The Bible doesn't say a single thing about "hate gays, hate other religions, hate sex, hate the darkies".
What stunning ignorance. I've read the bible. I've seen specific passages pointed out by self-proclaimed Evangelicals to the effect that God Hates Fags. Surely Christian scripture isn't as wretched as some of the examples I've seen from the Koran.
Won't ever happen. It's part of the story of God's relationship with man. It's a part that you don't seem to understand, but that doesn't make it wrong or morally abhorrent. It's neither of those things.
You see - I can take that arguement. But when I go to a church, I meet people who tell me that it's not a story of God's relationship with man. I'm told - the Bible is God's (Capital-W) Word. His unerring Word. It's His will for us. You and I can take more reasonable and educated stances on the meaning of scripture, but there are hundreds of millions of little thumpers out there, and church leaders, and radio talkshow hosts, who embrace a different notion.
That is the problem. And for a couple thousand years now, Christianity has had to deal with this problem. There are two solutions. Educate Christians how to deal with scripture. Or remove the problem passages from canon. You're right in that it's far far too late to do the latter. (never mind that there are hundreds of different versions of scripture already, but only one official catholic canon). Factionalisation has made this option impossible. It's an irreversible mistake that the early catholic church councils made. And factionalisation also has made education impossible. So the "reasonable" Christians are marginalized into a few shrinking denominations, like ELCA Lutherans, the near-extinct Chaleans in Iraq, etc. So now we have to deal with the Pat Robertsons and Tim McVeighs of the world. Just like the moderate Muslims have to deal with the Osama bin Ladens and Ayatollah Khomenis.
I can love The Lord, and not embrace inerrant scripture, and be brothers with the Tim McVeighs.
Fearmongering implies that the fearmongerer has something to gain by spreading the fear. (ie "if you do X, we won't all die"). He's saying that no matter what we do, we're fucked. Whether it's true or not, whether he's knowingly lying or not - it's not fearmongering. Unless he's somehow going to profit from all humanity being wiped out (including himself).
Google is ad-supported. The Internet on which they very profitably operate was built on taxpayer funds. I don't see why they shouldn't pay their fair share.
Space program, Public education, etc. isn't ad supported (and shouldn't be).
While I agree with the premise that Social Security is a necessary expenditure (ie. it benefits me when extremely poor people are minimally supported in their old age when they're too infirm to work; because if they're not taken care of, then we have hundreds of thousands of elderly homeless people starving and dying in the streets) - I don't agree with how the program's been managed and implemented, and I really wish they'd just kill it. If they were to kill it, and Americans were to see the consequences of this action, we could get past all the bullshit rhetoric from both sides, and as voters, make a more informed decision. We're so far removed from those consequences now, I think that voters have no clue as to what's at stake. (ie. the worst fallacy is thinking that when they stop having to pay SS tax, that they'll actually benefit from that money: wrong (most likely) - the inflation that causes will drive up interes rates, and/or generate a downward wage-pressure that will eliminate this money, and we'll be back in the situation we were in in 1930.) We're already seeing the consequences of the medicare drug benefit privatization fiasco, tens of millions of seniors can no longer get their medication, and state governments and young families are having to pick up the slack. Great for the drug companies. Terrible for Americans who aren't CxO's or major shareholders of huge pharmaceutical companies. In about 6 months, when massive numbers of seniors start dropping in the streets, (already happened to my mother - she had a heart problem while waiting in line at a pharmacy - remember soviet bread-lines?) when large numbers of upper middle class young families start having to shell out a thousand bucks a month or more for mom and dad's drugs, people are going to see the consequences of this ill-conceived law. And then, maybe there will be action.
SS/Medicaid is an insurance policy for those too incompetent, or ignorant, to do better for themselves.
Wrong. It is an insurance policy for EVERYONE. Hence the term "insurance" - the point of "insurance" being to spread risk broadly, so that everyone benefits from the law of averages. When insurers start picking and choosing participants based on risk, it ceases to be "insurance" and instead becomes an extortion racket.
as linking rewards to success is far more profitable for everyone.
