Your experience with military people is just so - limited - I guess.
Some of the meekest, most respectful people you ever meet will be veterans. Ehh. What can I say? You're probably not even aware that some of your own co-workers are veterans, because they don't flaunt it in your face.
HUH??? You've never worked for a micromanager? I've worked for them several times in my life, and in fact, I work with one right now. (not my direct supervisor, or we would be butting heads every day) I've found that the military rewarded self initiative far more often than the civilian sector. In fact, quarterly evaluations in the military cover the subject of initiative and self motivation. Many, many management people in the civilian world have no concept of those qualities. In fact, I would say that the manager who understands those qualities and takes full advantage of them is a rare find.
The US Navy, and the rest of the military, would disagree with you. Uncle Sam taught me that few, if any, people are "born leaders". More, I was taught that "born leaders" seldom fit into a cohesive unit, being more interested in their own goals, than the unit or corporate goals. Leadership and/or management are learned skills, and the military spends a great deal of effort teaching men and women to be effective leaders and managers. And, yes, you can test for leadership skills. Put a person into a real life complex stressful situation, and see how they perform. Oh, wait - you meant a test that you can sit down, and fill in the answers with a pencil? No, not really - but it might be a start if you bother to ask your victim or subject if he can even define leadership or management. I've often found that merely defining a problem or a goal gets me a long way toward solving the problem.
Freebie for you: My leadership training defined leadership as the art of motivating people to do what they should be doing anyway. Does that help you at all?
BTW - my training wasn't strictly military. The courses that I took were jointly developed by the US Navy and Princeton University. Everything that I learned is readily available to people in the corporate and industrial world, if they bother to look for it.
Well - we differ on our view of government, I suppose. Have you looked at how ACTA is being handled by the US government? Until recently, even the existence of the discussions was secret, and the content of those discussions top secret. Who is discussing, anyway? RIAA, MPAA, and other alphabet soup people - not people, or civil liberties organizations, or even constitutional lawyers, or lawyers of any other type. (sure, there are lots of lawyers involved, each representing the interests of one corporation, or group of corporations or another) There aren't even any lawyers from academia involved. It's all corporate run.
But, you bring up a way of looking at things that I had neglected. The government has been pretty nearly insolvent for most of my life (over 5 decades now) so they need SOME way of making money. Doesn't matter how wrong and immoral the methods might be - they need to make money to avoid bankruptcy.
Well, I'm prepared to do my part. I'll get in line, right behind the Baby Boomers to get my euthanasia shot, so that the Social Security pyramid scheme doesn't have to pay me anything. Where's that line again?
You seem to assume that real broadband is available to everyone, everywhere. If my operating system and data files all fit on the same 40MB hard drive that I was using ~1995, then yes, I could make backups to onlne servers. But, for me to make a backup of my real operating system and data files today would take several days. Even if I used a backup solution that only backs things up that have actually changed, I'm still looking at several hours upload time each week.
Besides which - call me paranoid, but I'm not willing to make backups to servers owned by strangers who may or may not be honest, and may or may not have my best interests at heart. I happen to like Google, but I wouldn't even back up all my data to a Google server!
Translation glitch, or reading comprehension problem? I can't decide. Maybe if I were multi-lingual, I would be better equipped to deal with a post that looks stupid. Damn, why couldn't I have gotten the multi-lingual gene, instead of the good-looks gene?
Sorry, but that's not quite good enough a distinction. Remember - most of the educational system in the US of A has been promoting Microsoft products for almost two decades now. Kids - my own, for instance, have grown up being indoctrinated to accept the idea that Microsoft and computing are synonymous. One of my own sons has swallowed that, hook, line, and sinker. Another son sees things much like I do - almost everything that Microsoft can do, can be done better by a *nix machine, usally faster, and more securely.
Now, the son who likes Microsoft isn't a shill - but he would make posts and comments similar to a lot of those found here on slashdot, posted by the shills. The kid is normal (or, almost normal anyway) but he has his opinions.
There isn't a Blu-Ray device in my house. Or at work. I don't own one, and I'm not going to own one. It's really pretty simple. If Sony couldn't sell Blu-Ray to chumps, they would stop producing them. As long as chumps are willing to pay for Blu-Ray, Sony will keep producing them!
Collectively, we are in love with assholes. That murderer, Ted Kennedy, died in office. As sick a pig as he was, he couldn't be run out of office. Time and time again, the people of MessyTwoShits re-elected him as their representative. Go figure.
