I guess the real problem I have is that people seem to thing that by censoring the game that we'll get rid of violence between racial groups, etc. It's like saying movies that depict racially motivated violence should be censored. Our country will be in a sad state if that ever happens.
Actually the sad thing is a major point of the game is how stupid and pointless gang and interracial violence is. In other words, it was meant to parody a real life problem and potentially could prevent such violence by waking people up to this fact. The main character is continually dragged into the middle of these conflicts but does not start them. By staying above these conflicts and befriending both sides the main character comes out on top after fighting off the myriad gangs trying to kill him.
A major component of the game as well is the fact that gangs tend to take advantage of ethnic tensions and rivalries. The game features the sicilian mafia, southern US biker gangs, haitian and cuban gangs as well as the colombian cartels. There are various other nondescript gangs which appear to be ethnically segregated as well. The offending line "kill the haitians" is uttered by the cubano gangsters on their way to avenge deaths by haitian gangsters who have sworn "I will destroy the cubans." The whole game reads as a commentary and a parody of US gang violence and the underlying societal problems behind it.
umm i don't know details cause i only saw the "adapted to movie version" but when some high profile priest was described in bad ways by Larry Flint they put it under the 1st admendment. rightfully so. this man has his right to publicly state his opinion so i don't believe rockstar can sue. but another example comes to mind about billy joel's (maybe idol i forget) best selling album was one that was put on the "banned" list of albums.
It was Jerry Falwell. Jerry Falwell had campaigned against Hustler and similar magazines, in part by bullying various institutions, businesses, etc, with threats of lawsuits. IN retaliation, Larry Flint wrote a satirical story in Hustler opining that Falwell had lost his virginity by screwing his own mother in an outhouse. Falwell sued and lost because of the first amendment protections on parody. Basically because it was such an absolutely ridiculous story that only a complete idiot would take as true instead of recognizing as a parody, it was protected speech.
And they told me I'd have to have a private lab do it for me - and pay dearly for it! Why the hell won't they test my drinking water without my having to pay for it? Isn't delivering water that's reasonably free of contaminants part of their responsibility?
There are a number of places that will test your water for you. Some universities might do it for free. I know there are a number of places that you can send away for kits to test your water. I found this one in the first five minutes of furtive googling. These guys also seem like a good avenue to check out.
Yes, your county is supposed to provide clean water. They do generally test water periodically at various points, depending on how diligently they check (I have known of some water utilities who go so far as to make random checks at the customer's access point).
One thing to consider is that there are many things which can get into the water and it is difficult to test for everything. You generally have to know what you are looking for to find anything. Also you aren't just worried about chemicals here. Parasites can be a problem even in modern water supplies. The purification process usually deals with them, but there have been cases of contamination down the line which caused trouble.
The process of producing good clean water is a very important scientific advancement and we are getting better at it every day. It is one of the many things which makes our modern society possible and distinguishes it from the third world; probably one of the most important by virtue of its many benefits.
I don't think the problem is that these systems run Windows though that's certainly not helping the security situation. I believe the problem is more the secrecy these companies are taking as well and the inherent risk to the accuracy of the voting that comes with computerizing the process.
Yes, and windows requires that secrecy. First off, the operating system is closed source and cannot be modified. Second, although open source apps have been ported to the windows platform by making use of gcc and alien toolkits (like GTK+), software made using Visual C++ and the Microsoft native libraries is not the property of the programmer, but of Microsoft, by virtue of the virulent nature of the license for the Microsoft header files, APIS, and associated libraries. MIcrosoft has repeatedly said that developing open source software using these libraries is a violation of their license and the license for Visual C++.
The only hope is to use an open platform for this purpose.
Whatever. I suppose that when you write academic papers on teen sex it is about "hot lesbians" and XXX blowjobs. Just a few of the many uninformative sites that that search brings up.
Re:Voting with your dollars works both ways.
on
Wikipedia Needs $20K
·
· Score: 1
They're fields of study, and as such you CAN do scientific work in them. Very few endevour to do so, and virtually all work done to date has been less than scientific, even if it claims to be.
I do not disagree. However most scientific and other academic journals would consider the research that is currently conducted in this area either far outside what their criteria require or at best offtopic. There may be parapsychology journals; it would not surprise me. But it and its kin are NOT widely recognized as serious science by academics in other fields, nor is the research and scholarship generally up to the rigourous standards such academics would require.
In my completely non-professional opinion, I can't imagine PBAs being medically necessary, but I think the authors of the recent PBA ban were foolish not to include that exemption because of SCOTUS concerns.
Neither did Bush, in his non-professional opinion. However, neither you nor Bush are doctors. Thank you for deciding that you know better than doctors who have dedicated their lives to medicine and spent years both preparing in school and working directly in the field in question.
