I looked up a few wikipedia pages on corporations and they had the company logos on them.
I think wikipedia succeeds _despite_ the efforts of the admins.
Maybe one day the admins will have the wikipedia exactly the way they want it to be. All the nonfree pictures removed, all the "not notable" information/pages deleted.
And that's the day everyone else starts using something else.
As a Christian I actually find "fucking hell" less offensive, and by the way Jesus is also regarded as a prophet amongst muslims. It seems a violent and vocal minority of muslims appear to take offense at almost anything, almost anything can be regarded as insulting their religion, when in fact they're the ones ruining the reputation of their religion the most.
I actually don't have a big problem with people saying fuck or using other expletives. To me there's a use for expletives. For example, if you were walking about and minding your own business, then some vehicle veered off the road and took your arm off. Now that's a perfectly valid time to say fuck or whatever.
I just find it silly when people use it as punctuation. It's like reviewers giving 100% or 0% ratings in all of their reviews. Amusing for a few seconds at most.
I hope you recognize the names. Compare by number of authors (and note that one Burroughs work had "sceptical" maybe someone else changed it - the rest had "skeptical").
I am not an American and I hope my standard of English never "improves" to the US standards, or to Firefox's dismal standards.
They deserve the government they didn't vote in. Because they could have voted them OUT, you've done the math yourself.
I find it hard to believe that most of the 40-50% you mention are convicted felons[1]. So how are the 80+ million disenfranchised?
If 62 million vote for the Repubs, 59 million for Dems, and say 80+ million vote for Party X, you think it'll be business as usual for the R and Ds?
And even if the 80 million actually vote but don't vote for the same parties or they just "spoilt" their votes as protest, after the results come out even if the R or Ds win do you really think the Two Parties can't do math? I bet they'll start paying a bit more attention to the complaints of the people you call "disenfranchised". So would those 80 million votes be wasted votes?
As it is the 80+ million don't count (can they even count or do elementary math?) They don't even "rise up" to vote.
If they don't "rise up" to vote and think that gives them the right to "rise up" to shoot people just because they're pissed off with the elected government, they themselves should be shot.
So what about them? My sympathies go to the ex-felons who can't vote. But not to the millions who can.
[1] I disagree with the USA's common (per state?) policy of disenfranchising convicted felons. You should only take away the right to vote from say the treasonous people who subvert the election system for example the bunch in Diebold, and then only temporarily till they serve their time or somehow come alive after being executed for treason;).
To me it's more a sign of the bosses at the top not bothering.
Because if you get complaints about missing stuff, you look at the video tapes. If you don't want the luggage owners to watch your staff (there might be good reasons for that - logistics, speed etc), you can always have video cameras watch your staff, the honest ones might actually want to be watched while opening bags so that they can prove they didn't steal stuff. And if you get blown to pieces whilst opening a bag, it'll be good for others to know whose bag it was, and other details.
If the cameras don't catch the culprit (they're not everywhere in the path), you rotate your staff and if the stats change, you can start to narrow down who might be crooked. Of course the crooks could realize you're getting close and steal less (or totally stop), that of course does reduce the problem.
Same goes for finding out who has been taking bribes or doing naughty stuff.
So it'll be going against the People's will if some misguided patriot started a revolution or shot people.
Or is it really a case of lots of people not voting for The Other Parties just because they all think it will be a wasted vote? If that's so, maybe they should do some polling so they can figure out how many would actually vote for "Some Other Party" assuming they're not playing the "game theory"/"voting game" stuff.
But I honestly doubt it, judging even from the remarks on Slashdot. Most are like the Pro Wrestling Team supporters.
I'm sceptical that it'll work that well. I do think it'll be more interesting than listening to people using fuck as punctuation - which is to me is dismally boring.
Question: how will it cope with people using stuff like "Jesus/G-d" as an expletive? That sort of thing is offensive to many people too.
Imagine if people started using Muhammad as an expletive. You can't just censor every mention of Muhammad because that will get you in big trouble too;).
It'll be interesting if the system can tell from the context.
How would it deal with "I helped my uncle jack off his horse" vs "I helped my Uncle Jack off his horse?";).
They talk about improving efficiencies, 1.6X etc, but ok so what got improved?
What interesting things did they learn? What were they doing wrong before and what did they change?
I don't see any hard facts or much useful info.
Car analogy: it's like Ford says we've improved engine efficiencies 1.6X.
But you don't even get new MPG figures, no comparison of 0-60 before and after (to show whether there was any impact on performance), no torque curves, not even a mention of "high intensity electric fields reducing viscosity".
So to me it's as good as some PR firm bullshit and should not be on Slashdot.
Heck it's about as much useful news as programmer productivity improving because Slashdot went down for a day.
"As much as I hate DRM, if you didn't read the fine-print then that's your own fault."
