Yet giving everyone affordable access to healthcare, increasing productivity, is decried as socialist,
That's how they discredit the idea for those who think in terms of "Capitalism=good, Socialism=Communism=Stalin=Gulags=bad".
The underlying thought though is; "socialized medicine=I take care of myself, exercise, eat right, but I'll have to pay for those fat people's heart transplants, and/or we'll have to federally mandate that people eat right and take care of themselves, and/or get the government involved in people's personal medical information, etc."
And I can understand those feelings.
But I think the trend is pretty clear. Companies are struggling to pay their employee's medical costs. Companies like Ford. California is pushing for a single-payer system. The usual rightwing suspects are saying companies will leave California in droves (just like they've been claiming that Californias other socialized institutions have been forcing companies to leave the worlds 5th largest economy for the past 20 years, yeah right). Employers are going to LOVE getting rid of their bloated, worthless, expensive healthcare plans, and putting the burden onto the workers via their income taxes. This measure's going to attract industry to California - not the other way around as the Rush Limbaughs of the world are arguing.
Mac before last was a 6100. I overclocked it (soldered a clip-on clock chip on top of the old one), added a HD, upgraded the cd-r to a burner.
My last mac was a beige G3.
It was fine for about a year.
Then I upgraded the video with an ATI Rage 128.
Got a bigger HD.
Updated the ROM card so I could run both my old and new HD.
Got a CPU accelrator (G4 450 MHz - didn't help much - architecture was badly bus-bound).
Then I got a firewire/usb card.
Had an external fw DVD burner. (hacked iDVD to work with it).
USB optical mouse.
Why didn't I just buy a new G4? I tried one. They weren't all that much better than my upgraded G3.
About 2 years ago, I bought a dual G5 though. (still using the 23" CRT I used with the beige).
I just installed my first expansion item; a bluetooth module.
I'm adding a second hard drive this week.
Maybe I'm not a typical Mac user.
I drooled over the ArsTechnical article last week where they took a dual duo core x86 Mac Pro, and put quad core x86 chips in - and they worked. Awesome. . . .
I think I'm going to be an a-typical Mac user for a long, long, time.
My (toshiba RP) HDTV has colorstream. It's fucking beautiful. Even if it's not "real" HDTV.
My biggest complaint about my DVD player is that it defaults to HDMI out. Every time we have a power glitch, the (samsung) DVD player reverts to the default. I keep the S-Video connector connected so that I can access the menu to switch back and enable the colorstream output. That's a pain in the ass.
I want to put my TV and DVD player on a UPS so I can keep my custom settings. Is that sick?
I don't see why the government doesn't just hand this whole Diebold fiasco off to Mitre.org or something like that. They'll turn out that little diebold whore.
I've noticed that some web sites will pop-up a browser window and hide it. For what reason, I have no idea. Poor coding practice?
On the Mac side, you can make it appear by using Expose. It's just a tiny, blank browser window with no control bar or buttons or anything, shuffled conveniently off the screen. Until Expose makes it my bitch.
On the Windows side, I'm sure there's got to be ways of popping IE windows, and making them not appear in the task bar. I just haven't seen it on the Windows side, because I browse a much narrower range of sites on Windows.
1) An IP address is technically non anonymous, true. But in a world of NAT, and DHCP, etc. there's a strong argument to be made that one is functionally anonymous, as far as the legal argument that that would bring some material gain goes. But I guess a sufficiently well-dressed lawyer could successfully argue otherwise in court.
2) One wonders if it would be theoretically possible to code a patch to the Bit Torrent client that forbids any single user (IP address) from downloading a complete image from your seed. This way, there'd be no way to prove that you were sharing an entire image of the copyrighted work, because even if they obtained logfiles, or packet-captures, you couldn't assemble anything other than bits and pieces of the whole. Then the RIAA would have to track all of the seeders that a downloader got data from, and sue them as a group. (which, I suppose, is also possible).
3) So. . . . avoid torrent sites with user logins. . . ? but yeah, I grasp that there is a mechanism to punish leechers by not giving them download bandwidth.
I'm just speculating that if there's a narrow legal definition of behavior that defines "copyright violation" in downloads, if perhaps there's a way that the design of the technology can game that system. (just like the original Napster gamed the system because in 1995, users didn't materially benefit in a legal sense from sharing their music - until after the legal precedent was set that defined the social karma element as a material benefit, and therefore a violation of the wording in the copyright act.
Or google may be working to make sure that when the "Net Neutrality" laws are passed, that they're passed in Google's favor (ie. fake "net neutrality" - like "clear skies" "no child left behind" "patriot act" etc.)
