All those groups you mentioned were trying to rule the country themselves. That's a lot different and more difficult than the US goal of trying to weed a number of people out of the country.
It also doesn't really recognize the reality of the situation in modern times. The Soviet military has definitely been an intimidating force, but never extremely effective. Their style of war has been more of attrition than tactics. In WWII they lost 7.5 million soldiers compared to about a third of that number lost by the Germans. In the 1980s, trying to keep up with Reagan was bankrupting their country, which ended up killing morale with a double whammy as people on the front weren't being paid regularly, and the people back home were wondering why the government was throwing their money into a place like Afghanistan while they couldn't even keep the local store shelves stocked.
The biggest thing that this point of view misses is that the Afghanis had the strong backing of the US, both in weapons and advisors. The only hope the Taliban has of something similar is if they can convince Iran to change their stance and start funnelling them support, which is unlikely, and even then wouldn't even come close to what the US was giving the mujahideen.
To each his own, but I feel safer knowing that the U.S. and Britain are making such a big effort to (1) eliminate the terrorists with those kinds of weapons, (2) cut off the money of any that are remaining, and (3) send a clear message to countries that harbor terrorists that the cost could very well be their removal from power. How many governments will want to pay the price that the Taliban probably will?
It just doesn't feel like a Slashdot armed forces update withut the obligatory moronic and uninformed statement from Michael. C'mon, I wanna hear him condemning what's happening today and regretting that nobody's learning from the advice of old British and Soviet soldiers!
could you please explain why Slashdot/OSDN continues to use web-bugs to track users? Where's the concern for privacy of your own visitors?
Re:Practical Extraction Report Language hax0r
on
Brian West Update
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
I like how they used PERL's full name to make it sound important.
Yeah man, I can't believe they would go and give the public some extra helpful information like that. Why couldn't they have just left the acronym out and let people stay uninformed? Don't the realize that the ego of the nerd demands that people know as little about computers as possible, so that they can laugh at them and feel better about themselves?
Oh yeah, and on behalf of all those who were moderated down (myself not included, amazingly) in the original story for trying to explain that this guy wasn't a good samaritan, allow me to say, "We told you so." To my brothers and sisters out there, please accept my impending loss of karma points due to this post as a worthy tribute to your earlier efforts.
Just had to point out a special milestone today for all long-time Slashdot readers. Since the price of VA Linux's stock closed at 78 cents today, Eric Raymond's original $41 million that he boasted to everyone here about has now fallen below $100,000. It now stands at $99,937.50.
Seriously, all they're doing is playing book-keeping tricks to pull the wool over your eyes. Doesn't it seem fishy how for the last three quarters they come within $100,000 of breaking even each time? Come on. When you actually read the articles and look at the numbers, though, you see that they're losing from $30-$50 million each quarter and writing it off as one-time charge. Someone else will have to explain how they manage to apply these supposed "one-time" charges every single quarter.;)
In other words, if RedHat were to keep "making money" at the same rate that they have for the last three quarters, they would run out of money not all that long from now.
These people are either contemptible for their raw opportunism, or pitiful for their sheer fanaticism and inability to see beyond their agendas.
I really hope that you don't think that you're better than those people in any way. You're basically using the same excuse they are to promote your anti-conservative opinions. You see it as an opportunity to bash some conservative viewpoints and trying to raise the level of outrage by tying it to "the dead bodies of those killed last Tuesday." Has your hypocrisy so consumed you that you can't even recognize how transparent your attempt to push your own agenda was? Only thing missing from your post was a sobbing "Have you no shame??!!"
What a bunch of bullshit that you wrote. Gee, since there are plane, car, and train crashes, we should just say no more of this bloody pointless transportation stuff, too. Sorry that your life is so empty, but well, life's what you make of it yourself, and after viewing your thoughts, I guess there's not much surprise why you're the way that you are.
I own the O'Reilly book, and considering when it came out, it should've had way more on Schemas than it did. (That is, Schemas weren't a W3C recommendation yet, but enough was known to be able to give more coverage in this book.) Instead, the coverage is tilted way toward DTDs.