So I can write malware as long as it has fine-print that's similarly as accessible?
I'm sure some malware authors will be very happy if that's all it takes to make it legal.
Given the amount of people who click-through stuff (just to play that cool flash game etc), there'll be tons of legally installed rootkits and spam zombies:).
If I were that evil, I'd be doing that then.
Did Sony's CDs come with fine print? And did the fine print mention what would be impaired? If it did not then who went to jail for 12-18 months as a result of the Sony CD malware?
Just scaring people isn't enough. You also have to convince people that they have a good chance of living if they surrender/submit.
That's how Saddam (and other dictators) stayed in power.
Most people were convinced they could go on with their daily lives and not be killed, just so long as they followed a few rules (though terrible they may be). And most indeed were not killed.
If the people are convinced you are going to kill them anyway, it starts to be a big problem.
"Follow the terrible rules and you will live" vs "there are no rules, anybody might try to kill you". Most people will pick the former.
And yes seize all their weapons. Any Government (whether a Dictatorship or a Democracy or whatever) that wants to stay in power has to maintain a strict monopoly on violence. If Saddam let random mob leaders go about shooting people, he wouldn't have stayed in power for long. Only Saddam's bunch were allowed to go about shooting people.
Rome was pretty good at maintaining some sense of "law and order" too. In fact perhaps even more so than most of the leaders Rome defeated.
Yeah so that you have a chance to be the Tyrant:).
Violent revolutions tend to become dictatorships. Because the bunch capable of and willing to exert the most violence will end up at the top.
That is why Karl Marx (and Engels) encouragement of violence was a fatal "design flaw" in their "guide to starting Communism".
Only in a few rare cases has a violent revolution immediately resulted in a peaceful democracy. Only a very few would hand over power once they have seized it.
I strongly recommend sticking to peaceful means. You might enjoy being a Tyrant a bit too much for your own good.;)
OK you'd probably resist the temptation, but maybe not your "friend" who kills you.
> If they were just given guns and told "here, go nuts at whatever moves" no one would be able to stop them.
That would be a very bad move. If you piss off the civilians too much, you end up with everybody _actively_ against you.
As Sun Tzu has said you must always give the enemy an escape route. People who think they're going to die anyway can be very very dangerous. You will need more bullets to stop a "dead man" than you need to stop someone who was hoping to live after trying to kill you.
And if you nuke or carpet bomb the entire country, you're going to lose access to lots of oil, not just from Iraq but from the rest of OPEC.
Lastly, there might be a fair bit of rebellion in the ranks with those orders.
The way I see it, IBM is in the business of providing so much choice to customers that they need expensive IBM consultants to help them decide.
Microsoft will sell you the Microsoft Way of doing things.
Whereas IBM will say "You want a Active Directory server, a Z mainframe with RedHat, OpenSolaris and Oracle, Cisco switches, and there must be full J2EE buzzword compliance? No problem, just sign here".
Careful to make sure they will actually do the job though, and not outsource it to a bunch of fresh PHP coders in India;).
Seems a waste of money since different parents have different ideas of what is appropriate for their children.
I think it would be better to spend 125 million instead on teaching parents how to domesticate/train their children properly.
Not saying they should all train their kids to be exactly the same , but if you look at the training programs for dogs, even if you're training a dog to do different things, the concepts and methods are pretty much the same, even if the desired results and objectives might be different.
And too many parents are clueless on the basic concepts.
Maybe they should force parents to pass a basic parenting test before they are allowed to have children. If they have children without a license then they get fined.
Slashdot Mirror
"An un-elected upper chamber "
:).
So you mean the system in Iran isn't as bad as the US Gov is painting it?
Google it
I looked up a few wikipedia pages on corporations and they had the company logos on them.
I think wikipedia succeeds _despite_ the efforts of the admins.
Maybe one day the admins will have the wikipedia exactly the way they want it to be. All the nonfree pictures removed, all the "not notable" information/pages deleted.
And that's the day everyone else starts using something else.
The current wikipedia page for IBM has the IBM logo on it, same for RedHat etc.
So should those be removed for not being under a free license?
The Wikipedia admins are just being a bunch of wankers as usual.
WikiWankers (I guess that's probably someone's trademark or copyrighted phrase).
As a Christian I actually find "fucking hell" less offensive, and by the way Jesus is also regarded as a prophet amongst muslims. It seems a violent and vocal minority of muslims appear to take offense at almost anything, almost anything can be regarded as insulting their religion, when in fact they're the ones ruining the reputation of their religion the most.
I actually don't have a big problem with people saying fuck or using other expletives. To me there's a use for expletives. For example, if you were walking about and minding your own business, then some vehicle veered off the road and took your arm off. Now that's a perfectly valid time to say fuck or whatever.
