That was not, you know, fighting for the Taliban? I'm all in favor of civil rights, but, if you take a gun and go on the side of the enemy in the middle of a war, you deserve to get shot. The act of siding with the enemy is a voluntary surrender of citizenship and the accompanying civil rights.
Hey Google: If you want to adhere to the principal of "do no evil", that means world wide, not just in your own country! You know, I'm glad to see that everyone has no problem lining up behind Google vs George Bush, but at the same time, give Google a total pass on forking over all of their information to the Chinese government, on demand.
The reality is, Google's "fight against the evil Bush empire" is really nothing more than a sales pitch designed to protect their intellectual property from domestic competition. Google is a business, not the "savior of the world from the clutches of Bill Gates and George Bush". Does anyone here remember when Microsoft was the "savior of the world from the clutches of IBM". Different graphics every day on the search site is no different than the Windows logo or the Nike Swoosh. Same sales pitch, different generation, and anyone that thinks otherwise is either too young to remember or a fool.
People have no problem forking over all of their personal information to the private sector. Credit card companies know what you buy and where. Amazon has statistical models that identify (often correctly), books you might like when you buy another book. Even power companies have models that can generally predict your power usage patterns by demographic and weather forecasts. But, oh, no, if the "government" gets all this stuff, its the end of the world. Ironically, denying the government access to information already freely shared in the corporate world only stacks the deck towards giving corporations the upper hand over government.
Seriously - whether you are for or against it, the war in Iraq is the political issue in the United States. Democrats have blasted Bush over the war in various ways, but when push comes to shove, the Democratic Party is more able to rally around buying everyone broadband than it is about whether or not we ought to be fighting this war in Iraq.
Republicans should celebrate the likes of Pelosi, Reid and Kerry and Kennedy. If the Democrats had real leaders and real party, Republicans would be screwed in November. As it is, rolling out with "well, we're not sure about the war, but you should free internet", is just not going to pass any reasonable sanity test.
Software is and has been a part of Apple's brand since the beginning of time, and it also is for Microsoft. This decision is not even Apple's to make.
If you think Microsoft is going to private label a version of Windows for Apple, think again. If anyone could get a private label version of Windows, it would be Dell, and they can't get it. So certainly Apple could not.
. I love natural selection in action with these people
You are actually getting it. What's happening is that only religious societies tend to be male dominated enough to reproduce for the expansion of its population. Liberal areligious European society is dying out, as is liberal America. Evolution wins. Irony of Irony, Darwin loves God best.
>Unfortunately, the thing that will get livestock farmers in the US out of business will be SLAPP suits by PETA et al. >(but we'll still keep importing meat
Is exactly why PETA and company are a bunch of traitors. They aren't solving any problems that they claim to be solving, just wrecking the American economy. Hopefully Bush the GREAT will dispense with them in his third term (after we adjust the constitution).
It's nearly impossible to get a TV with a UHF/VHF antenna input, because they don't make them like that anymore.
So they took a feature away from TVs now and that is better?
It's nearly impossible to get a TV that doesn't support closed captioning and content lockouts, because they don't make them like that anymore.
True
Technology has improved, and they don't make them "like that" anymore because "that" way yields a poorer product.
Sometimes, but not always. Sometimes newer versions are less expensively made and with poorer workmanship and materials to cut costs. Consider these examples:
American cars prior to 1974 were actually made from a better and stronger grade of steel than cars are today. It was also heavier and less fuel efficient, so the car got worse gas mileage. I used to run my 1973 Oldsmobile through obstacles that would actually screw up an SUV of today. In a similar vein, cars used to have bumpers that actually worked, but they weighed too much, again, fuel efficiency favored, and got the boot. Now if you want a fuel efficient car, that's what you get today, but, if you wanted a car that was built like a tank, well, they just don't make them like that any more!
They used to put cane sugar in Coca Cola, but in the 1980s American bottlers switched to corn syrup as a sweetener. Again, this was to cut costs and increase profit margins. As a result, if you really want the "real thing", you should get it from Mexico, where they use cane sugar to these days. Sugar is not propped up in Mexico like it is in the USA, so its actually -cheaper-. But in the USA, they just don't make Coke like they used to.