I assume that's because the basis of their claims is that by SHARING music, one is profitting (for sufficiently broad definitions of "profit"). Maybe you're not getting paid when you share your music folder out, but you're getting "social karma" from people who download from you, and therefore, you're "stealing" that profit from the record company. And this is the legal basis by which the RIAA has to prosecute.
So the question is - on this basis. . . This means that "leechers" are basically not as likely to get sued?
Does this also mean that music distributed via Bit Torrent is also pretty much "safe" - because when you are sharing on that protocol, you're - A: not sharing a "significant quantity" of the copyrighted work (because various clients may only download one block from you - and by itself, that block is not "music" but actually small bits and pieces of otherwise meaningless digital data from several different files in the entire torrent package). B. not sharing in a way that the people who download from you, don't know who the hell you are, because the Bit Torrent protocol pretty much anonymizes you (don't know if that stands up to legal scrutiny).
So Bit Torrent users are also less likely to get sued?
A transmission swap can be IMPOSSIBLE without the correct (usually VERY expensive) tools and equipment. At least on modern cars.
I think there's a parallel to modern computing.
By the way, this "that's not programming, that's scripting" pissing contest is pretty silly too. You can swap transmissions all you want. But if the car's operator doesn't keep the gas tank full, (or the tires properly inflated, or the oil changed) the car will stop functioning in short order.
The reason children don't code (if that is even true, as it's a completely unsubstantiated assertion) is because they don't want to.
Or, more accurately, they're not motivated to.
When I started coding, the coolest computer games were; blackjack, pong, text adventure. . . (anyone remember Temple of Apshai?).
Coding a game of this calibre is pretty simple, and easily within reach of a kid with a TRS-80, and the BASIC manual that shipped with it, with maybe the 20-30 surplus hours per week a 10 year old kid has after school, chores, and other extracurricular activities.
The motivation? Learning. And, to impress freinds. (one buddy of mine, when we were 14, wrote a chess game for TRS-80 Model III - well, he was pretty special).
Today, my kids want to put in that kind of time, and have "Quake" as their output. No way in hell is that going to happen. There's no language or framework that has that kind of RAD power. So they would spend that kind of time, in java, in perl, realbasic, whatever, and come up with something as meaningless and trivial as a text-based blackjack game. Big deal. You have any idea how to motivate kids?
I wouldn't blame lack of access to programming languages - but there is a serious barrier to entry for "meaningful" things that a kid would want to write. We're talking OOP, IDE's, frameworks, licensing, etc. It's hugely more complex now to do these kinds of things - and NO language has abstracted out those complexities yet.
My oldest son (now 18) basically gave up, and decided that programming wasn't for him, when I tried to teach him Java. It was the OOP concepts that did him in - the same ones that I found very difficult to grasp (maybe I still haven't grasped - and neither have a lot of professional java programmers I know, by the way).
My 12 year old is there now - and he thought "hello world" was ok. But he wants to write something really cool to impress his freinds.
The other thing that drove me to program was the need for administrative automation. I've done tons and tons of scripting to just make system administration easier. (remember autoexec.bat and config.sys?) I didn't really start doing that stuff until I was in my 20's, because before that, I only cared about games. But a lot of that isn't necessary now on most modern OSes. It's all built-in now, GUIfied, and often, bundled with "Enterprise" or "Server" versions that aren't available to home users who don't want to either pay buttloads of money, or pirate. And in any case, most kids want to write games, not administrative scripts.
It came from far-far-rightwing radio commentator Michael "Savage" Weiner. (yes, his real name is Weiner, but he goes by "Michael Savage".)
I take it to mean; Islamofascism - the religious/cultural/political movement to establish fundamentalist Islamic rule, impose Sharia law, put all women into bhurkas and subject them to; no education, stay at home, and stoning for accused adultery, trading your daughter for a couple of goats, and hanging for accused homosexuals - you know, the whole nightmare story you read about. (as if rightwingers actually gave a crap about women's rights and gay rights).
They equate this with fascism, which isn't actually too far from the truth, because the broadest definition of fascism is "authoritarian ruling through force or threat of violence". However, most modern definitions of fascism include an element of corporatism, which frankly, isn't possible in an Islamic republic, because the entire economy is structured differently: strict interpretations of Islamic Law forbid charging interest for loans as Usury - which is really the essential element to any modern industrialized economic power.
"Islamofascist" is really a curious term, and a curious concept, because it exposes a problem in leftist thinking - that respect for other cultures and religions should trump respect for basic human rights of conscience. I don't think that all people who lean left, (or even who sit in the center) buy into that. Most lefties I know are appalled at the fundamentalist culture in Islam, but simply oppose use of force to change it. Some fairly brutal practices like wife-beating and female genital mutilation are deeply culturally ingrained in Islamic cultures (while not strictly being part of religious law itself - they're more like cultural traditions that were bolted on to the religion after the fact, by the men who "run the religion"; the imams who issue fatwas, etc.).