For the record, partial birth abortions were never allowed as of Roe V Wade unless the mother's life was in danger. Some reasons the mother's life might be in danger include deformities of the skull, specifically an oversized skull with little or no brain inside. It is a rare condition but it does happen. This also means that even if the child were saved it will likely not survive very long, and even then will be a vegetable. Both mother and child are likely to die in childbirth in such cases. Or so say doctors. BUt we all know that random people on slashdot and GWB knwo better.
The PBA ban would have been nothing but a token gesture which did not in any way change the law (because PBAs have ALWAYS been banned except when the mother's life is in danger) unless it was absolute. In other words the only condition under which PBA was legal was when the mother's life was in danger, and this is now an illegal procedure. Thank you for declaring that we will make sure women die in childbirth in the united states of america. God will reward our resolve with the heads of our enemies the evil hippies and terrorists.
"It's not often I get to ask this politely... what planet are you on? This one rotates too fast (1670 km/hr at the equator, 670 km/hr at the Artic/Antarctic Circles)."
So long as it's summer chasing the sun ceases to be an issue within the Artic/Antartic Circles:)
But when it is summer in the arctic it is winter in the antarctic, and vice versa....
A- Conceited without reason B- Self-interested to astronomic proportions C- Frustratingly condescending and tunnel-visioned D- Doesn't matter, it's all idiocy to me.
E - Cowboyneal F - ???? G - Profit!
I am going with E personally, though I am starting to lean towards F.
Just use "-" to remove results you don't want. So, if "teen" returns too many results that involve sex, just do "teen -sex" and no pages with the word sex will be returned.
And what if you are writing about teen sex but not about 18 year old porno actors? ahhh yes I guess you are screwed then.
Re:Voting with your dollars works both ways.
on
Wikipedia Needs $20K
·
· Score: 1
You haven't given any reason for not including an article on psychics in an encyclopedia. Why should I buy an entire book on psychics when perhaps all I'm interrested in is an encyclopedic article on psychics. (As well as perhaps a bunch of other topics that you don't find worthy of inclusion in an encyclopedia)
I'll bite. Maybe those editors do not think that pseudoscience and fantasy belong in a catalogue of scientific knowlege. You will also likely not find the corpus of various myths or the works of Asimov in the encyclopaedia.
Those people who consider work in that area scientific are few in number and small in influence. They therefore will be more likely to publish their work in highly specialized media such as tabloids or their book.
Your argument would be valid-- if wikipedia wasn't in constant peer review and written by many different people.
But that is the problem. It is peer review by random people on the internet. There is no guarantee of authenticity of any of the data. Neither is it likely that any recognized expert in a given domain will be involved at any point in this process. They will be too busy writing for the Encyclopaedia Britannica (which is available online) or internationally recognized and peer-reviewed academic journals (in which the peers who are doing the reviewing are all recognized experts in the domain in question.)
By the way there are indeed recognized experts, and indeed university degrees, available for each of the subjects you have mentioned.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=encyclope dia
I don't see anything referring to "authority". You're just pulling shit out of your ass.
How do you determine authority? What, does it depend if X amount of people believe them to be telling the truth?
Great, so the wiki dictionary does not think that the wiki encyclopaedia needs authority. Outstanding! I think we should find the wiki magazine that awards a +5 informative to this nugget of information. Oh well, slashdot will have to do.
In order for the articles for a body of knowlege to be considered accurate, they would have to be authoritative. To that end, they should be compiled by recognized authorities in the field in question. The history of the encyclopedia britannica illustrates this point. Section on psychoanalysis written by Sigmund Freud makes more sense than section on psychoanalysis by J Random Hacker on the internet, or Mr Trollsworth for that matter.
For what it is worth, you are probably an authority on the video games you were writing about. I am not sure since there are no links to your contributions.
Your analysis is wrong. How would it be any different from other p2p apps ? They don't outlaw Kazaa or whathaveyou because nobody would buy their service, since using p2p in general adds to the value. There is absolutely no difference. You're wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Wrong.
Actually broadband companies have repeatedly defined p2p apps as a "server" and therefore a violation of their TOS. If you serve content in any way you violate TOS and can be banned. They usually only attack you if you have been serving out more than what they calculate as your share or what is normal, but of course they never define in any objective overt way what is normal. So, yes they do ban p2p.
you know, your crapflooding would be a lot more interesting if that link didn't lead to a completely worthless webpage for figuring out what the hell you're talking about
Apparently it was a blog site which was slashdotted thanks to trolls and now is off the net:P
Basically, he's a skinny, stinky geek. So he needs some mcdonalds and some freshening agents. Or maybe he's a phat yet fresh dude and he's just getting the gifts everyone knows he'll love.
I got a toblerone the size of my arm and some pomade. I have no idea what that means...