In fact, even though I think the O'Reilly book did an excellent job covering the most important XML-related standards in this book, the future importance of Schemas keeps me from recommending this book. If they covered the subject as well as they covered everything else, I'd easily say that this was one book that should be on every XML-monkeys' shelves. I can't say that now, so hopefully they have a second edition in the works where they fix this gaping hole. As for now, I'd probably stick for recommending Holzner's Inside XML, but note that I'm not familiar with the Wrox book that I've seen other people recommend.
Well, I'm not surprised that you didn't have the maturity or ability to answer my points, but the truly astounding thing is that you think I, ZicoKnows@hotmail.com for crying out loud, am an open source (BSD) advocate! Even the people who hate me here at Slashdot, and trust me, there are many, must be laughing their asses off at you right now. Listen closely, Bruce — that's the sound of your remaining credibility being flushed away.
So just for the record: are you really that delusional, thinking that anybody who points out how full of it you are must be Brett Glass himself? Or is this just another attempt, like the post I responded to originally, to distort his views and link him in Slashdotter's minds to one of the most unpopular people here?
Whatever the reason, you still haven't been able to answer my points, instead deciding to attack the messenger. I'm sure HP must be really proud of you right now.
And yet here you are, posting for the first time in over half a month (save for replying to two posts which refer to you by name in their subject lines). Feel free to tell me otherwise, but I'd say it looks an awful lot like you do take him seriously, enough to try to marginalize him as a selfish kook. Think nobody was taking him seriously when he was cleaning your clock in the Silicon Valley roundtable?
You seem to be distorting his views, and by extension, people who dislike the GPL license by acting like they want to take everything private, commercialize it, and not return anything. Actually, it's about freedom and being able to do whatever you want with the code, while the GPL tells me, "Better get a second job, because no matter how much time and money you spend improving this code, as soon as you release it, people are going to download the code for free rather than pay you a nickel." The corpses of the Linux companies, the all-time low stock prices of the remaining ones, the decision by the owners of this very web site to start selling proprietary software, the fact that GPL software is always left chasing the taillights of others in the industry, they all bear this out.
I'm sure some people will think that "second job" comment I made above was a snide little slam, but if you read the Silicon Valley roundtable, then you'll know what I was talking about. A programmer asked how someone like him would make a living (i.e., not have to take on a second job) in a GPL world, and Bruce told him that he should start thinking about getting into the support or documentation business. Yeah, I'm sure the programmers of the world are looking forward to that...
You say that you give your music away, but in all honesty, is it something that anybody would pay for if they had to? It's kind of easy to be on the side of giving stuff away when there aren't any income possibilities for it.
So are you the brave soul who steps forward to admit that what you guys are really fighting for has nothing to do with principles or freedom, but more about jealousy and hating to see other people making a lot of money?
Because it also allows American small businesses and individual hackers to walk away with a huge amount of research, too. And no, it isn't free, because we all pay taxes, including Sony. Note that I'm not arguing whether or not MIT is federally funded or not, but if they were, then why should they be entitled to all the loot when the American people are the venture capitalists who are paying for the seed money?
Of course if the roles were reversed, most people here would be telling us how evil patents are and talking about boycotting Sony. Funny how that works, huh?
I'm not sure whom you're trying to deceive, but most Slashdotters wouldn't purchase it even if it had absolutely NO restrictions. As long as there was a no-cost alternative, no matter the ethics, they'd choose that over paying for a product. Go ahead, tell me I'm wrong, I could use a good laugh.
Bollocks. People have been able to get 64-bit Windows since last year, the difference being that it was in beta and not fully supported. Just because RedHat et al. slapped together a 64-bit Linux distribution before doing any real QA/QC checking on it doesn't mean that they're ahead of anybody. If you think that RedHat's release was anything above beta quality itself, you're kidding yourself.
Well, that goes hand-in-hand for something else I've mentioned a number of times here, which would be a "Incorrect" moderation for those situations you mention. I just think it's weak when someone tags as overrated a post with a score of one, and I see it a lot.
I didn't read the fair.org article, but was there any claim that George Will was the one who stole the document? On the other hand, Yvette Lozano (I'm pretty sure it's Yvette, not Juanita), stole the Bush campaign materials and lied to investigators, including a grand jury, about it. Biiiiiig difference.
