-perfection was betrayed by a couple of lucky hits.
So the subject of this comment is misleading. Sheets was actually more dominant, but he won't be remembered in the record books for his more dominant performance because the ball managed to find holes in the Brewers' defense. Then again, Sheets walked a batter, so no perfection for him!
Either way, this is not good for team looking for it's 13th consecutive division title (not counting the unfinished 1994 season). Over two days, they managed three hits in 56 at-bats (58 total times at the plate). Ouch!
Even with 27 strikeouts, the catcher would have to catch 27 third strikes, not to mention the trajectories of each pitch and of each swing allowing 27 consecutive outs by the Arizona defense.
Bradbury's next book... seems to set an overall vision that this is an in-between generation caught between [sic] the brutal and primitive and the advanced.
When discussing two things, use "between". When discussing three or more things, use "among". And when discussing my tendency to place periods and commas outside the quotation marks, acknowledge my support for consistency with the colon and semicolon. But I digress.
How can you be "between" three things? Between specifically means that there is object A on one side and object B on the other. If there are more than three sides, or other objects on top and bottom or in front and back, then you are among said objects, not between them.
And by extension... Windows Security!
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Hardened PHP
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· Score: 1
Before someone else lashes out at Microsoft for analagous reasons, I don't think such an analogy would be entirely fair. While it is a server admin's responsibility to secure his/her server(s), and it is a software company's responsibility to secure its operating system(s), the tasks are not the same or even on the same level.
But to support cnf's point, I'm neither a server admin nor a software developer for Microsoft, and I'm watching South Park so I can't concentrate on explaining why it's not a good analogy... But I thought it was a good idea.:-P
Re:Installation Warning (if you use Koepi's binary
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XVID 1.0 Released
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· Score: 1
A few hours ago, anyway. Heh.
Installation Warning (if you use Koepi's binary)
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XVID 1.0 Released
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· Score: 4, Informative
I installed Koepi's version of the XviD 1.0 a few days ago, and I noticed a disclaimer:
Since I lost all my data, I switched to another installer system. (Since XviD-1.0-RC1.)
If you used the old NSIS installer (builds _before_ 1.0-RC1), please uninstall it manually before upgrading with these new installers. If you have done that already, upgrading with these new installers works like you expect it.
Also, Win9x support is better now with this installer.
Lots of firms continue to secure exploits with minor updates to old versions (but not too old) while focusing support on the newer product. As for MT, you'd have to ask them.
There are at least two audio tracks in the new Incredibles trailer. The first is from the Propellerheads' version of the "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" theme -- awesome track, over nine minutes long.
I've been downloading/viewing trailers online for years now, and aside from the prerequisite Quicktime format, I have not had to download anything. Why now must I download iTunes to view the "Incredisize" trailer?
You can upgrade to as high as version 2.66.1, and the new pricing scheme won't affect your Movable Type site. That's what we're doing at Polstate.com.
By the way, shameless plug:
Polstate.com is the Political State Report, a web site held together by contributors from each state (US) who report on grassroots and statewide political news, especially when relevant to local and state elections. We offer a different flavor of political news, distinct from most other blogs and news sites that focus on the Presidency, war on terror, and national economy.
What gangster can't swim? We need to be able to swim, at least for a short while. Swim for as long as you can sprint, and when your energy runs low, you swim slower and slowly lose health. This allows you a short amount of time in the water... What's so tough about this?
Considering the whole of spacetime as a single unit, with our perception limited to only one piece of it at a time, it occurs to me that perhaps everything in both our future and past exists all at once; we're just sliding down a scale as the next section is revealed to us.
That said, wouldn't it make sense that the world's fastest computer is among the very last "super" computers built, many years (centuries? millennia?) in our future (if you want to call it that)? No computer we build today could possibly ever be the world's fastest unless the world cease's to be.
Besides, according to Douglas Adams, Earth itself is the world's fastest computer, designed by Deep Thought.
[...] "Open source software, also described as free software..." [...]
Whether we're talking about free speech or free lunch, "open source" does not necessarily mean "free" in either sense. Both the open source and free software movements have lengthy explanations for this.
Limited suspension, I said. A slippery slope develops, naturally, but I never said people should be locked away and the key thrown away over it. Take prisoners, get to the bottom of it, move on.
A significant problem with our legal system, and every other formal system in this country, is the amount of bureaucracy each task must go through. Simplify the process, design it more intelligently, run everything more efficiently, and a limited denial of some rights we used to hold dear will be an acceptable price to pay for actually getting it right.
Slashdot Mirror
Brainwashing and ignorance are two very different things. As I said, no one else has control over our minds. That's your illusion, not mine.
This is funny to me because, while Moore's documentary may have generated those warm, goose-bumpy feelings this weekend in enough of the judges to win Fahrenheit 911 the Palme D'Or, I'm betting than 20 (or even 10 or 5) years from now, Moore's film will be to political documentaries what Hackers now is to hacking movies, or what Doc Brown's pronunciation of "1.21 gigawatts!" sounds like today.