Unfortuately, this does nothing at all to link rewards to success. Not like Profit Sharing does. This links rewards to stock price. And short term stock price, at that.
It's profitable for the few bigwigs and cronies at the top, who routinely trade stocks on insider information, who routinely falsify or twist accounting results in order to pump and dump. It is not profitable for the workers, or the rank and file shareholders, or creditors who get stuck when the company has to file bankruptcy because the workers' pension fun has been the CEO's personal piggybank.
NeXT wasn't exactly doing all that great at the time of the merger either.
It could be said that NeXT had great technology, but couldn't get anywhere with it because they didn't have the market clout. They bought Apple's name, and market clout, and suceeded dramatically. None of this had anything at all to do with the iPod. But you can't talk about the success of Apple without talking about the iPod.
Personally, I like to think that the iPod was a success because the hard-drive, the fire wire, etc. were all just what the market was looking for. But really - I think the success of the iPod is due to Apple's FairPlay more than anything else.
I can't wait for Jobs to buy a Cable News channel.
They bitch and moan about the Liberal media now? Just wait until Steve (militant vegan) Jobs gets his own channel. They don't know the meaning of the word "liberal" - - yet.
I don't want to believe this is the case, but maybe that's just the liberal in me, always trying to see the best in people.
I dunno - the Liberal in me believes that the reason he's not seeking warrants is because he conflates democrats with terrorsts, they're all "political enemies" to him. Like Nixon. And if you look at his staff, many were veterans of the Nixon administration. Rove worked for Nixon.
The lesson I learned in 1999/2000 is that EVERYONE knew that the market could not sustain those levels. But people put their money in anyway, because they thought it would go up for a while longer, and they wanted to gamble on getting out on time.
Everyone knew the market would deflate eventually. The most pessemistic said it would go down by 50%. Then start to steadily climb again. Since I was in for the long term, I figured I could handle a temporary dip, even on that scale. However, most of my stocks didn't go down by 50%. When they passed that mark, I bailed, and still made a profit - just not the profit I had hoped for. Most bottomed out at about 1/10th their peak value. Most have not gone back up - most have been absolutely flat under George W Bush's "growth and jobs inspiring tax cuts" - for 5 years. (If you look at a graph of most indices over the past 10 years, yesterday was a mouse-fart).
Then I heard a repeat of the same crap - in the housing market. Everyone knew the bubble was not sustainable, everyone knew it would drop at some point, the most pessimistic analysts have said that maybe prices will level out for a few years at worst. I'm expecting huge drops. Like most Americans who are making payments on a single home, I'll be fucked. 11% drop in November. 9% drop in December.
I don't want to conflate "rootkit" with "cloaking" (by Mark Russinovich's terms) - even though that's somewhat playing into the hands of the corporate vendors who are starting to play this game now.
(also - I realize that such a plug-in would necessarily have to be linked with a filter-driver of some kind as well, one that loads before the other "cloaking" software).
This could be a place to draw a line in the sand: Cloakers use +H (hidden bit). Administrators respond by using -H, or setting Explorer to show hidden files. Cloakers respond by using a filter driver to hide file system objects. (skanky, but somewhat justifiable, as in the Symantec NPROTECT case). Administrators respond by using this anti-cloaking plugin. Cloakers respond by disabling the plugin. . .
This is a measure that would be much more clearly framed as malicious. It sucks that we have gotten to this point of he-said/she-said, but here's where we are. Companies like Symantec are saying that it's justifiable to install "cloaking" to protect a user from their own actions. Sure, that washes for a non-technical user. It still smells funny, but I can buy that argument. Sony's argument that there's a license agreement, etc. - seems more closely related to the weasel family.