As for the previous poster's comments about Will, anybody who would have the inclination to watch "This Week" knows that he's the designated conservative viewpoint on the show, just as George Stephanopolous is the designated liberal viewpoint. See, Will's not a reporter, he's an editorial writer — they're expected to show bias.
If they did an honest appraisal, they'd probably note that he graduated from Yale and Harvard Business School. Just because you're liberal doesn't mean that he's unqualified any more than Bill Clinton, who I despise despite voting for him twice, just because he was governor of a small backwoods state or Jimmy Carter, just because he was a peanut farmer who took the populist route to becoming Governor.
Listening to the media as much as you have, how did you manage to watch all those shows and still miss liberal regulars like Judy Woodruff, Bernard Shaw, Bill Schneider, Bill Press, Mark Shields, Al Hunt, John King, Ted Turner, Dan Rather, Bryant Gumbel, Bob Schieffer, Gloria Borger, Peter Jennings, Sam Donaldson, Cokie Roberts, Tom Brokau, David Broder, Chip Reid, Gwen Ifil, Brian Williams, Laurie Singer, Andrea Mitchell, Alan Colmes (an awesome guy), Ellen Ratner, Eleanor Clift, Jesse Jackson, Geraldo Rivera, Alan Derschowitz, Nina Totenberg, Linda Wertheimer, Juan Williams, Evan Thomas, Johnathan Alter, Ed Koch, Ellis Henican, Joe Conason, Gene Lyons, Vic Kamber, Julian Epstein, Susan Estrich, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Julian Bond, Kwasei Mfume, Michael Kinsley, Bill Maher, Martin Sheen, Rosie O'Donnell, Whoopie Goldberg, 95% of the New York Times and Washington Post, etc., etc.
Slashdot Mirror
All those groups you mentioned were trying to rule the country themselves. That's a lot different and more difficult than the US goal of trying to weed a number of people out of the country.
It also doesn't really recognize the reality of the situation in modern times. The Soviet military has definitely been an intimidating force, but never extremely effective. Their style of war has been more of attrition than tactics. In WWII they lost 7.5 million soldiers compared to about a third of that number lost by the Germans. In the 1980s, trying to keep up with Reagan was bankrupting their country, which ended up killing morale with a double whammy as people on the front weren't being paid regularly, and the people back home were wondering why the government was throwing their money into a place like Afghanistan while they couldn't even keep the local store shelves stocked.
The biggest thing that this point of view misses is that the Afghanis had the strong backing of the US, both in weapons and advisors. The only hope the Taliban has of something similar is if they can convince Iran to change their stance and start funnelling them support, which is unlikely, and even then wouldn't even come close to what the US was giving the mujahideen.
To each his own, but I feel safer knowing that the U.S. and Britain are making such a big effort to (1) eliminate the terrorists with those kinds of weapons, (2) cut off the money of any that are remaining, and (3) send a clear message to countries that harbor terrorists that the cost could very well be their removal from power. How many governments will want to pay the price that the Taliban probably will?
Why are you scared? Do you live in the area or have loved ones who might be involved in any of the fighting?
It just doesn't feel like a Slashdot armed forces update withut the obligatory moronic and uninformed statement from Michael. C'mon, I wanna hear him condemning what's happening today and regretting that nobody's learning from the advice of old British and Soviet soldiers!
could you please explain why Slashdot/OSDN continues to use web-bugs to track users? Where's the concern for privacy of your own visitors?
I like how they used PERL's full name to make it sound important.
Yeah man, I can't believe they would go and give the public some extra helpful information like that. Why couldn't they have just left the acronym out and let people stay uninformed? Don't the realize that the ego of the nerd demands that people know as little about computers as possible, so that they can laugh at them and feel better about themselves?
Oh yeah, and on behalf of all those who were moderated down (myself not included, amazingly) in the original story for trying to explain that this guy wasn't a good samaritan, allow me to say, "We told you so." To my brothers and sisters out there, please accept my impending loss of karma points due to this post as a worthy tribute to your earlier efforts.