I don't think that the left can really effectively fight against the current rightwing stranglehold on power in the west, until it comes to grips with this cognative dissonance, and puts to rest the FUD that they're "objectively pro-terrorist". In fact, I think that if the representatives of the left (politicians, and other public figures) can make it clear that secularism is about human rights, and not about letting some other religion or way of thinking completely take over, then they can also begin to argue effectively that the things that westerners find objectionable about fundamentlist Islam, are also the same things that westerners should be finding objectionable about fundamentalist Christianity, or Judaism. What we're fighting for is peaceful coexistence, not a "clash of cultures". While the amount of global friction with fundamentalist Islamists is hard to deny, and convincing them to lay off on the "convert by sword" approach is going to be very difficult - an essential element is to convince our own radical militant fundamentalist Christians to lay off and coexist peacefully (and prosperously) as well.
Re:Disparaging members of other races? Hardly
on
Hacking the Governator
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· Score: 2, Informative
"I love the governor because he is a straight talker just like I am," she said.'
Yeah, except when he hides behind his ESL-credentials and says things like: "I never took steroids, besides, they weren't illegal when I took them." or "I believe that gay marriage should be between a man and a woman."
Personally, the guy who promised to come in as governor and apply fiscal discipline to solve California's budget crisis - and the first thing he does is put out a measure to borrow 8 billion dollars;
Straight-talking is not an appropriate description.
I don't have a problem with what he said candidly, off the record, behind closed doors, in his office, particularly since there is a personal backstory with rep Garcia.
But Schwartzenegger isn't anything close to a straight talker. He's your typical corporate-lobbyist stooge, just like all the rest. Including Angelides.
Oddly enough - I think that the draw of tabletop RPGs compared to computer, is the social aspect. The face to face comaraderie, the joking, making your best freind cry in front of everyone by backstabbing his character.
And most of all - the Rules Lawyering. You can't Rules Lawyer your way out of a bad situation in a computer RPG. That's a fact.
I recently stepped into a game store the other day. I haven't done any RPG gaming in years, and I'm getting back into it with a group of freinds from work.
I stepped up the the book rack, bewildered at the array of new D&D books available. 3rd edition? A book on just Psionics?! Version 3.5? WTF? So this guy comes up to me, overweight, bearded, wearing a vest. A fucking vest! (they're always wearing a fucking vest) I felt like I was back in 1987. He proceeds to very helpfully explain to me what the deal is WRT Version 3.5, and all the rest.
Then he starts telling me about an RPG system he and his group are working on. . . Dammit, I *did* step into a time machine and fall back to 1987!
It would be great if we can get away from this fundamentalist idology false dilemma of either you support 100% complete de-regulation, or your a commie.
There's plenty of room for refinement of process. Unfortunately, it's one of the most red-hot swollen festering political buttons right now.
There's a good reason for all this overhead. Well, most of it.
It's an attempt to prevent fraud and abuse.
It doesn't stop all fraud, it doesn't stop clever people from gaming the system (it's just a more complex game), and, of course, the system is only as good as the political hacks that are put into place to police it. But the absence of this overhead makes it much easier to get those contracts for the "$1000 hammer" that never get delivered.
Heh. Screw that noise. The TV is busy being used by me pwn1ng my 12-y/o son's little camping butt with his smarmy sniper-rife. I got yer number buddy, eat hot plasma!
The problem is; Small companies, with "lightweight" processes have traditionally been used as fronts for fraud and waste (a.k.a. "war-profiteering"). (example: ex-Senator Cunningham's dealings with "small contractor" MZM, or Shirlington Limousine, etc.)
With the implicit oversight involved with larger corporations (who tend to shun smaller contracts), this kind of fraud is less likely (though clearly not impossible - see Boeing's tanker-leasing deal). These large, established corporations tend to have established reputations they'd like to protect.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that all small companies are red flags for fraud, and I'm not saying all large companies are 100% safe. I'm saying that established oversight and processes common to large companies and larger contracts tend to weed-out the most common fraudulent practices.
I envision a future where applications come with API requirements, not OS requirements. "Requires GTK 2.42, OpenGL 3.0, and SDL. OpenAL 5 required for 3D audio."
Well, the kicker here is - these things ARE pretty much cross platform; Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, etc.
It's where you need to talk to the OS (Administrative Script Programmers chime in here - ) that causes the problem.
Sure, I can use a Perl script to admin my windows network, to talk to Active Directory through the ADSI interface, talk to the event log, registry, or file system through the WMI or WIN32 interface, etc.
But that script isn't portable.