But when the cloaking advocates take the added step of actually disabling de-cloaking tools, (especially covertly) then that's something that in my mind, is a much more clearly malicious action. I suppose my view is easier to understand if I explain: I think it's a good thing to protect non-technical users from their own actions (as in the Symantec NPROTECT case; uneducated fumbling could cause data loss!) - and you could argue that Sony's spyware protects users from "accidentally" violating copyright law - protecting them from the consequences of potential lawsuits, etc. (although that argument is a peice of shit). But you can't argue that a system administrator, developer, engineer, or technician, should be operating in a protective cage. That's utter bullshit, and to me, as a systems engineer, in order to be able to guarantee that my products are secure for my customer, I better damn well have complete control over the configuration of my machine. You can weld the hood shut against mechanics - but you better damn well let a mechanic have a way to work on the engine.
To give you an idea, it would be like comparing the writing styles of JK Rowling to William Gibson, one is very simple and easy to read, the other is very high-level and in-depth.
I wouldn't say JK Rowling is easy to read. If you've ever read Goblet of Fire (in particular) aloud to your kids (for example) - you notice the extreme adverb abuse that goes on in her writing. It's not so bad reading to yourself silently - but when you hear all those "-ly"'s coming out of your mouth, it's pure torture.
I think that what is needed, is an Explorer plugin, to be made freely and widely available, which circumvents this "cloaking" technology (using Mark Russinovich's term).
If all of this "cloaking" crap were to be made irrelevant, then these kinds of things would no longer be a security issue - it would return administrative control over machines to the machine's owner. Whether that's Symantec's cloaking for their recycle bin, or whether it's Sony's rootkit, or anything else.
Computer owners don't need a corporate nanny protecting them from shooting themselves in the foot. Good software design does that. Not sneak tactics.
Christianity, and therefore Capitalism, are not just incompatible, but diametrically opposed explicitly
Not so!
One of the most holy sacraments of the Church of Mammon is to thoroughly delude one's self that one is a "Good Christian" (Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Jew, Thorian, whatever) - while actually serving Mammon (God Money). The Sacred Mendacity. And this, my freind, is the golden age of Mammon's ultimate triumph over the world.
Heh - reminds me of the visit I made to Provo Utah, where at a Novell campus, I saw the PPC Port of Netware running on a Motorola Viper. Ah - those where the days. Back when my CNE was my meal ticket, and not just so much cheap toilet paper. . .
One of the great disappointments of my dual 2GHz G5 Power Mac was that when I first bought it, it was not just relatively quiet, it was unusually quiet. Not silent, but quiet.
Then came the first OS update, and a series of firmware updates, and with virtually each one, the behavior of the fans has changed dramatically. And it has never returned back to it's original baseline state of "unusually quiet".
I wanted one until: 1. Apple showed that they don't want to support firewire as the interface of choice anymore. 2. Apple shipped a spyTunes 6.0.2. I know you can shut it off. But they were not up front about it, it does not bode well for the future. 3. Apple has switched to Intel - and appears to have the intention of supporting hardware-level DRM (a.k.a. "trusted computing").
I'm no longer all that exited about getting an iPod. Apple's technology is good. But they're increasingly taking a poor policy stance.
Bush *is* my guy, he's just not very good at doing what I want from a Republican. I want a fiscally conservative and a socially laissez-faire administration, not a deficit-spending social imperialist.
Republicans will lie and say that's what they're for, and SUCKERS like you will vote for them. Not realizing that once they get into power, they're just whores for the highest bidder like any other politician.
If the self-proclaimed american conservatives weren't so gullible, this wouldn't be a problem. Must have something to do with how gullible one has to be to accept "Free Market Economic" theory as viable. . .
We're all willing to put up with dozens of repeat articles on cold fusion based on the dream that one day, we'll all be able to extend our middle fingers at ExxonMobilShellAramcoBushCoHalliburtonChevron.
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The Bible doesn't say a single thing about "hate gays, hate other religions, hate sex, hate the darkies".
What stunning ignorance. I've read the bible. I've seen specific passages pointed out by self-proclaimed Evangelicals to the effect that God Hates Fags. Surely Christian scripture isn't as wretched as some of the examples I've seen from the Koran.
Won't ever happen. It's part of the story of God's relationship with man. It's a part that you don't seem to understand, but that doesn't make it wrong or morally abhorrent. It's neither of those things.