Because Janet Napolitano has little interest in terrorism. She has been bought and paid for by Corporate America, to keep the sheeples in line with their vision of the future. Napolitano has prostituted herself and her agency to Big Business. She, and Big Business got around the constitution by claiming that pirated music and software are "counterfeit" music and software. Somehow, in their perversion of the concept of justice, the counterfeiting of music is on a par with counterfeiting United States currency.
I once thought that all this nonsense was the brainchild of the neoconservatives - but today's "liberal" party keeps right on with the rape of the United States constitution. Wait til the final version of ACTA comes out. It will most likely give ICE the authority to exterminate entire family trees based on a suspicion that members of the family have counterfeited a music track.
Rat's ass. TOS's are very often stupid and overly restrictive. Some idiot typed up what he thought was a good TOS, a committee was appointed to approve it, and this is what you get. If my wife takes a photo of our grandchild, and I post it - the photo will be taken down because it's not my own work? How freaking STUPID!!!
Nothing on the intartubez is ever lost - or that's what I've heard. I'll bet some geek or another saved all the good stuff, and he's busy putting it back up somewhere. If I were interested enough, I'd Google around - alas - I only read the summary to get an idea what the censorship was about. As usual, it's a story about corporate douches lacking balls. Phht. Nothing new here.
You're right - everyone notices advertisements. That's why I have a massive HOSTS list, and use AdBlock Plus, along with several other tools. I don't see very many advertisements on the internet. And, because I'm such a disagreeable asshole, those advertisements that I DO SEE help to ensure that I DO NOT buy those products. So, yes, you're right, Mr. Anonymous Coward.
From my point of view, every single time that Windows is brought to it's knees with spyware, trojans, viruses, or whatever malware - then Microsoft has failed.
I'll probably come close to agreeing with you in one respect. Many of Windows "failures" are probably due to third party software failures. But, I hold Microsoft entirely responsible for their shoddy security and permissions scheme. Someone will respond with "blah blah market share blah blah" - to which I would respond, "prove that little bit of nonsense". If Microsoft could and would adopt the restrictive security and permissions of any *nix, then Windows would fail far less often. Not only that, but they would save businesses and the average Joe Sixpack customer billions of dollars annually because they wouldn't have to pay for Norton, McAfee, or whatever other poor excuse for a security system.
Nothing extra, nothing hidden? Geezus, you're young and naive. Nothing extra? How about requiring your installation of windows to "validate" before allowing updates? Nothing hidden? How about that ancient bit of code that forbade Windows from installing on any version of DOS other than MSDOS?
Anyone who cared to enumerate all the little "extra" and "hidden" shit in Windows could go on for hours - maybe even days.
Nothing extra, nothing hidden. Somehow, you've confused Windows with open source software, Bubba.
How relevant is that particular copyright, really? I mean - everything in Unix has been transported to other operating systems, right? Linux, BSD, Mac's OS's - and God knows what else. What is left to fight over? Yeah, I know, Linux has been pointed at, with people muttering about stolen code. But, audit after audit turns up no copied code.
What does Unix have, that a person can't get from Linux, or BSD, or OSX? The license from ONE of those is going to meet anyone's requirements. Let the legal beagles argue over this, along with all the other pointless stuff the wrangle over. It really doesn't matter to me, one bit.
Yeah - you can block something. I'm not seeing what I can block, so much as I'm seeing what Google can block. (it's Google that's doing the blocking, after all) I've played with a few things, and it's surprising how much more web there is out there, that I can't see normally. For starters - go to Google labs, and download Namebench. Start up the graphical interface (or the CLI - whatever blows your skirt up) and select the box to "check for censorship".
Admittedly, MOST of the censorship isn't bad, but the net is indeed censored by Google and several other major DNS lookup providers.
This is just something for people to think about. After you've thought for a little bit, you might begin to wonder about censorship outside of the good ol' US of A. Personally, I wonder about China, Egypt, Libya - you know, all the places where the politicians might have something to lose if the populace really knows what's going on.
All of that from a guy who occasionally browses the "darkweb". A large percentage of what is available on the darkweb is truly disgusting - but a person can CHOOSE to look, or not.
Aside from that - I'm somewhat surprised that tools such as I2P haven't been used more by the various revolutionaries in the mideast.
Or, in this case, live by frivolous litigation, die by frivolous litigation. I hope they lose big time. Actually, I hope they lose several cases in a row, and just go belly up. Dirty rat bastards.