I can do stuff on ANY unix, like create users, archive logs, secure permissions, etc. - and with the exception of specific paths (/usr/etc/var etc.) that script is pretty much portable. But talking to the OS in a windows world is a whole 'nother ball of twine. You may as well write your stuff in VBScript, because at least there's a bunch of examples out there where other coders have done the work (spent the hours) for you.
So - with the exception of this kind of scripting - we're pretty much already there. Pick your language. Pick your runtime environment.
What does this tell us?
The real battle is for the Server Market, and the mindshare of the network admins out there. Microsoft has made a lot of headway in the Server Market. No doubt about that. They totally made Novell their bitch in the 1990's. But there are signs they're losing their momentum. Part of this has to do with the failure of their focus on.NET. Part of this has to do with their reluctance to use any form of Open Source development, or open file formats. (in fact, the only time I can recall MS adopting an open protocol was TCP/IP, which, on their part, was wildly successful for them). They had a model to follow. They've done it before. But they're just reluctant to repeat their old successes, I guess.
This only really tells half the story. The software/OS half.
The other half is the Hardware Story.
SGI, HP, Digital, IBM, AT&T, all the big Unix vendors did have their own OS flavor. (At least shell scripting was mostly portable). But they also had their own hardware, mostly with different CPU architectures. Compiled binaries couldn't run on the different hardware platforms, even if they were written using the same damn libraries. The problem with this was that the hardware was damn expensive, so once you were locked in, they could totally assrape you on hardware.
Then the IBM PC platform came out, which was enough of a standard, and performed "good enough" on the low end, and was dirt cheap because of the fact that everybody could manufacture them to the same standard, and prices went down-down-down while performance improved. I remember paying $4000 for an IBM PC (an 086) with 16 MB of RAM, back in the 1980's. Monochrome screen. It had a "turbo" button you could press to make it run at 12 MHz instead of 10 MHz - (you could screw up timing in games and animations if you ran it at 12). When you look at the advent of the "sub-$1000" market in the late 1990's, those machines totally outclassed the top end in the 1980's, and they outclassed a lot of these proprietary Unix vendors' desktop machines as well.
DOS was just the cheap OS you could run on these cheap systems. But the real savings came in the hardware realm. They still do - compare perhaps the LAST hardware-holdout, Sun, to an intel-compatible system. Price-performance wise, it's not even close, in the desktop area.
One by one, these vendors either dropped out, got bought out, or switched to Intel architecture, to save themselves costs on the back-end. But most of them didn't forget their old "ways", and still charged a hardware premium.
Eventually, even Apple switched to intel chips; because the specialty CPU vendor just could not keep up, even with "superior" architecture. (whatever happened to "twice as fast"?).
The inexorable slide towards monoculture, ironically, was because of the overall cross-fertilization and competition in the huge intel-compatible-PC market. Within each Unix-vendor's hardware market, they were a monopoly, a monoculture. Each one lost out because, despite their best efforts to prevent compatability, the customers switched to the intel-compatable platforms. While we still have competition on the intel-compatable side (many CPU vendors, many Motherboard vendors, many adapter card vendors, many HD vendors, etc.) - prices will remain competitively low. But the market is consolidating, and has been for about a decade. The best news is that intel is losing the overwhelming dominance it's had for a long time.
It's ironic, that one of the tools for eliminating hardware dependency, Java, came out of the last hardware-holdout, and it perhaps saved Sun from losing the last slice of marketshare it had. (in addition to their intel offerings). Sun embraced multiculture, and it saved them. I would say, too, that IBM was probably saved by their embracing Linux (another "tool" of hardware cross-compatability, by virtue of it's Open Source foundation).
Microsoft, however, continues to reject multiculturalism, cross compatability. They really screwed the pooch with Java, and they also fucked themselves by taking a cross-platform OS (NT, ran on x86, MIPS, and PPC, at one time - Proof: xBox 360 uses some of the PPC fork of NT), and their rejection of anything Open Source. And their last gasp of a power-play,.NET, where they pretended to be "open" - but not really, has (in my observation) done nothing more than alienate formerly loyal Developers for the Win23 platform (particularly among the VB-set). This was really Microsoft's strongest asset: the legions of Visual Studio users out there, who coded exclusively for Windows, because Visual Studio was such a far superior IDE (others have been closing the gap lately), and it was so difficult to produce co
The Cell Phone companies and the Electrical Power Transmission companies have done studies, and those studies say that electrical fields can't possibly affect biological tissues.
No matter what goofy molecules ducks use to find their way to fly south for the winter.
Actually, it's much worse than just "liking feet".
BDSM "kinks" can be very personal.
Imagine if he had posted an ad for a MALE submissive, looking for a dominant. Could you imaging being outed as a male submissive to your basketball buddies? That's something someone could never live down.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet giving everyone affordable access to healthcare, increasing productivity, is decried as socialist,
That's how they discredit the idea for those who think in terms of "Capitalism=good, Socialism=Communism=Stalin=Gulags=bad".