Ahhh, now I feel better. :)
Just had to point out a special milestone today for all long-time Slashdot readers. Since the price of VA Linux's stock closed at 78 cents today, Eric Raymond's original $41 million that he boasted to everyone here about has now fallen below $100,000. It now stands at $99,937.50.
Seriously, all they're doing is playing book-keeping tricks to pull the wool over your eyes. Doesn't it seem fishy how for the last three quarters they come within $100,000 of breaking even each time? Come on. When you actually read the articles and look at the numbers, though, you see that they're losing from $30-$50 million each quarter and writing it off as one-time charge. Someone else will have to explain how they manage to apply these supposed "one-time" charges every single quarter. ;)
In other words, if RedHat were to keep "making money" at the same rate that they have for the last three quarters, they would run out of money not all that long from now.
These people are either contemptible for their raw opportunism, or pitiful for their sheer fanaticism and inability to see beyond their agendas.
I really hope that you don't think that you're better than those people in any way. You're basically using the same excuse they are to promote your anti-conservative opinions. You see it as an opportunity to bash some conservative viewpoints and trying to raise the level of outrage by tying it to "the dead bodies of those killed last Tuesday." Has your hypocrisy so consumed you that you can't even recognize how transparent your attempt to push your own agenda was? Only thing missing from your post was a sobbing "Have you no shame??!!"
What a bunch of bullshit that you wrote. Gee, since there are plane, car, and train crashes, we should just say no more of this bloody pointless transportation stuff, too. Sorry that your life is so empty, but well, life's what you make of it yourself, and after viewing your thoughts, I guess there's not much surprise why you're the way that you are.
I own the O'Reilly book, and considering when it came out, it should've had way more on Schemas than it did. (That is, Schemas weren't a W3C recommendation yet, but enough was known to be able to give more coverage in this book.) Instead, the coverage is tilted way toward DTDs.
In fact, even though I think the O'Reilly book did an excellent job covering the most important XML-related standards in this book, the future importance of Schemas keeps me from recommending this book. If they covered the subject as well as they covered everything else, I'd easily say that this was one book that should be on every XML-monkeys' shelves. I can't say that now, so hopefully they have a second edition in the works where they fix this gaping hole. As for now, I'd probably stick for recommending Holzner's Inside XML, but note that I'm not familiar with the Wrox book that I've seen other people recommend.
Well, I'm not surprised that you didn't have the maturity or ability to answer my points, but the truly astounding thing is that you think I, ZicoKnows@hotmail.com for crying out loud, am an open source (BSD) advocate! Even the people who hate me here at Slashdot, and trust me, there are many, must be laughing their asses off at you right now. Listen closely, Bruce — that's the sound of your remaining credibility being flushed away.
So just for the record: are you really that delusional, thinking that anybody who points out how full of it you are must be Brett Glass himself? Or is this just another attempt, like the post I responded to originally, to distort his views and link him in Slashdotter's minds to one of the most unpopular people here?
Whatever the reason, you still haven't been able to answer my points, instead deciding to attack the messenger. I'm sure HP must be really proud of you right now.
Most people don't take him seriously.
And yet here you are, posting for the first time in over half a month (save for replying to two posts which refer to you by name in their subject lines). Feel free to tell me otherwise, but I'd say it looks an awful lot like you do take him seriously, enough to try to marginalize him as a selfish kook. Think nobody was taking him seriously when he was cleaning your clock in the Silicon Valley roundtable?
You seem to be distorting his views, and by extension, people who dislike the GPL license by acting like they want to take everything private, commercialize it, and not return anything. Actually, it's about freedom and being able to do whatever you want with the code, while the GPL tells me, "Better get a second job, because no matter how much time and money you spend improving this code, as soon as you release it, people are going to download the code for free rather than pay you a nickel." The corpses of the Linux companies, the all-time low stock prices of the remaining ones, the decision by the owners of this very web site to start selling proprietary software, the fact that GPL software is always left chasing the taillights of others in the industry, they all bear this out.
I'm sure some people will think that "second job" comment I made above was a snide little slam, but if you read the Silicon Valley roundtable, then you'll know what I was talking about. A programmer asked how someone like him would make a living (i.e., not have to take on a second job) in a GPL world, and Bruce told him that he should start thinking about getting into the support or documentation business. Yeah, I'm sure the programmers of the world are looking forward to that...