It used to be that computers did not have DRM, so you could copy anything with them, but, in the not too distant future, you won't be able to, because, they won't make them like that any more. In fact, you won't be allowed to record off of analog out and then redigitize, because, they won't make them like that any more.
It used to be that you got real food on airplanes, but, its too expensive, and now you can't even get peanuts because of handful of people with peanut allergies, and so, they don't fly like they used to.
Tonka trucks used to be always made out of steel and if you were a kid they were awesome. But then they switched to plastic stuff. Or how about when they switched Lincoln Logs from wood to plastic. What's up with that? Now you can get the "collectible original" Lincoln Logs and those are actually wood.
Technology is not always about making things better. Sometimes its about making a product 25% as good as it was, so you could make it for 40% cheaper.
The thing that irritates me about the tone of Microsoft is that they still live in this world where they spin everything they do as amazing and its just not any more. Computers aren't "amazing" anymore. Operating systems and things like Windows does, even if new, don't have the same impact as the basic innovations of GUI displays did in 1992. The amazing stuff that is happening is, um, usually at Google.
You know, I have a grim admiration of anyone that would devote so much time to water cooling an x-box. I only hope that the people with such time and talent do not devote their energies to darker activities. Today, those guys are cooling x-box 360s, but tomorrow, they'll be working on nuclear weapons, writing spyware, or working on Windows, depending on which pays the most.
My wife has had a PowerBook G4 now for about a year. I bought it for her in January. Since that time, my three dogs have stomped on it repeatedly as my wife has a habit of leaving the notebook opened up on the floor. The case is a bit dented and doesn't fold properly, and two or three of the keys are missing, and we've had to change the power cord twice, but... given that we are talking about 3 dogs weighing around 70lbs apiece, I'd say its doing pretty good.
Conversely, my wife's friend brought a toshiba satellite notebook to the house, and also made the mistake of leaving it opened on the floor. It took all of about 30 seconds for the dogs to knock all of the keys off of its wimpy keyboard. Consequently, we had to buy her a new one.
Thus, in my mind, Apple's dog resistant keyboard lasts one year, whereas, a PC notebook lasts 30 seconds. Now I'm not saying Steve Jobs has a kennel onsite at Apple to test things like this out, but I wouldn't put it past him either.
a. Maintaining secret prisons outside of the USA is perfectly legal under American law.
b. Also, the USA is not legally required to adhere to the Geneva conventions for those nations or combatants that do not adhere to them either. Therefor, we could legally execute all of the Al Qaeda and Taliban POWS, if we so chose. If Al Qaeda signs the Geneva Convention, then, their combatants get Geneva Convention rights, but, they do not.
Finally, this is the text of the 4th amendment. I suggest you read it.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
1) First off, this amendment clearly does not require a warrant for a search. It insinuates that if you are going to send a human being to break into someone's house and disrupt their premises to conduct a physical search, that you need a warrant for that.
2) A person's property is not affected by electronic wiretapping. The original message is not delayed, its quality is not altered, and the value within it remains unchanged. Secondly, the message arguably is the property of the government anyway because it is going over the public airwaves. You could make the argument that the government does not needs a warrant to read email or listen in on voice mail or even to read physical mail because as soon as the message leaves the holder's hands and uses -public- transport, it is arguably not even the person's property, so it fails the "personal effects" test of the 4th amendment.
As for shredding the constitution, reading having a gov't computer that reads email is hardly the constitutional offense that the liberal agenda has. Show me the constitutional clause or amendment that specifically allows the government to regulate the environment, create "worker's rights legislation", or even civil rights or welfare or any other left wing project. I'm not saying that some of these powers the government has are bad, but, they are unconstitutional if you take the reasonable position that the framers explicit enumeration of federal powers and explicit granting of "all other powers to the state or to the individual" means exactly what it said.