The underlying thought though is; "socialized medicine=I take care of myself, exercise, eat right, but I'll have to pay for those fat people's heart transplants, and/or we'll have to federally mandate that people eat right and take care of themselves, and/or get the government involved in people's personal medical information, etc."
And I can understand those feelings.
But I think the trend is pretty clear. Companies are struggling to pay their employee's medical costs. Companies like Ford. California is pushing for a single-payer system. The usual rightwing suspects are saying companies will leave California in droves (just like they've been claiming that Californias other socialized institutions have been forcing companies to leave the worlds 5th largest economy for the past 20 years, yeah right). Employers are going to LOVE getting rid of their bloated, worthless, expensive healthcare plans, and putting the burden onto the workers via their income taxes. This measure's going to attract industry to California - not the other way around as the Rush Limbaughs of the world are arguing.
Mac before last was a 6100. I overclocked it (soldered a clip-on clock chip on top of the old one), added a HD, upgraded the cd-r to a burner.
My last mac was a beige G3.
It was fine for about a year.
Then I upgraded the video with an ATI Rage 128.
Got a bigger HD.
Updated the ROM card so I could run both my old and new HD.
Got a CPU accelrator (G4 450 MHz - didn't help much - architecture was badly bus-bound).
Then I got a firewire/usb card.
Had an external fw DVD burner. (hacked iDVD to work with it).
USB optical mouse.
Why didn't I just buy a new G4? I tried one. They weren't all that much better than my upgraded G3.
About 2 years ago, I bought a dual G5 though. (still using the 23" CRT I used with the beige).
I just installed my first expansion item; a bluetooth module.
I'm adding a second hard drive this week.
Maybe I'm not a typical Mac user.
I drooled over the ArsTechnical article last week where they took a dual duo core x86 Mac Pro, and put quad core x86 chips in - and they worked. Awesome. . . .
I think I'm going to be an a-typical Mac user for a long, long, time.
My (toshiba RP) HDTV has colorstream. It's fucking beautiful. Even if it's not "real" HDTV.
My biggest complaint about my DVD player is that it defaults to HDMI out. Every time we have a power glitch, the (samsung) DVD player reverts to the default. I keep the S-Video connector connected so that I can access the menu to switch back and enable the colorstream output. That's a pain in the ass.
I want to put my TV and DVD player on a UPS so I can keep my custom settings. Is that sick?
I don't see why the government doesn't just hand this whole Diebold fiasco off to Mitre.org or something like that. They'll turn out that little diebold whore.
I've noticed that some web sites will pop-up a browser window and hide it. For what reason, I have no idea. Poor coding practice?
On the Mac side, you can make it appear by using Expose. It's just a tiny, blank browser window with no control bar or buttons or anything, shuffled conveniently off the screen. Until Expose makes it my bitch.
On the Windows side, I'm sure there's got to be ways of popping IE windows, and making them not appear in the task bar. I just haven't seen it on the Windows side, because I browse a much narrower range of sites on Windows.
Thanks for the response;
1) An IP address is technically non anonymous, true. But in a world of NAT, and DHCP, etc. there's a strong argument to be made that one is functionally anonymous, as far as the legal argument that that would bring some material gain goes. But I guess a sufficiently well-dressed lawyer could successfully argue otherwise in court.
2) One wonders if it would be theoretically possible to code a patch to the Bit Torrent client that forbids any single user (IP address) from downloading a complete image from your seed. This way, there'd be no way to prove that you were sharing an entire image of the copyrighted work, because even if they obtained logfiles, or packet-captures, you couldn't assemble anything other than bits and pieces of the whole. Then the RIAA would have to track all of the seeders that a downloader got data from, and sue them as a group. (which, I suppose, is also possible).
3) So. . . . avoid torrent sites with user logins. . . ? but yeah, I grasp that there is a mechanism to punish leechers by not giving them download bandwidth.
I'm just speculating that if there's a narrow legal definition of behavior that defines "copyright violation" in downloads, if perhaps there's a way that the design of the technology can game that system. (just like the original Napster gamed the system because in 1995, users didn't materially benefit in a legal sense from sharing their music - until after the legal precedent was set that defined the social karma element as a material benefit, and therefore a violation of the wording in the copyright act.
Or google may be working to make sure that when the "Net Neutrality" laws are passed, that they're passed in Google's favor (ie. fake "net neutrality" - like "clear skies" "no child left behind" "patriot act" etc.)
A question:
I assume that's because the basis of their claims is that by SHARING music, one is profitting (for sufficiently broad definitions of "profit"). Maybe you're not getting paid when you share your music folder out, but you're getting "social karma" from people who download from you, and therefore, you're "stealing" that profit from the record company.