Sure, it looked and sounded good at the time, but now it's so dated and so wrong on so many levels that one can't help but treat it as a comedy! But there's still a lot for time to tell on Moore's latest film, so we'll see.
First, I can almost guarantee you that at least 150 million Americans don't even care one way or the other:
Over 80 million are under age 20.
Over 35 million are over age 65.
Now being under 20 or over 65 does not mean you don't care, but most Americans in those age groups have other agendas that have nothing to do with global politics. Then consider that about 1/5 of the population that are neither minors nor seniors (ages 20-64, over 166 million) aren't even registered to vote, and millions more are registered but don't vote or care, and we're lucky extremely lucky if 150 million Americans are paying attention to anything Michael Moore or his supporters or opposition have to say.
So then you consider that this country is roughly split among those that actually have opinions on the matter, and you're lucky if you've got 60 million -- 20% of the population -- on either side (why not 150/2=75 million? because a number of us don't choose sides).
Finally, to the brainwashing... That works both ways. Those who disagree with me are just as brainwashed by whatever they think as I am brainwashed by whatever I think. More to the point: there is no such thing as "brainwashing". We simply perceive the facts as they are delivered to us, and we make our own judgments based on our own personal values and reasons.
Disagreeing or agreeing with any president's administration provides no one with any higher moral authority. Our political ideals have no effect on our qualifications as American citizens.
I assume that you'll be mouthing off again in this forum or another quite soon, so do everyone involved a favor and have your facts straight before you start slinging your uninformed opinion around.
Hopefully this movie will open in the US and will cause some people to open their eyes.
[...]
...and hopefully people will realize what an anti-American, unpatriotic worm Michael Moore is. But notice that I don't call him worthless, because he certainly serves a valuable purpose:
Whether you agree or disagree with the message he attempts to deliver, he alerts us to the fact that we are our own worst enemy. Of course, those of us who disagree with Moore simply think he should fight his war from another continent... which, I suppose, is what he's doing at Cannes.
Don't get me wrong. I think Moore's mind is a brilliant one. We do need people like Michael Moore to stand up for what they believe even when it goes against the current administration, because it is that freedom which makes our country so great. But I respectfully disagree with his motives and methods, and I believe he (like everyone else among us, including myself) is ignorant of the details that generate the interpretive big picture that he sees.
That is, the intricate, day-to-day, small-ball details -- the ones that add up to what everyone sees, hears, and reads in the mass media -- will never be known by anyone, because no one among us comes close enough to omniscience or omnipresence to possibly have any idea what motives drive the events of the world. We only know what we perceive, and from that we drive our opinions outword... despite that we have little basis in fact for them.
If not for the computer and the internet, it would seem like only yesterday. But because the computer and the internet are such integral parts of so many of our lives these days, we are all vaguely reminiscent (or not) of a time long ago when the browser war was between one evil and another, and countless users sought to install only one or the other. Or, at least we had a favorite.
Now there are several other options, still including MSIE and (sort of) Netscape, but more importantly also including Mozilla (Netscape's hipper cousin) and Opera. Then you consider other platforms, and there are viable alternatives like Safari and Konqueror, plus others that I'm sure I'm leaving out.
My guess is that more than 95% of the people who read this have at least two web browsers installed, and everyone probably has a preference between the two or among the several. I actually use several, because not only do I use MSIE, Mozilla (Firefox!), and Opera in Windows XP, but I also use Konqueror in Linux and Safari and IE5 on the Macs at the office (mostly for web development testing purposes).
This is a very small, badly dithered picture of the web browser timeline. It is not meant to be detailed or even all that accurate. Instead, it is only meant to serve as a reminder of a less chaotic but equally fun time, and as a bridge between our simpler past and brighter present. Well, at least with regard to web browsers.
I work in tech support for a small college, and this is a story I actually just heard today about one of my co-workers. It happened earlier this week.
She was called into the President's office because they were upgrading his computer, probably involving an upgraded OS. I don't know those details because they weren't important. What's important is that the process involved a new keyboard, and so the techie had put the keyboard on the desk and was trying to get through whatever process she was following on screen with the mouse.
At some point she determined that she needed to restart the computer, so she pressed Ctrl-Alt-Del. Nothing happened. She pressed it again and complained that nothing was happening, and nothing continued to happen. The President's secretary looked on patiently and discovered the problem -- the keyboard was not plugged in. So the secretary softly explained that the keyboard wasn't plugged in, and the techie snapped (in a nice but frustrated way), "no, it should still work!" (WTF?)
You can imagine that it wasn't long before the secretary had her convinced that a keyboard will not affect anything on any computer that it isn't connected to.
...is Ben Sheets' near-perfect game just two days earlier against the same Braves team. Such a miserable offensive performance by the Braves against Sheets should have left them eager to pound the ball against Johnson on Tuesday. And, in comparison, they did.