Bottom line is, there has been no worse shredder of the Constitution than the American Left Wing.
PS. If you care so much about an expansive reading the 4th amendment, try and be equally expansive about this one:
"T h e r i g h t t o k e e p a n d b e a r a r m s s h a l l n o t b e i n f r i n g e d"
Which means, again, that because Clinton signed the Assault Weapons ban, that was ANOTHER REASON for him to be impeached, for clearly violating the constitution. Whereas Bush, on the other hand, let that stupid law expire so thus restored basic rights back to Americans.
When it all boils down to it, when you look at the repeal of the gun ban, the lowering of taxes, the removal of so many stupid regulations, Bush has actually been the most freedom granting president in modern times.
Can you Bush haters spare the shrill accusations and made up facts for at least once!
Executive Orders are not laws. The NSA did not break the law.
As far as Clinton goes, the impeachment was about a lot more than the blow job your side spins it as. It was about an entire pattern of abuses of power that include:
a) the mysterious deaths of senior cabinet officials b) using the IRS audit as a means to go after political enemies c) pardoning known terrorists d) involving the USA in Kosovo, without the consent of congress. e) refusing congressional subpoenas for white house documents f) deleting all of the white house email, in total violation of a congressional subpoena and numerous court orders g) taking campaign contributions from the chinese h) using public buildings for fundraising
Any computer professional's complaint of spying is innately absurd.
The job of computers is to track and spy on people. They track this, track that, data mine this, data mine that, report on this, report on that, and we do it so our corporate masters can make more money. In fact, we even have a philosphical movement to build spying technology for -free-.
Here we are, a bunch of web dudes, complaining that a web site about spies uses cookies of all things, when just about every major web site also uses cookies, or, you get the same effect of cookies by playing games with the URL. You can stick the state in the URL, you can stick it in a hidden POST tag to keep it along, but somewhere along the way, we're all keeping state. Ironically, at least the cookies are most upfront about it.
We complain about the government listening in on people's phone calls without a warrant, yet, I would bet at least half of us on this board have user superuser powers on his or her company systems at one point to read another user's documents. If you are a network admin, you don't have to have a warrant to read your users' email or documents. You just do it.
We voluntarily let every detail about what we buy or sell get tracked when we purchase products electronically, but, god forbid, the government might actually keep a database itself, that's evil. Heck we write these systems. If anything, the only real concern about government spying is that we haven't gotten the contract ourselves to write the system or that it might not be written using Linux.
The solution is to not build ever more arcane systems to have things in secret, but really, we should just make everything public about anyone.
Texas sticks it to Sony and France sticks it to the recording industry, and everyone cheers. If that is not proof the world is ending, then I do not know what is.
If the EU works like the US, a government finding of a public sector problem opens the floodgates for numerous lawsuits against the company in the private sector. That is, if the US gov't were to say "Microsoft is evil", then, a thousand lawyers would pop up, saying, see, "the gov't says MS is evil, give us some of their oney".
As it is, I would still expect that some enterprising lawyer in the USA would probably have the cahoneys to site EU actions as precedent in a US court.
Just to clarify my point about reducing carbon content. Basically, we should build a giant machine to scrub the atmosphere, and then, like OPEC manipulates oil prices to the world community, we would in turn use our atmoshpere machine to manipulate global temperatures. So we could shorten the growing season enough to starve our geopolitical rivals, or perhaps lengthen it to turn our enemy's lands into dust choked deserts.
Slashdot Mirror
>What's that you say, the U.S. signed the Geneva conventions preventing torture of prisoners of war
Only to other signatories of the Geneva Convention. None of our present military opponents actually signed it.
That was not, you know, fighting for the Taliban? I'm all in favor of civil rights, but, if you take a gun and go on the side of the enemy in the middle of a war, you deserve to get shot. The act of siding with the enemy is a voluntary surrender of citizenship and the accompanying civil rights.