And this is the legal basis by which the RIAA has to prosecute.
So the question is - on this basis. . .
This means that "leechers" are basically not as likely to get sued?
Does this also mean that music distributed via Bit Torrent is also pretty much "safe" - because when you are sharing on that protocol, you're -
A: not sharing a "significant quantity" of the copyrighted work (because various clients may only download one block from you - and by itself, that block is not "music" but actually small bits and pieces of otherwise meaningless digital data from several different files in the entire torrent package).
B. not sharing in a way that the people who download from you, don't know who the hell you are, because the Bit Torrent protocol pretty much anonymizes you (don't know if that stands up to legal scrutiny).
So Bit Torrent users are also less likely to get sued?
(a transmission swap isn't difficult either),
A transmission swap can be IMPOSSIBLE without the correct (usually VERY expensive) tools and equipment. At least on modern cars.
I think there's a parallel to modern computing.
By the way, this "that's not programming, that's scripting" pissing contest is pretty silly too. You can swap transmissions all you want. But if the car's operator doesn't keep the gas tank full, (or the tires properly inflated, or the oil changed) the car will stop functioning in short order.
The reason children don't code (if that is even true, as it's a completely unsubstantiated assertion) is because they don't want to.
Or, more accurately, they're not motivated to.
When I started coding, the coolest computer games were; blackjack, pong, text adventure. . . (anyone remember Temple of Apshai?).
Coding a game of this calibre is pretty simple, and easily within reach of a kid with a TRS-80, and the BASIC manual that shipped with it, with maybe the 20-30 surplus hours per week a 10 year old kid has after school, chores, and other extracurricular activities.
The motivation? Learning. And, to impress freinds. (one buddy of mine, when we were 14, wrote a chess game for TRS-80 Model III - well, he was pretty special).
Today, my kids want to put in that kind of time, and have "Quake" as their output. No way in hell is that going to happen. There's no language or framework that has that kind of RAD power. So they would spend that kind of time, in java, in perl, realbasic, whatever, and come up with something as meaningless and trivial as a text-based blackjack game. Big deal.
You have any idea how to motivate kids?
I wouldn't blame lack of access to programming languages - but there is a serious barrier to entry for "meaningful" things that a kid would want to write. We're talking OOP, IDE's, frameworks, licensing, etc. It's hugely more complex now to do these kinds of things - and NO language has abstracted out those complexities yet.
My oldest son (now 18) basically gave up, and decided that programming wasn't for him, when I tried to teach him Java. It was the OOP concepts that did him in - the same ones that I found very difficult to grasp (maybe I still haven't grasped - and neither have a lot of professional java programmers I know, by the way).
My 12 year old is there now - and he thought "hello world" was ok. But he wants to write something really cool to impress his freinds.
The other thing that drove me to program was the need for administrative automation. I've done tons and tons of scripting to just make system administration easier. (remember autoexec.bat and config.sys?) I didn't really start doing that stuff until I was in my 20's, because before that, I only cared about games.
But a lot of that isn't necessary now on most modern OSes. It's all built-in now, GUIfied, and often, bundled with "Enterprise" or "Server" versions that aren't available to home users who don't want to either pay buttloads of money, or pirate. And in any case, most kids want to write games, not administrative scripts.
It came from far-far-rightwing radio commentator Michael "Savage" Weiner. (yes, his real name is Weiner, but he goes by "Michael Savage".)
I take it to mean;
Islamofascism - the religious/cultural/political movement to establish fundamentalist Islamic rule, impose Sharia law, put all women into bhurkas and subject them to; no education, stay at home, and stoning for accused adultery, trading your daughter for a couple of goats, and hanging for accused homosexuals - you know, the whole nightmare story you read about. (as if rightwingers actually gave a crap about women's rights and gay rights).
They equate this with fascism, which isn't actually too far from the truth, because the broadest definition of fascism is "authoritarian ruling through force or threat of violence". However, most modern definitions of fascism include an element of corporatism, which frankly, isn't possible in an Islamic republic, because the entire economy is structured differently: strict interpretations of Islamic Law forbid charging interest for loans as Usury - which is really the essential element to any modern industrialized economic power.
"Islamofascist" is really a curious term, and a curious concept, because it exposes a problem in leftist thinking - that respect for other cultures and religions should trump respect for basic human rights of conscience. I don't think that all people who lean left, (or even who sit in the center) buy into that. Most lefties I know are appalled at the fundamentalist culture in Islam, but simply oppose use of force to change it. Some fairly brutal practices like wife-beating and female genital mutilation are deeply culturally ingrained in Islamic cultures (while not strictly being part of religious law itself - they're more like cultural traditions that were bolted on to the religion after the fact, by the men who "run the religion"; the imams who issue fatwas, etc.).