If you spent a hundred fortunes, feeding the homeless, clothing children, curing diseases, if you did ten thousand times what Mother Theresa has been credited with - BUT, your philosophy in life cause you to do something that a political party hates - you would still be EVIL!!! When you fail to embrace the ideology of any given party, or government, you will be painted evil, no matter how much good you may have accidentally done in your life.
Uh-huh. How many atheist scientists are you counting? Would the guy who said this be an atheist: "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."
You might be surprised if you researched how many scientists believe in some purpose, some design, some power in the universe, that we just can't comprehend. Some of them recognize that purpose, or power, as God, others not so - but many, many scientists believe SOMETHING more than they can see, and measure.
Heh. Did you read all the posts on here by atheists? They'll all tell you that we'd be better off without religion of any sort. So, it's also the definition of anti-religion nuts. Oh - don't bother countering that atheism is based on fact - you can't prove your point, I can't prove my point, and Omar can't prove his point either.
"Now, we can take out buried facilities with a couple of bunker busters."
Uhhhh - which "bunker busters" exactly? Dude - if your target is buried 100, 200, 500, even 1000 feet below the surface - you're not going to get it with "conventianal weapons". I think the "bunker busters" you refer to are actually tactical nukes.
Someone who happens to be on target. The mewling idiots complain about "religion" being a danger. And, within the past 100 years, we've seen that ATHEISTS rank among the cruelest, most inhuman monsters on earth.
It's "ideology" that is the real threat. Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, and Joseph Stalin never went to a Christian mass, and they certainly never took an Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. Ideology. Any time some sumbitch starts thinking that he knows what's good for the rest of humanity, we are in trouble, no matter his religion, or lack of.
Actually, you overplay your attempt to downplay HBGary Federal. While they never actually won any government contracts, they did have credibility with the US government, they did have access to a lot of "insider" stuff, and they were in negotiations with other contractors to provide some rather big-time stuff. They enjoyed the backing of their parent company, a major figure in the corporate world.
Note that I do NOT claim that thier credibility was justified, nor do I claim that their wares were anything more than vaporware - but they were much, much more than some upstart company operating on less than a shoestring in someone's garage with only 4 employees.
Slashdot Mirror
Your experience with military people is just so - limited - I guess.
Some of the meekest, most respectful people you ever meet will be veterans. Ehh. What can I say? You're probably not even aware that some of your own co-workers are veterans, because they don't flaunt it in your face.
HUH??? You've never worked for a micromanager? I've worked for them several times in my life, and in fact, I work with one right now. (not my direct supervisor, or we would be butting heads every day) I've found that the military rewarded self initiative far more often than the civilian sector. In fact, quarterly evaluations in the military cover the subject of initiative and self motivation. Many, many management people in the civilian world have no concept of those qualities. In fact, I would say that the manager who understands those qualities and takes full advantage of them is a rare find.
The US Navy, and the rest of the military, would disagree with you. Uncle Sam taught me that few, if any, people are "born leaders". More, I was taught that "born leaders" seldom fit into a cohesive unit, being more interested in their own goals, than the unit or corporate goals. Leadership and/or management are learned skills, and the military spends a great deal of effort teaching men and women to be effective leaders and managers. And, yes, you can test for leadership skills. Put a person into a real life complex stressful situation, and see how they perform. Oh, wait - you meant a test that you can sit down, and fill in the answers with a pencil? No, not really - but it might be a start if you bother to ask your victim or subject if he can even define leadership or management. I've often found that merely defining a problem or a goal gets me a long way toward solving the problem.
Freebie for you: My leadership training defined leadership as the art of motivating people to do what they should be doing anyway. Does that help you at all?
BTW - my training wasn't strictly military. The courses that I took were jointly developed by the US Navy and Princeton University. Everything that I learned is readily available to people in the corporate and industrial world, if they bother to look for it.
Well - we differ on our view of government, I suppose. Have you looked at how ACTA is being handled by the US government? Until recently, even the existence of the discussions was secret, and the content of those discussions top secret. Who is discussing, anyway? RIAA, MPAA, and other alphabet soup people - not people, or civil liberties organizations, or even constitutional lawyers, or lawyers of any other type. (sure, there are lots of lawyers involved, each representing the interests of one corporation, or group of corporations or another) There aren't even any lawyers from academia involved. It's all corporate run.
But, you bring up a way of looking at things that I had neglected. The government has been pretty nearly insolvent for most of my life (over 5 decades now) so they need SOME way of making money. Doesn't matter how wrong and immoral the methods might be - they need to make money to avoid bankruptcy.