Oh, and I got a nice compliment about my sexual prowess. I wanted it in writing so I could show it to all the ladies (and get em all up ons yo), but no dice:\
Don't worry; be happy. You'll be a thousandaire in no time, yo!:) BTW was it Dapper Dan or Fop?:)
Guy who submited this got toothpaste, tic-tacs and deo-spray.
He finds that choice wierd but perhaps his friends are sending a message?
My take on it would have been that they think he is cheap and he stinks. There is no other reason to get personal hygeine products for someone than to hope to God they use them. The McDonalds gift certs were probably to say that he is cheap; or he eats too much fucking fast food, I dunno...
"Being On Microsoft Schools Agreement means that any PC will thus cost money each year in the per-PC fees EVEN IF ITS USED WITH LINUX/*BSD. Don't matter - as long as its a Pentium class PC its fee liable."
Am I understanding this correctly? That you have to pay a fee for every Pentium class PC you have, even if it doesn't have Microsoft crap on it?!
If so, find the moron responsible for signing such a contract, and slap him/her silly.
This is Microsoft's standard contract. You dont get a different one. If you do not buy this contract you go to BSA-land. Under this contract you pay for a windows license on computers even if they run Linux, and even if you bought them with an OEM-licensed copy of Windows. So you pay for Windows at least twice in most cases.
You cannot decrease the number of computers under this contract. You can only increase it, and at a rate determined by Microsoft. This means that you may be paying for more licenses than you have computers.
This is the license they are offering schools, businesses, and governments, and they are lapping them up like hotcakes. It was Microsoft's plan to survive the dot-bomb and kill Linux, and it is working.
Recently the Federal government found out they had been being overcharged for years, in part by paying small business prices for things rather than enterprise prices. Their reaction was to buy more microsoft software than ever.
"I've noticed the open/close door sound from Doom a lot more than the end spawn cube sound."
This sound effect's most popular first use comes from the movie Aliens.
Didn't Star Trek do that first? Then again, Star Wars has wooshing doors, too. Damn you slashdot! Now I have to go over a bunch of geeky movies and games comparing sound effects!:)
<p><I> The server will be slashdotted because of the Linus picture IMO.</i> <p>Not only is it slashdotted, but it seems to have a custom 404 that has html errors so it shows the actual code instead of displaying the error: <block> <p><!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN"> <html><head> <title>404 Not Found</title> </head><body> <h1>N ot Found</h1> <p>The requested URL/pages/watchmen/pictures/pic01/linus4.jpg was not found on this server.</p> <p>Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.</p> <hr/> <address>Apache/2.0.40 Server at www.wbglinks.net Port 80</address> </body></html> </block>
The WMD's, especially the nuclair ones, can be inspected succesfully in: USA, France, China, Israel among others. But not Iraq.
The claim of WMD's was a Weapon of Mass Distraction. Unproofed FUD to make the common people live in fear. Just like SCO is for now.
Anyone who believes either is a complete dork. Proof first; innocent until proven.
When the Bush administration was drumming up support for the war they said they had incontrovertable evidence that there were WMDs. They claimed they knew what weapons Saddam had and where they were. They said they had pictures, spy reports, tons of intelligence. They have yet to produce even this. They claim that if there were not weapons they were fooled by bad intelligence, but they refuse to share even what they were looking at that had them so convinced!
If they really knew what they claimed they knew, they would have found the weapons already. Personally, I would not be surprised if Saddam had hidden something in Syria. BUt he did not hide himself in Syria. So maybe the Syrians were afraid of the stench of death about him. Besides, in the first gulf war, he tried to send weapons, planes, and troops to hide in neighbouring countries. The governments of these countries kept it all. So maybe Saddam hid stuff in Syria but it is Syria's WMD now. After all they are more dangerous than Saddam to both the US and Israel as well as to their own people.
The way Sadam was oppressing and torturing his own people made it a moral imperative to stop him (Because the US could stop the terror and improve the lives of Iraq people, as well the US had the legal right to do so)
If Bush had used this as a reason to attack Iraq, I would have supported the war and so would a lot of the people who oppose him now. But he explicitly promised that democracy in Iraq would not happen, and has explicitly acted to prevent it happening. Further, for 20-odd years the US government not only did not care what Saddam did to his people, but helped him do it better by supplying and enabling him. To pretend that he is the good guy and great liberator now is crass and cynical on the part of President Bush.
Have you looked at the timeline they have set up? Iraq is not to get an election for a constitutional convention until 2005. After the constituition is finally agreed upon maybe there will be an interim government. Elected government is not even on the table. Until then Iraq is to be occupied militarily, denied basic services like a police force and a government infrastructure (to do things like maintain roads, take away the garbage, keep the lights on, etc etc). That's no kind of plan in my book.
"if SCO succeeds and we end up with our back against the wall we can put something else on those boxes and carry on."