I don't think that the left can really effectively fight against the current rightwing stranglehold on power in the west, until it comes to grips with this cognative dissonance, and puts to rest the FUD that they're "objectively pro-terrorist". In fact, I think that if the representatives of the left (politicians, and other public figures) can make it clear that secularism is about human rights, and not about letting some other religion or way of thinking completely take over, then they can also begin to argue effectively that the things that westerners find objectionable about fundamentlist Islam, are also the same things that westerners should be finding objectionable about fundamentalist Christianity, or Judaism. What we're fighting for is peaceful coexistence, not a "clash of cultures". While the amount of global friction with fundamentalist Islamists is hard to deny, and convincing them to lay off on the "convert by sword" approach is going to be very difficult - an essential element is to convince our own radical militant fundamentalist Christians to lay off and coexist peacefully (and prosperously) as well.
"I love the governor because he is a straight talker just like I am," she said.'
Yeah, except when he hides behind his ESL-credentials and says things like: "I never took steroids, besides, they weren't illegal when I took them." or "I believe that gay marriage should be between a man and a woman."
Personally, the guy who promised to come in as governor and apply fiscal discipline to solve California's budget crisis - and the first thing he does is put out a measure to borrow 8 billion dollars;
Straight-talking is not an appropriate description.
I don't have a problem with what he said candidly, off the record, behind closed doors, in his office, particularly since there is a personal backstory with rep Garcia.
But Schwartzenegger isn't anything close to a straight talker. He's your typical corporate-lobbyist stooge, just like all the rest. Including Angelides.
Where's my purple thumb?!
Oddly enough - I think that the draw of tabletop RPGs compared to computer, is the social aspect. The face to face comaraderie, the joking, making your best freind cry in front of everyone by backstabbing his character.
And most of all - the Rules Lawyering. You can't Rules Lawyer your way out of a bad situation in a computer RPG. That's a fact.
I recently stepped into a game store the other day. I haven't done any RPG gaming in years, and I'm getting back into it with a group of freinds from work.
I stepped up the the book rack, bewildered at the array of new D&D books available. 3rd edition? A book on just Psionics?! Version 3.5? WTF? So this guy comes up to me, overweight, bearded, wearing a vest. A fucking vest! (they're always wearing a fucking vest) I felt like I was back in 1987. He proceeds to very helpfully explain to me what the deal is WRT Version 3.5, and all the rest.
Then he starts telling me about an RPG system he and his group are working on. . .
Dammit, I *did* step into a time machine and fall back to 1987!
I agree.
It would be great if we can get away from this fundamentalist idology false dilemma of either you support 100% complete de-regulation, or your a commie.
There's plenty of room for refinement of process. Unfortunately, it's one of the most red-hot swollen festering political buttons right now.
There's a good reason for all this overhead. Well, most of it.
It's an attempt to prevent fraud and abuse.
It doesn't stop all fraud, it doesn't stop clever people from gaming the system (it's just a more complex game), and, of course, the system is only as good as the political hacks that are put into place to police it. But the absence of this overhead makes it much easier to get those contracts for the "$1000 hammer" that never get delivered.
Placing kids in front of the TV?
Heh.
Screw that noise. The TV is busy being used by me pwn1ng my 12-y/o son's little camping butt with his smarmy sniper-rife. I got yer number buddy, eat hot plasma!
The problem is;
Small companies, with "lightweight" processes have traditionally been used as fronts for fraud and waste (a.k.a. "war-profiteering"). (example: ex-Senator Cunningham's dealings with "small contractor" MZM, or Shirlington Limousine, etc.)
With the implicit oversight involved with larger corporations (who tend to shun smaller contracts), this kind of fraud is less likely (though clearly not impossible - see Boeing's tanker-leasing deal). These large, established corporations tend to have established reputations they'd like to protect.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that all small companies are red flags for fraud, and I'm not saying all large companies are 100% safe. I'm saying that established oversight and processes common to large companies and larger contracts tend to weed-out the most common fraudulent practices.
I envision a future where applications come with API requirements, not OS requirements. "Requires GTK 2.42, OpenGL 3.0, and SDL. OpenAL 5 required for 3D audio."
/etc /var etc.) that script is pretty much portable. But talking to the OS in a windows world is a whole 'nother ball of twine. You may as well write your stuff in VBScript, because at least there's a bunch of examples out there where other coders have done the work (spent the hours) for you.
.NET. Part of this has to do with their reluctance to use any form of Open Source development, or open file formats. (in fact, the only time I can recall MS adopting an open protocol was TCP/IP, which, on their part, was wildly successful for them). They had a model to follow. They've done it before. But they're just reluctant to repeat their old successes, I guess.
Well, the kicker here is - these things ARE pretty much cross platform; Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, etc.