Well, I'm prepared to do my part. I'll get in line, right behind the Baby Boomers to get my euthanasia shot, so that the Social Security pyramid scheme doesn't have to pay me anything. Where's that line again?
You seem to assume that real broadband is available to everyone, everywhere. If my operating system and data files all fit on the same 40MB hard drive that I was using ~1995, then yes, I could make backups to onlne servers. But, for me to make a backup of my real operating system and data files today would take several days. Even if I used a backup solution that only backs things up that have actually changed, I'm still looking at several hours upload time each week.
Besides which - call me paranoid, but I'm not willing to make backups to servers owned by strangers who may or may not be honest, and may or may not have my best interests at heart. I happen to like Google, but I wouldn't even back up all my data to a Google server!
Translation glitch, or reading comprehension problem? I can't decide. Maybe if I were multi-lingual, I would be better equipped to deal with a post that looks stupid. Damn, why couldn't I have gotten the multi-lingual gene, instead of the good-looks gene?
Sorry, but that's not quite good enough a distinction. Remember - most of the educational system in the US of A has been promoting Microsoft products for almost two decades now. Kids - my own, for instance, have grown up being indoctrinated to accept the idea that Microsoft and computing are synonymous. One of my own sons has swallowed that, hook, line, and sinker. Another son sees things much like I do - almost everything that Microsoft can do, can be done better by a *nix machine, usally faster, and more securely.
Now, the son who likes Microsoft isn't a shill - but he would make posts and comments similar to a lot of those found here on slashdot, posted by the shills. The kid is normal (or, almost normal anyway) but he has his opinions.
There isn't a Blu-Ray device in my house. Or at work. I don't own one, and I'm not going to own one. It's really pretty simple. If Sony couldn't sell Blu-Ray to chumps, they would stop producing them. As long as chumps are willing to pay for Blu-Ray, Sony will keep producing them!
Collectively, we are in love with assholes. That murderer, Ted Kennedy, died in office. As sick a pig as he was, he couldn't be run out of office. Time and time again, the people of MessyTwoShits re-elected him as their representative. Go figure.
Because Janet Napolitano has little interest in terrorism. She has been bought and paid for by Corporate America, to keep the sheeples in line with their vision of the future. Napolitano has prostituted herself and her agency to Big Business. She, and Big Business got around the constitution by claiming that pirated music and software are "counterfeit" music and software. Somehow, in their perversion of the concept of justice, the counterfeiting of music is on a par with counterfeiting United States currency.
I once thought that all this nonsense was the brainchild of the neoconservatives - but today's "liberal" party keeps right on with the rape of the United States constitution. Wait til the final version of ACTA comes out. It will most likely give ICE the authority to exterminate entire family trees based on a suspicion that members of the family have counterfeited a music track.
Rat's ass. TOS's are very often stupid and overly restrictive. Some idiot typed up what he thought was a good TOS, a committee was appointed to approve it, and this is what you get. If my wife takes a photo of our grandchild, and I post it - the photo will be taken down because it's not my own work? How freaking STUPID!!!
"I'd show you, but of course they're down."
Nothing on the intartubez is ever lost - or that's what I've heard. I'll bet some geek or another saved all the good stuff, and he's busy putting it back up somewhere. If I were interested enough, I'd Google around - alas - I only read the summary to get an idea what the censorship was about. As usual, it's a story about corporate douches lacking balls. Phht. Nothing new here.
You're right - everyone notices advertisements. That's why I have a massive HOSTS list, and use AdBlock Plus, along with several other tools. I don't see very many advertisements on the internet. And, because I'm such a disagreeable asshole, those advertisements that I DO SEE help to ensure that I DO NOT buy those products. So, yes, you're right, Mr. Anonymous Coward.
From my point of view, every single time that Windows is brought to it's knees with spyware, trojans, viruses, or whatever malware - then Microsoft has failed.
I'll probably come close to agreeing with you in one respect. Many of Windows "failures" are probably due to third party software failures. But, I hold Microsoft entirely responsible for their shoddy security and permissions scheme. Someone will respond with "blah blah market share blah blah" - to which I would respond, "prove that little bit of nonsense". If Microsoft could and would adopt the restrictive security and permissions of any *nix, then Windows would fail far less often. Not only that, but they would save businesses and the average Joe Sixpack customer billions of dollars annually because they wouldn't have to pay for Norton, McAfee, or whatever other poor excuse for a security system.