Sunday: Ben Sheets of the Milwaukee Brewers allowed three hits and struck out 18 Braves in a complete game win over Atlanta. With 18 strikeouts, one walk, three hits, and one sacrifice bunt, Braves batters retreated to the dugout without putting the ball in play or reaching base 18 out of 31 times (58.1%).
Tuesday: Randy Johnson's game may have been perfect (meaning no Braves reached first base safely for any reason), but his 13 strikeouts mean that the Braves retreated to the dugout without putting the ball in play or reaching base only 13 out of 27 times (48.1%).
So while Johnson's game is defined as "perfect" by MLB, it was slightly more reliant on the Braves hitting the ball directly at the defense, while Sheets' near-perfection was betrayed by a couple of lucky hits.
So the subject of this comment is misleading. Sheets was actually more dominant, but he won't be remembered in the record books for his more dominant performance because the ball managed to find holes in the Brewers' defense. Then again, Sheets walked a batter, so no perfection for him!
Either way, this is not good for team looking for it's 13th consecutive division title (not counting the unfinished 1994 season). Over two days, they managed three hits in 56 at-bats (58 total times at the plate). Ouch!
"There's no crying in baseball."
Even with 27 strikeouts, the catcher would have to catch 27 third strikes, not to mention the trajectories of each pitch and of each swing allowing 27 consecutive outs by the Arizona defense.
I also read that Amerigo Vespucci is not the father of America. Kthxbye.
Bradbury's next book... seems to set an overall vision that this is an in-between generation caught between [sic] the brutal and primitive and the advanced.
When discussing two things, use "between". When discussing three or more things, use "among". And when discussing my tendency to place periods and commas outside the quotation marks, acknowledge my support for consistency with the colon and semicolon. But I digress.
How can you be "between" three things? Between specifically means that there is object A on one side and object B on the other. If there are more than three sides, or other objects on top and bottom or in front and back, then you are among said objects, not between them.
Before someone else lashes out at Microsoft for analagous reasons, I don't think such an analogy would be entirely fair. While it is a server admin's responsibility to secure his/her server(s), and it is a software company's responsibility to secure its operating system(s), the tasks are not the same or even on the same level.
:-P
But to support cnf's point, I'm neither a server admin nor a software developer for Microsoft, and I'm watching South Park so I can't concentrate on explaining why it's not a good analogy... But I thought it was a good idea.
A few hours ago, anyway. Heh.
Lots of firms continue to secure exploits with minor updates to old versions (but not too old) while focusing support on the newer product. As for MT, you'd have to ask them.
There are at least two audio tracks in the new Incredibles trailer. The first is from the Propellerheads' version of the "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" theme -- awesome track, over nine minutes long.
Anyone know the second?
I've been downloading/viewing trailers online for years now, and aside from the prerequisite Quicktime format, I have not had to download anything. Why now must I download iTunes to view the "Incredisize" trailer?
You can upgrade to as high as version 2.66.1, and the new pricing scheme won't affect your Movable Type site. That's what we're doing at Polstate.com.
By the way, shameless plug:
Polstate.com is the Political State Report, a web site held together by contributors from each state (US) who report on grassroots and statewide political news, especially when relevant to local and state elections. We offer a different flavor of political news, distinct from most other blogs and news sites that focus on the Presidency, war on terror, and national economy.
The RIAA is lying because, like most corporations, it is only interested in the preservation of its profits.
What gangster can't swim? We need to be able to swim, at least for a short while. Swim for as long as you can sprint, and when your energy runs low, you swim slower and slowly lose health. This allows you a short amount of time in the water... What's so tough about this?
I'll listen to anything Uma Thurman says.
*drool*
Warning: abstract thoughts ahead.
Considering the whole of spacetime as a single unit, with our perception limited to only one piece of it at a time, it occurs to me that perhaps everything in both our future and past exists all at once; we're just sliding down a scale as the next section is revealed to us.
That said, wouldn't it make sense that the world's fastest computer is among the very last "super" computers built, many years (centuries? millennia?) in our future (if you want to call it that)? No computer we build today could possibly ever be the world's fastest unless the world cease's to be.
Besides, according to Douglas Adams, Earth itself is the world's fastest computer, designed by Deep Thought.
[...] "Open source software, also described as free software..." [...]
Whether we're talking about free speech or free lunch, "open source" does not necessarily mean "free" in either sense. Both the open source and free software movements have lengthy explanations for this.
What will you do when Texas messes with you jackass? hmm?
I'll have my hit squad come after your sorry ass, just to make me feel better. Then I'll mess with Texas.
Limited suspension, I said. A slippery slope develops, naturally, but I never said people should be locked away and the key thrown away over it. Take prisoners, get to the bottom of it, move on.
A significant problem with our legal system, and every other formal system in this country, is the amount of bureaucracy each task must go through. Simplify the process, design it more intelligently, run everything more efficiently, and a limited denial of some rights we used to hold dear will be an acceptable price to pay for actually getting it right.