You see - I can take that arguement. But when I go to a church, I meet people who tell me that it's not a story of God's relationship with man. I'm told - the Bible is God's (Capital-W) Word. His unerring Word. It's His will for us. You and I can take more reasonable and educated stances on the meaning of scripture, but there are hundreds of millions of little thumpers out there, and church leaders, and radio talkshow hosts, who embrace a different notion.
That is the problem. And for a couple thousand years now, Christianity has had to deal with this problem. There are two solutions. Educate Christians how to deal with scripture. Or remove the problem passages from canon. You're right in that it's far far too late to do the latter. (never mind that there are hundreds of different versions of scripture already, but only one official catholic canon). Factionalisation has made this option impossible. It's an irreversible mistake that the early catholic church councils made. And factionalisation also has made education impossible. So the "reasonable" Christians are marginalized into a few shrinking denominations, like ELCA Lutherans, the near-extinct Chaleans in Iraq, etc. So now we have to deal with the Pat Robertsons and Tim McVeighs of the world. Just like the moderate Muslims have to deal with the Osama bin Ladens and Ayatollah Khomenis.
I can love The Lord, and not embrace inerrant scripture, and be brothers with the Tim McVeighs.
It's not fearmongering.
Fearmongering implies that the fearmongerer has something to gain by spreading the fear. (ie "if you do X, we won't all die"). He's saying that no matter what we do, we're fucked. Whether it's true or not, whether he's knowingly lying or not - it's not fearmongering. Unless he's somehow going to profit from all humanity being wiped out (including himself).
Google is ad-supported.
The Internet on which they very profitably operate was built on taxpayer funds.
I don't see why they shouldn't pay their fair share.
Space program, Public education, etc. isn't ad supported (and shouldn't be).
While I agree with the premise that Social Security is a necessary expenditure (ie. it benefits me when extremely poor people are minimally supported in their old age when they're too infirm to work; because if they're not taken care of, then we have hundreds of thousands of elderly homeless people starving and dying in the streets) - I don't agree with how the program's been managed and implemented, and I really wish they'd just kill it.
If they were to kill it, and Americans were to see the consequences of this action, we could get past all the bullshit rhetoric from both sides, and as voters, make a more informed decision. We're so far removed from those consequences now, I think that voters have no clue as to what's at stake. (ie. the worst fallacy is thinking that when they stop having to pay SS tax, that they'll actually benefit from that money: wrong (most likely) - the inflation that causes will drive up interes rates, and/or generate a downward wage-pressure that will eliminate this money, and we'll be back in the situation we were in in 1930.)
We're already seeing the consequences of the medicare drug benefit privatization fiasco, tens of millions of seniors can no longer get their medication, and state governments and young families are having to pick up the slack. Great for the drug companies. Terrible for Americans who aren't CxO's or major shareholders of huge pharmaceutical companies. In about 6 months, when massive numbers of seniors start dropping in the streets, (already happened to my mother - she had a heart problem while waiting in line at a pharmacy - remember soviet bread-lines?) when large numbers of upper middle class young families start having to shell out a thousand bucks a month or more for mom and dad's drugs, people are going to see the consequences of this ill-conceived law. And then, maybe there will be action.
SS/Medicaid is an insurance policy for those too incompetent, or ignorant, to do better for themselves.
Wrong. It is an insurance policy for EVERYONE. Hence the term "insurance" - the point of "insurance" being to spread risk broadly, so that everyone benefits from the law of averages. When insurers start picking and choosing participants based on risk, it ceases to be "insurance" and instead becomes an extortion racket.
Include a printout of a hash of the vote data on the paper.
Much less easlily falsifiable.
as linking rewards to success is far more profitable for everyone.
Unfortuately, this does nothing at all to link rewards to success. Not like Profit Sharing does. This links rewards to stock price. And short term stock price, at that.