He's an advocate of BSD-style licenses and a strong critique of the GPL. He's written a lot of good material about why he thinks the GPL is very bad.
You say that you give your music away, but in all honesty, is it something that anybody would pay for if they had to? It's kind of easy to be on the side of giving stuff away when there aren't any income possibilities for it.
So are you the brave soul who steps forward to admit that what you guys are really fighting for has nothing to do with principles or freedom, but more about jealousy and hating to see other people making a lot of money?
Because it also allows American small businesses and individual hackers to walk away with a huge amount of research, too. And no, it isn't free, because we all pay taxes, including Sony. Note that I'm not arguing whether or not MIT is federally funded or not, but if they were, then why should they be entitled to all the loot when the American people are the venture capitalists who are paying for the seed money?
Of course if the roles were reversed, most people here would be telling us how evil patents are and talking about boycotting Sony. Funny how that works, huh?
I'm not sure whom you're trying to deceive, but most Slashdotters wouldn't purchase it even if it had absolutely NO restrictions. As long as there was a no-cost alternative, no matter the ethics, they'd choose that over paying for a product. Go ahead, tell me I'm wrong, I could use a good laugh.
Yeah, but let's not forget that IBM did open source DB2 for Linux because they believe so strongly in Open Source on servers. Right?
Bollocks. People have been able to get 64-bit Windows since last year, the difference being that it was in beta and not fully supported. Just because RedHat et al. slapped together a 64-bit Linux distribution before doing any real QA/QC checking on it doesn't mean that they're ahead of anybody. If you think that RedHat's release was anything above beta quality itself, you're kidding yourself.
Well, that goes hand-in-hand for something else I've mentioned a number of times here, which would be a "Incorrect" moderation for those situations you mention. I just think it's weak when someone tags as overrated a post with a score of one, and I see it a lot.
I didn't read the fair.org article, but was there any claim that George Will was the one who stole the document? On the other hand, Yvette Lozano (I'm pretty sure it's Yvette, not Juanita), stole the Bush campaign materials and lied to investigators, including a grand jury, about it. Biiiiiig difference.
As for the previous poster's comments about Will, anybody who would have the inclination to watch "This Week" knows that he's the designated conservative viewpoint on the show, just as George Stephanopolous is the designated liberal viewpoint. See, Will's not a reporter, he's an editorial writer — they're expected to show bias.
it seems as though some major ZDNet anti-MS reporters such as Mary Jo Foley have gone away
Why would you respect any news outlet that has reporters, not editorialists, who are anti- or pro- anything? I thought their job was to report.
If they did an honest appraisal, they'd probably note that he graduated from Yale and Harvard Business School. Just because you're liberal doesn't mean that he's unqualified any more than Bill Clinton, who I despise despite voting for him twice, just because he was governor of a small backwoods state or Jimmy Carter, just because he was a peanut farmer who took the populist route to becoming Governor.
Listening to the media as much as you have, how did you manage to watch all those shows and still miss liberal regulars like Judy Woodruff, Bernard Shaw, Bill Schneider, Bill Press, Mark Shields, Al Hunt, John King, Ted Turner, Dan Rather, Bryant Gumbel, Bob Schieffer, Gloria Borger, Peter Jennings, Sam Donaldson, Cokie Roberts, Tom Brokau, David Broder, Chip Reid, Gwen Ifil, Brian Williams, Laurie Singer, Andrea Mitchell, Alan Colmes (an awesome guy), Ellen Ratner, Eleanor Clift, Jesse Jackson, Geraldo Rivera, Alan Derschowitz, Nina Totenberg, Linda Wertheimer, Juan Williams, Evan Thomas, Johnathan Alter, Ed Koch, Ellis Henican, Joe Conason, Gene Lyons, Vic Kamber, Julian Epstein, Susan Estrich, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Julian Bond, Kwasei Mfume, Michael Kinsley, Bill Maher, Martin Sheen, Rosie O'Donnell, Whoopie Goldberg, 95% of the New York Times and Washington Post, etc., etc.