Hey Google: If you want to adhere to the principal of "do no evil", that means world wide, not just in your own country! You know, I'm glad to see that everyone has no problem lining up behind Google vs George Bush, but at the same time, give Google a total pass on forking over all of their information to the Chinese government, on demand.
The reality is, Google's "fight against the evil Bush empire" is really nothing more than a sales pitch designed to protect their intellectual property from domestic competition. Google is a business, not the "savior of the world from the clutches of Bill Gates and George Bush". Does anyone here remember when Microsoft was the "savior of the world from the clutches of IBM". Different graphics every day on the search site is no different than the Windows logo or the Nike Swoosh. Same sales pitch, different generation, and anyone that thinks otherwise is either too young to remember or a fool.
People have no problem forking over all of their personal information to the private sector. Credit card companies know what you buy and where. Amazon has statistical models that identify (often correctly), books you might like when you buy another book. Even power companies have models that can generally predict your power usage patterns by demographic and weather forecasts. But, oh, no, if the "government" gets all this stuff, its the end of the world. Ironically, denying the government access to information already freely shared in the corporate world only stacks the deck towards giving corporations the upper hand over government.
a unified stance on the war.
Seriously - whether you are for or against it, the war in Iraq is the political issue in the United States. Democrats have blasted Bush over the war in various ways, but when push comes to shove, the Democratic Party is more able to rally around buying everyone broadband than it is about whether or not we ought to be fighting this war in Iraq.
Republicans should celebrate the likes of Pelosi, Reid and Kerry and Kennedy. If the Democrats had real leaders and real party, Republicans would be screwed in November. As it is, rolling out with "well, we're not sure about the war, but you should free internet", is just not going to pass any reasonable sanity test.
The USA would not need to move to IPv6, and, we would not be getting a lot of blackmail DOS attacks by offshore people.
Software is and has been a part of Apple's brand since the beginning of time, and it also is for Microsoft. This decision is not even Apple's to make.
If you think Microsoft is going to private label a version of Windows for Apple, think again. If anyone could get a private label version of Windows, it would be Dell, and they can't get it. So certainly Apple could not.
. I love natural selection in action with these people
You are actually getting it. What's happening is that only religious societies tend to be male dominated enough to reproduce for the expansion of its population. Liberal areligious European society is dying out, as is liberal America. Evolution wins. Irony of Irony, Darwin loves God best.
>Unfortunately, the thing that will get livestock farmers in the US out of business will be SLAPP suits by PETA et al. >(but we'll still keep importing meat
Is exactly why PETA and company are a bunch of traitors. They aren't solving any problems that they claim to be solving, just wrecking the American economy. Hopefully Bush the GREAT will dispense with them in his third term (after we adjust the constitution).
>And, 8MB IS nothing on modern machines. Things have changed a little since 1998, you know!
When you go around making statements like that, its highly likely that "Java is pretty fast" statements should be taken with a grain of salt!
If we run out of stuff on earth, it's not like there is a shortage of materials in space.
It's nearly impossible to get a TV with a UHF/VHF antenna input, because they don't make them like that anymore.
So they took a feature away from TVs now and that is better?
It's nearly impossible to get a TV that doesn't support closed captioning and content lockouts, because they don't make them like that anymore.
True
Technology has improved, and they don't make them "like that" anymore because "that" way yields a poorer product.
Sometimes, but not always. Sometimes newer versions are less expensively made and with poorer workmanship and materials to cut costs. Consider these examples:
American cars prior to 1974 were actually made from a better and stronger grade of steel than cars are today. It was also heavier and less fuel efficient, so the car got worse gas mileage. I used to run my 1973 Oldsmobile through obstacles that would actually screw up an SUV of today. In a similar vein, cars used to have bumpers that actually worked, but they weighed too much, again, fuel efficiency favored, and got the boot. Now if you want a fuel efficient car, that's what you get today, but, if you wanted a car that was built like a tank, well, they just don't make them like that any more!