I just find it silly when people use it as punctuation. It's like reviewers giving 100% or 0% ratings in all of their reviews. Amusing for a few seconds at most.
AFAIK sceptical is _a_ correct spelling. Where's your evidence that it is wrong?
The dictionaries I checked list sceptical as a correct spelling.
As for popular usage more are listed as using sceptical than skeptical here:
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/_/search/Search.aspx?By=0&SearchBy=4&Word=sceptical
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/_/search/Search.aspx?By=0&SearchBy=4&Word=skeptical
I hope you recognize the names. Compare by number of authors (and note that one Burroughs work had "sceptical" maybe someone else changed it - the rest had "skeptical").
I am not an American and I hope my standard of English never "improves" to the US standards, or to Firefox's dismal standards.
Yes what about them?
;).
They deserve the government they didn't vote in. Because they could have voted them OUT, you've done the math yourself.
I find it hard to believe that most of the 40-50% you mention are convicted felons[1]. So how are the 80+ million disenfranchised?
If 62 million vote for the Repubs, 59 million for Dems, and say 80+ million vote for Party X, you think it'll be business as usual for the R and Ds?
And even if the 80 million actually vote but don't vote for the same parties or they just "spoilt" their votes as protest, after the results come out even if the R or Ds win do you really think the Two Parties can't do math? I bet they'll start paying a bit more attention to the complaints of the people you call "disenfranchised". So would those 80 million votes be wasted votes?
As it is the 80+ million don't count (can they even count or do elementary math?) They don't even "rise up" to vote.
If they don't "rise up" to vote and think that gives them the right to "rise up" to shoot people just because they're pissed off with the elected government, they themselves should be shot.
So what about them? My sympathies go to the ex-felons who can't vote. But not to the millions who can.
[1] I disagree with the USA's common (per state?) policy of disenfranchising convicted felons. You should only take away the right to vote from say the treasonous people who subvert the election system for example the bunch in Diebold, and then only temporarily till they serve their time or somehow come alive after being executed for treason
To me it's more a sign of the bosses at the top not bothering.
Because if you get complaints about missing stuff, you look at the video tapes. If you don't want the luggage owners to watch your staff (there might be good reasons for that - logistics, speed etc), you can always have video cameras watch your staff, the honest ones might actually want to be watched while opening bags so that they can prove they didn't steal stuff. And if you get blown to pieces whilst opening a bag, it'll be good for others to know whose bag it was, and other details.
If the cameras don't catch the culprit (they're not everywhere in the path), you rotate your staff and if the stats change, you can start to narrow down who might be crooked. Of course the crooks could realize you're getting close and steal less (or totally stop), that of course does reduce the problem.
Same goes for finding out who has been taking bribes or doing naughty stuff.
Why should they rise up?
If they were genuinely upset, they should start voting for some other parties.
I'd say most appear satisfied with either one of the Two Parties given that 99% of them voted for one of the Two in 2004 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._presidential_election,_2004 )
So it'll be going against the People's will if some misguided patriot started a revolution or shot people.
Or is it really a case of lots of people not voting for The Other Parties just because they all think it will be a wasted vote? If that's so, maybe they should do some polling so they can figure out how many would actually vote for "Some Other Party" assuming they're not playing the "game theory"/"voting game" stuff.
But I honestly doubt it, judging even from the remarks on Slashdot. Most are like the Pro Wrestling Team supporters.
Calm down, it's still only October.
Then again maybe the TSA employee felt it was Christmas everyday. Hohoho.
I'm sceptical that it'll work that well. I do think it'll be more interesting than listening to people using fuck as punctuation - which is to me is dismally boring.
;).
;).
Question: how will it cope with people using stuff like "Jesus/G-d" as an expletive? That sort of thing is offensive to many people too.
Imagine if people started using Muhammad as an expletive. You can't just censor every mention of Muhammad because that will get you in big trouble too
It'll be interesting if the system can tell from the context.
How would it deal with "I helped my uncle jack off his horse" vs "I helped my Uncle Jack off his horse?"
They talk about improving efficiencies, 1.6X etc, but ok so what got improved?
What interesting things did they learn? What were they doing wrong before and what did they change?
I don't see any hard facts or much useful info.
Car analogy: it's like Ford says we've improved engine efficiencies 1.6X.
But you don't even get new MPG figures, no comparison of 0-60 before and after (to show whether there was any impact on performance), no torque curves, not even a mention of "high intensity electric fields reducing viscosity".
So to me it's as good as some PR firm bullshit and should not be on Slashdot.
Heck it's about as much useful news as programmer productivity improving because Slashdot went down for a day.
"As much as I hate DRM, if you didn't read the fine-print then that's your own fault."
:).
So I can write malware as long as it has fine-print that's similarly as accessible?