It's where you need to talk to the OS (Administrative Script Programmers chime in here - ) that causes the problem.
Sure, I can use a Perl script to admin my windows network, to talk to Active Directory through the ADSI interface, talk to the event log, registry, or file system through the WMI or WIN32 interface, etc.
But that script isn't portable.
I can do stuff on ANY unix, like create users, archive logs, secure permissions, etc. - and with the exception of specific paths (/usr
So - with the exception of this kind of scripting - we're pretty much already there. Pick your language. Pick your runtime environment.
What does this tell us?
The real battle is for the Server Market, and the mindshare of the network admins out there. Microsoft has made a lot of headway in the Server Market. No doubt about that. They totally made Novell their bitch in the 1990's. But there are signs they're losing their momentum. Part of this has to do with the failure of their focus on
This only really tells half the story. The software/OS half.
.NET, where they pretended to be "open" - but not really, has (in my observation) done nothing more than alienate formerly loyal Developers for the Win23 platform (particularly among the VB-set). This was really Microsoft's strongest asset: the legions of Visual Studio users out there, who coded exclusively for Windows, because Visual Studio was such a far superior IDE (others have been closing the gap lately), and it was so difficult to produce co
The other half is the Hardware Story.
SGI, HP, Digital, IBM, AT&T, all the big Unix vendors did have their own OS flavor. (At least shell scripting was mostly portable). But they also had their own hardware, mostly with different CPU architectures. Compiled binaries couldn't run on the different hardware platforms, even if they were written using the same damn libraries. The problem with this was that the hardware was damn expensive, so once you were locked in, they could totally assrape you on hardware.
Then the IBM PC platform came out, which was enough of a standard, and performed "good enough" on the low end, and was dirt cheap because of the fact that everybody could manufacture them to the same standard, and prices went down-down-down while performance improved. I remember paying $4000 for an IBM PC (an 086) with 16 MB of RAM, back in the 1980's. Monochrome screen. It had a "turbo" button you could press to make it run at 12 MHz instead of 10 MHz - (you could screw up timing in games and animations if you ran it at 12). When you look at the advent of the "sub-$1000" market in the late 1990's, those machines totally outclassed the top end in the 1980's, and they outclassed a lot of these proprietary Unix vendors' desktop machines as well.
DOS was just the cheap OS you could run on these cheap systems. But the real savings came in the hardware realm. They still do - compare perhaps the LAST hardware-holdout, Sun, to an intel-compatible system. Price-performance wise, it's not even close, in the desktop area.
One by one, these vendors either dropped out, got bought out, or switched to Intel architecture, to save themselves costs on the back-end. But most of them didn't forget their old "ways", and still charged a hardware premium.
Eventually, even Apple switched to intel chips; because the specialty CPU vendor just could not keep up, even with "superior" architecture. (whatever happened to "twice as fast"?).
The inexorable slide towards monoculture, ironically, was because of the overall cross-fertilization and competition in the huge intel-compatible-PC market. Within each Unix-vendor's hardware market, they were a monopoly, a monoculture. Each one lost out because, despite their best efforts to prevent compatability, the customers switched to the intel-compatable platforms.
While we still have competition on the intel-compatable side (many CPU vendors, many Motherboard vendors, many adapter card vendors, many HD vendors, etc.) - prices will remain competitively low. But the market is consolidating, and has been for about a decade. The best news is that intel is losing the overwhelming dominance it's had for a long time.
It's ironic, that one of the tools for eliminating hardware dependency, Java, came out of the last hardware-holdout, and it perhaps saved Sun from losing the last slice of marketshare it had. (in addition to their intel offerings). Sun embraced multiculture, and it saved them. I would say, too, that IBM was probably saved by their embracing Linux (another "tool" of hardware cross-compatability, by virtue of it's Open Source foundation).
Microsoft, however, continues to reject multiculturalism, cross compatability. They really screwed the pooch with Java, and they also fucked themselves by taking a cross-platform OS (NT, ran on x86, MIPS, and PPC, at one time - Proof: xBox 360 uses some of the PPC fork of NT), and their rejection of anything Open Source. And their last gasp of a power-play,
The Cell Phone companies and the Electrical Power Transmission companies have done studies, and those studies say that electrical fields can't possibly affect biological tissues.
No matter what goofy molecules ducks use to find their way to fly south for the winter.
I think he was just a good-natured were-bear. But that's just me.
You want formula?
How about a weekly TV series called "Young Aaragorn" - the trials and tribulations of a young Numenorean king-in-exile attending an Elven High School.
Actually, it's much worse than just "liking feet".
BDSM "kinks" can be very personal.
Imagine if he had posted an ad for a MALE submissive, looking for a dominant. Could you imaging being outed as a male submissive to your basketball buddies? That's something someone could never live down.