Nothing extra, nothing hidden? Geezus, you're young and naive. Nothing extra? How about requiring your installation of windows to "validate" before allowing updates? Nothing hidden? How about that ancient bit of code that forbade Windows from installing on any version of DOS other than MSDOS?
Anyone who cared to enumerate all the little "extra" and "hidden" shit in Windows could go on for hours - maybe even days.
Nothing extra, nothing hidden. Somehow, you've confused Windows with open source software, Bubba.
How relevant is that particular copyright, really? I mean - everything in Unix has been transported to other operating systems, right? Linux, BSD, Mac's OS's - and God knows what else. What is left to fight over? Yeah, I know, Linux has been pointed at, with people muttering about stolen code. But, audit after audit turns up no copied code.
What does Unix have, that a person can't get from Linux, or BSD, or OSX? The license from ONE of those is going to meet anyone's requirements. Let the legal beagles argue over this, along with all the other pointless stuff the wrangle over. It really doesn't matter to me, one bit.
Yeah - you can block something. I'm not seeing what I can block, so much as I'm seeing what Google can block. (it's Google that's doing the blocking, after all) I've played with a few things, and it's surprising how much more web there is out there, that I can't see normally. For starters - go to Google labs, and download Namebench. Start up the graphical interface (or the CLI - whatever blows your skirt up) and select the box to "check for censorship".
Admittedly, MOST of the censorship isn't bad, but the net is indeed censored by Google and several other major DNS lookup providers.
This is just something for people to think about. After you've thought for a little bit, you might begin to wonder about censorship outside of the good ol' US of A. Personally, I wonder about China, Egypt, Libya - you know, all the places where the politicians might have something to lose if the populace really knows what's going on.
All of that from a guy who occasionally browses the "darkweb". A large percentage of what is available on the darkweb is truly disgusting - but a person can CHOOSE to look, or not.
Aside from that - I'm somewhat surprised that tools such as I2P haven't been used more by the various revolutionaries in the mideast.
die by the gun
Or, in this case, live by frivolous litigation, die by frivolous litigation. I hope they lose big time. Actually, I hope they lose several cases in a row, and just go belly up. Dirty rat bastards.
Let me clear up your confusion.
If you spent a hundred fortunes, feeding the homeless, clothing children, curing diseases, if you did ten thousand times what Mother Theresa has been credited with - BUT, your philosophy in life cause you to do something that a political party hates - you would still be EVIL!!! When you fail to embrace the ideology of any given party, or government, you will be painted evil, no matter how much good you may have accidentally done in your life.
Uh-huh. How many atheist scientists are you counting? Would the guy who said this be an atheist: "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."
You might be surprised if you researched how many scientists believe in some purpose, some design, some power in the universe, that we just can't comprehend. Some of them recognize that purpose, or power, as God, others not so - but many, many scientists believe SOMETHING more than they can see, and measure.
Heh. Did you read all the posts on here by atheists? They'll all tell you that we'd be better off without religion of any sort. So, it's also the definition of anti-religion nuts. Oh - don't bother countering that atheism is based on fact - you can't prove your point, I can't prove my point, and Omar can't prove his point either.
"Now, we can take out buried facilities with a couple of bunker busters."
Uhhhh - which "bunker busters" exactly? Dude - if your target is buried 100, 200, 500, even 1000 feet below the surface - you're not going to get it with "conventianal weapons". I think the "bunker busters" you refer to are actually tactical nukes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_bunker_buster
Note the poor penetration of your conventional weapons when used for bunker busting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunker_buster
Someone who happens to be on target. The mewling idiots complain about "religion" being a danger. And, within the past 100 years, we've seen that ATHEISTS rank among the cruelest, most inhuman monsters on earth.
It's "ideology" that is the real threat. Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, and Joseph Stalin never went to a Christian mass, and they certainly never took an Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. Ideology. Any time some sumbitch starts thinking that he knows what's good for the rest of humanity, we are in trouble, no matter his religion, or lack of.
Actually, you overplay your attempt to downplay HBGary Federal. While they never actually won any government contracts, they did have credibility with the US government, they did have access to a lot of "insider" stuff, and they were in negotiations with other contractors to provide some rather big-time stuff. They enjoyed the backing of their parent company, a major figure in the corporate world.
Note that I do NOT claim that thier credibility was justified, nor do I claim that their wares were anything more than vaporware - but they were much, much more than some upstart company operating on less than a shoestring in someone's garage with only 4 employees.
Turn babies into iPads? They can do that? Do I have to bring a baby, or can they supply their own?