It's profitable for the few bigwigs and cronies at the top, who routinely trade stocks on insider information, who routinely falsify or twist accounting results in order to pump and dump. It is not profitable for the workers, or the rank and file shareholders, or creditors who get stuck when the company has to file bankruptcy because the workers' pension fun has been the CEO's personal piggybank.
Obviously, China is not run by huge multinational oil companies, like all other industrialized nations are.
NeXT wasn't exactly doing all that great at the time of the merger either.
It could be said that NeXT had great technology, but couldn't get anywhere with it because they didn't have the market clout. They bought Apple's name, and market clout, and suceeded dramatically. None of this had anything at all to do with the iPod. But you can't talk about the success of Apple without talking about the iPod.
Personally, I like to think that the iPod was a success because the hard-drive, the fire wire, etc. were all just what the market was looking for. But really - I think the success of the iPod is due to Apple's FairPlay more than anything else.
I For One, Welcome Jobs As Our Media Overlord.
I can't wait for Jobs to buy a Cable News channel.
They bitch and moan about the Liberal media now?
Just wait until Steve (militant vegan) Jobs gets his own channel.
They don't know the meaning of the word "liberal" - - yet.
I don't want to believe this is the case, but maybe that's just the liberal in me, always trying to see the best in people.
I dunno - the Liberal in me believes that the reason he's not seeking warrants is because he conflates democrats with terrorsts, they're all "political enemies" to him. Like Nixon. And if you look at his staff, many were veterans of the Nixon administration. Rove worked for Nixon.
What are Finland's immigration policies? Just curious.
The lesson I learned in 1999/2000 is that EVERYONE knew that the market could not sustain those levels. But people put their money in anyway, because they thought it would go up for a while longer, and they wanted to gamble on getting out on time.
Everyone knew the market would deflate eventually. The most pessemistic said it would go down by 50%. Then start to steadily climb again. Since I was in for the long term, I figured I could handle a temporary dip, even on that scale. However, most of my stocks didn't go down by 50%. When they passed that mark, I bailed, and still made a profit - just not the profit I had hoped for. Most bottomed out at about 1/10th their peak value. Most have not gone back up - most have been absolutely flat under George W Bush's "growth and jobs inspiring tax cuts" - for 5 years. (If you look at a graph of most indices over the past 10 years, yesterday was a mouse-fart).
Then I heard a repeat of the same crap - in the housing market. Everyone knew the bubble was not sustainable, everyone knew it would drop at some point, the most pessimistic analysts have said that maybe prices will level out for a few years at worst. I'm expecting huge drops. Like most Americans who are making payments on a single home, I'll be fucked. 11% drop in November. 9% drop in December.
At least I have my health. . .
you should be using both
I believe hiding trade facts is very important for a free market.
ever hear of the term; "unclear on the concept"?
I don't want to conflate "rootkit" with "cloaking" (by Mark Russinovich's terms) - even though that's somewhat playing into the hands of the corporate vendors who are starting to play this game now.
(also - I realize that such a plug-in would necessarily have to be linked with a filter-driver of some kind as well, one that loads before the other "cloaking" software).
This could be a place to draw a line in the sand:
Cloakers use +H (hidden bit).
Administrators respond by using -H, or setting Explorer to show hidden files.
Cloakers respond by using a filter driver to hide file system objects. (skanky, but somewhat justifiable, as in the Symantec NPROTECT case).
Administrators respond by using this anti-cloaking plugin.
Cloakers respond by disabling the plugin. . .
This is a measure that would be much more clearly framed as malicious. It sucks that we have gotten to this point of he-said/she-said, but here's where we are. Companies like Symantec are saying that it's justifiable to install "cloaking" to protect a user from their own actions. Sure, that washes for a non-technical user. It still smells funny, but I can buy that argument. Sony's argument that there's a license agreement, etc. - seems more closely related to the weasel family.