I'm sure some malware authors will be very happy if that's all it takes to make it legal.
Given the amount of people who click-through stuff (just to play that cool flash game etc), there'll be tons of legally installed rootkits and spam zombies
If I were that evil, I'd be doing that then.
Did Sony's CDs come with fine print? And did the fine print mention what would be impaired? If it did not then who went to jail for 12-18 months as a result of the Sony CD malware?
"Except Apple, we couldn't stop the horrible taste coming out of their mouths"
:).
Workaround - stop kissing them.
Just because some people say Apple has good taste doesn't mean they taste good
Yep no tears for him.
But what counts as "Unauthorized impairment of a protected computer"?
DRM that stops your OS or drives from working properly?
Have you seen The Mother of all Demos?
http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html
How far we've advanced and how little we have advanced, after 40 years.
There was so much more that could have been done. Thing is the driving need to do it is not there.
> What on Earth is "hand-coded" C? And why is it better than... wait... what other kind of C is there?
There are also "Foot in Mouth" C, "Head up Arse" C and so on.
http://thedailywtf.com/ might have some examples.
Anyone actually read the review?
I'm curious on how much better it really is.
e.g. latency, maximum tracking speed (many optical mice lose track if you move them really quick - and that sucks for many games).
As for not being able to work on reflective surfaces, there are already cheaper "laser" mice that work on reflective surfaces.
Maybe I should read the review - but I hate reviews that are split across tons of pages and turn out to be useless (e.g. PR/Ad company crap).
Just scaring people isn't enough. You also have to convince people that they have a good chance of living if they surrender/submit.
That's how Saddam (and other dictators) stayed in power.
Most people were convinced they could go on with their daily lives and not be killed, just so long as they followed a few rules (though terrible they may be). And most indeed were not killed.
If the people are convinced you are going to kill them anyway, it starts to be a big problem.
"Follow the terrible rules and you will live" vs "there are no rules, anybody might try to kill you". Most people will pick the former.
And yes seize all their weapons. Any Government (whether a Dictatorship or a Democracy or whatever) that wants to stay in power has to maintain a strict monopoly on violence. If Saddam let random mob leaders go about shooting people, he wouldn't have stayed in power for long. Only Saddam's bunch were allowed to go about shooting people.
Rome was pretty good at maintaining some sense of "law and order" too. In fact perhaps even more so than most of the leaders Rome defeated.
Yeah so that you have a chance to be the Tyrant :).
;)
Violent revolutions tend to become dictatorships. Because the bunch capable of and willing to exert the most violence will end up at the top.
That is why Karl Marx (and Engels) encouragement of violence was a fatal "design flaw" in their "guide to starting Communism".
Only in a few rare cases has a violent revolution immediately resulted in a peaceful democracy. Only a very few would hand over power once they have seized it.
I strongly recommend sticking to peaceful means. You might enjoy being a Tyrant a bit too much for your own good.
OK you'd probably resist the temptation, but maybe not your "friend" who kills you.
> If they were just given guns and told "here, go nuts at whatever moves" no one would be able to stop them.
That would be a very bad move. If you piss off the civilians too much, you end up with everybody _actively_ against you.
As Sun Tzu has said you must always give the enemy an escape route. People who think they're going to die anyway can be very very dangerous. You will need more bullets to stop a "dead man" than you need to stop someone who was hoping to live after trying to kill you.
And if you nuke or carpet bomb the entire country, you're going to lose access to lots of oil, not just from Iraq but from the rest of OPEC.
Lastly, there might be a fair bit of rebellion in the ranks with those orders.
Are you trying to figure out whether Jinx paid you a fair rate? ;)
The way I see it, IBM is in the business of providing so much choice to customers that they need expensive IBM consultants to help them decide.
;).
Microsoft will sell you the Microsoft Way of doing things.
Whereas IBM will say "You want a Active Directory server, a Z mainframe with RedHat, OpenSolaris and Oracle, Cisco switches, and there must be full J2EE buzzword compliance? No problem, just sign here".
Careful to make sure they will actually do the job though, and not outsource it to a bunch of fresh PHP coders in India
I've heard rumours that apparently if you even sneeze and say excuse me, your Japanese neighbour will say "It's ok, I didn't hear that".
:)
So no problem there.
I'm curious - how do you fix a punctured wheel on an Aptera?
Seems a waste of money since different parents have different ideas of what is appropriate for their children.
I think it would be better to spend 125 million instead on teaching parents how to domesticate/train their children properly.
Not saying they should all train their kids to be exactly the same , but if you look at the training programs for dogs, even if you're training a dog to do different things, the concepts and methods are pretty much the same, even if the desired results and objectives might be different.
And too many parents are clueless on the basic concepts.
Maybe they should force parents to pass a basic parenting test before they are allowed to have children. If they have children without a license then they get fined.