They used to put cane sugar in Coca Cola, but in the 1980s American bottlers switched to corn syrup as a sweetener. Again, this was to cut costs and increase profit margins. As a result, if you really want the "real thing", you should get it from Mexico, where they use cane sugar to these days. Sugar is not propped up in Mexico like it is in the USA, so its actually -cheaper-. But in the USA, they just don't make Coke like they used to.
It used to be that computers did not have DRM, so you could copy anything with them, but, in the not too distant future, you won't be able to, because, they won't make them like that any more. In fact, you won't be allowed to record off of analog out and then redigitize, because, they won't make them like that any more.
It used to be that you got real food on airplanes, but, its too expensive, and now you can't even get peanuts because of handful of people with peanut allergies, and so, they don't fly like they used to.
Tonka trucks used to be always made out of steel and if you were a kid they were awesome. But then they switched to plastic stuff. Or how about when they switched Lincoln Logs from wood to plastic. What's up with that? Now you can get the "collectible original" Lincoln Logs and those are actually wood.
Technology is not always about making things better. Sometimes its about making a product 25% as good as it was, so you could make it for 40% cheaper.
Urge and Justin Timberlake?
Sounds to me like Microsoft's new iTunes clone might as well be renamed "Gay"!
The thing that irritates me about the tone of Microsoft is that they still live in this world where they spin everything they do as amazing and its just not any more. Computers aren't "amazing" anymore. Operating systems and things like Windows does, even if new, don't have the same impact as the basic innovations of GUI displays did in 1992. The amazing stuff that is happening is, um, usually at Google.
You know, I have a grim admiration of anyone that would devote so much time to water cooling an x-box. I only hope that the people with such time and talent do not devote their energies to darker activities. Today, those guys are cooling x-box 360s, but tomorrow, they'll be working on nuclear weapons, writing spyware, or working on Windows, depending on which pays the most.
My wife has had a PowerBook G4 now for about a year. I bought it for her in January. Since that time, my three dogs have stomped on it repeatedly as my wife has a habit of leaving the notebook opened up on the floor. The case is a bit dented and doesn't fold properly, and two or three of the keys are missing, and we've had to change the power cord twice, but... given that we are talking about 3 dogs weighing around 70lbs apiece, I'd say its doing pretty good.
Conversely, my wife's friend brought a toshiba satellite notebook to the house, and also made the mistake of leaving it opened on the floor. It took all of about 30 seconds for the dogs to knock all of the keys off of its wimpy keyboard. Consequently, we had to buy her a new one.
Thus, in my mind, Apple's dog resistant keyboard lasts one year, whereas, a PC notebook lasts 30 seconds. Now I'm not saying Steve Jobs has a kennel onsite at Apple to test things like this out, but I wouldn't put it past him either.
Dude you crack me up.
a. Maintaining secret prisons outside of the USA is perfectly legal under American law.
b. Also, the USA is not legally required to adhere to the Geneva conventions for those nations or combatants that do not adhere to them either. Therefor, we could legally execute all of the Al Qaeda and Taliban POWS, if we so chose. If Al Qaeda signs the Geneva Convention, then, their combatants get Geneva Convention rights, but, they do not.
Finally, this is the text of the 4th amendment. I suggest you read it.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
1) First off, this amendment clearly does not require a warrant for a search. It insinuates that if you are going to send a human being to break into someone's house and disrupt their premises to conduct a physical search, that you need a warrant for that.
2) A person's property is not affected by electronic wiretapping. The original message is not delayed, its quality is not altered, and the value within it remains unchanged. Secondly, the message arguably is the property of the government anyway because it is going over the public airwaves. You could make the argument that the government does not needs a warrant to read email or listen in on voice mail or even to read physical mail because as soon as the message leaves the holder's hands and uses -public- transport, it is arguably not even the person's property, so it fails the "personal effects" test of the 4th amendment.
As for shredding the constitution, reading having a gov't computer that reads email is hardly the constitutional offense that the liberal agenda has. Show me the constitutional clause or amendment that specifically allows the government to regulate the environment, create "worker's rights legislation", or even civil rights or welfare or any other left wing project. I'm not saying that some of these powers the government has are bad, but, they are unconstitutional if you take the reasonable position that the framers explicit enumeration of federal powers and explicit granting of "all other powers to the state or to the individual" means exactly what it said.