But when the cloaking advocates take the added step of actually disabling de-cloaking tools, (especially covertly) then that's something that in my mind, is a much more clearly malicious action. I suppose my view is easier to understand if I explain: I think it's a good thing to protect non-technical users from their own actions (as in the Symantec NPROTECT case; uneducated fumbling could cause data loss!) - and you could argue that Sony's spyware protects users from "accidentally" violating copyright law - protecting them from the consequences of potential lawsuits, etc. (although that argument is a peice of shit). But you can't argue that a system administrator, developer, engineer, or technician, should be operating in a protective cage. That's utter bullshit, and to me, as a systems engineer, in order to be able to guarantee that my products are secure for my customer, I better damn well have complete control over the configuration of my machine. You can weld the hood shut against mechanics - but you better damn well let a mechanic have a way to work on the engine.
To give you an idea, it would be like comparing the writing styles of JK Rowling to William Gibson, one is very simple and easy to read, the other is very high-level and in-depth.
I wouldn't say JK Rowling is easy to read. If you've ever read Goblet of Fire (in particular) aloud to your kids (for example) - you notice the extreme adverb abuse that goes on in her writing. It's not so bad reading to yourself silently - but when you hear all those "-ly"'s coming out of your mouth, it's pure torture.
I think that what is needed, is an Explorer plugin, to be made freely and widely available, which circumvents this "cloaking" technology (using Mark Russinovich's term).
If all of this "cloaking" crap were to be made irrelevant, then these kinds of things would no longer be a security issue - it would return administrative control over machines to the machine's owner. Whether that's Symantec's cloaking for their recycle bin, or whether it's Sony's rootkit, or anything else.
Computer owners don't need a corporate nanny protecting them from shooting themselves in the foot. Good software design does that. Not sneak tactics.
Christianity, and therefore Capitalism, are not just incompatible, but diametrically opposed explicitly
Not so!
One of the most holy sacraments of the Church of Mammon is to thoroughly delude one's self that one is a "Good Christian" (Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Jew, Thorian, whatever) - while actually serving Mammon (God Money). The Sacred Mendacity. And this, my freind, is the golden age of Mammon's ultimate triumph over the world.
Would like to be able to run Windows apps the way OS X runs Classic Apps, now;
. . . Mac OS X doesn't run Classic Apps now (not on the intel version). And that's exactly how I'd like to be able to run Windows apps on OS X.
Heh - reminds me of the visit I made to Provo Utah, where at a Novell campus, I saw the PPC Port of Netware running on a Motorola Viper. Ah - those where the days. Back when my CNE was my meal ticket, and not just so much cheap toilet paper. . .
One of the great disappointments of my dual 2GHz G5 Power Mac was that when I first bought it, it was not just relatively quiet, it was unusually quiet. Not silent, but quiet.
Then came the first OS update, and a series of firmware updates, and with virtually each one, the behavior of the fans has changed dramatically. And it has never returned back to it's original baseline state of "unusually quiet".
Anyone else feel cheated?
meh.
I wanted one until:
1. Apple showed that they don't want to support firewire as the interface of choice anymore.
2. Apple shipped a spyTunes 6.0.2. I know you can shut it off. But they were not up front about it, it does not bode well for the future.
3. Apple has switched to Intel - and appears to have the intention of supporting hardware-level DRM (a.k.a. "trusted computing").
I'm no longer all that exited about getting an iPod. Apple's technology is good. But they're increasingly taking a poor policy stance.
Bush *is* my guy, he's just not very good at doing what I want from a Republican. I want a fiscally conservative and a socially laissez-faire administration, not a deficit-spending social imperialist.
Republicans will lie and say that's what they're for, and SUCKERS like you will vote for them. Not realizing that once they get into power, they're just whores for the highest bidder like any other politician.
If the self-proclaimed american conservatives weren't so gullible, this wouldn't be a problem. Must have something to do with how gullible one has to be to accept "Free Market Economic" theory as viable. . .
We're all willing to put up with dozens of repeat articles on cold fusion based on the dream that one day, we'll all be able to extend our middle fingers at ExxonMobilShellAramcoBushCoHalliburtonChevron.
But I do agree with you. Death sentences for spammers is just silly.
Yes.
They should be tortured for the rest of their lives.