Bottom line is, there has been no worse shredder of the Constitution than the American Left Wing.
PS. If you care so much about an expansive reading the 4th amendment, try and be equally expansive about this one:
"T h e r i g h t t o k e e p a n d b e a r a r m s s h a l l n o t b e i n f r i n g e d"
Which means, again, that because Clinton signed the Assault Weapons ban, that was ANOTHER REASON for him to be impeached, for clearly violating the constitution. Whereas Bush, on the other hand, let that stupid law expire so thus restored basic rights back to Americans.
When it all boils down to it, when you look at the repeal of the gun ban, the lowering of taxes, the removal of so many stupid regulations, Bush has actually been the most freedom granting president in modern times.
Can you Bush haters spare the shrill accusations and made up facts for at least once!
Executive Orders are not laws. The NSA did not break the law.
As far as Clinton goes, the impeachment was about a lot more than the blow job your side spins it as. It was about an entire pattern of abuses of power that include:
a) the mysterious deaths of senior cabinet officials
b) using the IRS audit as a means to go after political enemies
c) pardoning known terrorists
d) involving the USA in Kosovo, without the consent of congress.
e) refusing congressional subpoenas for white house documents
f) deleting all of the white house email, in total violation of a congressional subpoena and numerous court orders
g) taking campaign contributions from the chinese
h) using public buildings for fundraising
Conversely, Bush has not broken -any- laws.
Any computer professional's complaint of spying is innately absurd.
The job of computers is to track and spy on people. They track this, track that, data mine this, data mine that, report on this, report on that, and we do it so our corporate masters can make more money. In fact, we even have a philosphical movement to build spying technology for -free-.
Here we are, a bunch of web dudes, complaining that a web site about spies uses cookies of all things, when just about every major web site also uses cookies, or, you get the same effect of cookies by playing games with the URL. You can stick the state in the URL, you can stick it in a hidden POST tag to keep it along, but somewhere along the way, we're all keeping state. Ironically, at least the cookies are most upfront about it.
We complain about the government listening in on people's phone calls without a warrant, yet, I would bet at least half of us on this board have user superuser powers on his or her company systems at one point to read another user's documents. If you are a network admin, you don't have to have a warrant to read your users' email or documents. You just do it.
We voluntarily let every detail about what we buy or sell get tracked when we purchase products electronically, but, god forbid, the government might actually keep a database itself, that's evil. Heck we write these systems. If anything, the only real concern about government spying is that we haven't gotten the contract ourselves to write the system or that it might not be written using Linux.
The solution is to not build ever more arcane systems to have things in secret, but really, we should just make everything public about anyone.
Texas sticks it to Sony and France sticks it to the recording industry, and everyone cheers. If that is not proof the world is ending, then I do not know what is.
At my Christmas dinner, I'll be sure to have a French flag flying somewhere, and some French wine, and some French cheese, and yes, some FRENCH FRIES.
True enough, Stevens does. But he's outnumbered. However, a clever attorney could get in through a circuit court friendly to such an interpretation.
If the EU works like the US, a government finding of a public sector problem opens the floodgates for numerous lawsuits against the company in the private sector. That is, if the US gov't were to say "Microsoft is evil", then, a thousand lawyers would pop up, saying, see, "the gov't says MS is evil, give us some of their oney".
As it is, I would still expect that some enterprising lawyer in the USA would probably have the cahoneys to site EU actions as precedent in a US court.
Infidels, that's a great album. "I and I" is the best song on the album.
Just to clarify my point about reducing carbon content. Basically, we should build a giant machine to scrub the atmosphere, and then, like OPEC manipulates oil prices to the world community, we would in turn use our atmoshpere machine to manipulate global temperatures. So we could shorten the growing season enough to starve our geopolitical rivals, or perhaps lengthen it to turn our enemy's lands into dust choked deserts.