I disagree. Migrating will not be so easy. And also while the time linux was used SCO may ask people to pay up the 'license fee'.
The fact that Linux is a UNIX workalike, and the fact that most of the enterprise applications that run on Linux also run on commercial UNIX flavours like Solaris means that it is a lot easier to migrate to UNIX than it would be to or from Windows. Since Solaris is in the clear, so is one's choice IMHO.
x86 Solaris can be used on the same machines as Linux, or one can migrate to SPARC. Migrating to SPARC will be harder for sure, but either way the cost of the Solaris licenses will be less than dealing with SCO or any lawyers. TCO will still be less than Windows and you can have a happy day.
Understand the limitations of the tool you choose to work with and live with it or use a different tool. Nobodies forcing you to use any specific tool.
No, but somebody is trumpeting the lory of that tool as end-all-be-all, while simply ignoring the points of people who dare to break rank, spurn the kool-aid, and point out flaws. I swear every damn slashdot article about open source tools has some thread like this. And every time we get some version of "love it or leave it." What happened to actually trying to improve on the basis of valid criticism?
The article and the posts following it seem to promote MySQL as a production database to compete with Oracle. It is clear that while it is a nice database with good features and is useful for many projects, it lacks many things which DBAs like about RDBMS systems like Oracle. It is also clear that if any of the posts here and linked articles accurately describe MySQL behaviour it violates some very basic rules of software design.
"Defect" is also a difficult term to define. Some errors are much worse than others. It's not all about numbers, folks. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that MySQL isn't a great product. I just get skeptical when I hear things talked about in terms of "better" and "best."
Defect was also defined in the article.
It is difficult to quantify these things, true. BUt if you clearly define your terms and domain it is possible to get data. In this case they defined a set of common programming mistakes as defects and then compared the corpus of corporate closed source code they had reviewed to the MySQL code and found the number of defects per thousand lines was 6 times less.
Of course, this does not speak to design quality or the presence of mistakes which are harder to find than those for which they tested.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess the real problem I have is that people seem to thing that by censoring the game that we'll get rid of violence between racial groups, etc. It's like saying movies that depict racially motivated violence should be censored. Our country will be in a sad state if that ever happens.
Actually the sad thing is a major point of the game is how stupid and pointless gang and interracial violence is. In other words, it was meant to parody a real life problem and potentially could prevent such violence by waking people up to this fact. The main character is continually dragged into the middle of these conflicts but does not start them. By staying above these conflicts and befriending both sides the main character comes out on top after fighting off the myriad gangs trying to kill him.
A major component of the game as well is the fact that gangs tend to take advantage of ethnic tensions and rivalries. The game features the sicilian mafia, southern US biker gangs, haitian and cuban gangs as well as the colombian cartels. There are various other nondescript gangs which appear to be ethnically segregated as well. The offending line "kill the haitians" is uttered by the cubano gangsters on their way to avenge deaths by haitian gangsters who have sworn "I will destroy the cubans." The whole game reads as a commentary and a parody of US gang violence and the underlying societal problems behind it.
umm i don't know details cause i only saw the "adapted to movie version" but when some high profile priest was described in bad ways by Larry Flint they put it under the 1st admendment. rightfully so. this man has his right to publicly state his opinion so i don't believe rockstar can sue. but another example comes to mind about billy joel's (maybe idol i forget) best selling album was one that was put on the "banned" list of albums.
It was Jerry Falwell. Jerry Falwell had campaigned against Hustler and similar magazines, in part by bullying various institutions, businesses, etc, with threats of lawsuits. IN retaliation, Larry Flint wrote a satirical story in Hustler opining that Falwell had lost his virginity by screwing his own mother in an outhouse. Falwell sued and lost because of the first amendment protections on parody. Basically because it was such an absolutely ridiculous story that only a complete idiot would take as true instead of recognizing as a parody, it was protected speech.
And they told me I'd have to have a private lab do it for me - and pay dearly for it! Why the hell won't they test my drinking water without my having to pay for it? Isn't delivering water that's reasonably free of contaminants part of their responsibility?
There are a number of places that will test your water for you. Some universities might do it for free. I know there are a number of places that you can send away for kits to test your water. I found this one in the first five minutes of furtive googling. These guys also seem like a good avenue to check out.
Yes, your county is supposed to provide clean water. They do generally test water periodically at various points, depending on how diligently they check (I have known of some water utilities who go so far as to make random checks at the customer's access point).
One thing to consider is that there are many things which can get into the water and it is difficult to test for everything. You generally have to know what you are looking for to find anything. Also you aren't just worried about chemicals here. Parasites can be a problem even in modern water supplies. The purification process usually deals with them, but there have been cases of contamination down the line which caused trouble.
The process of producing good clean water is a very important scientific advancement and we are getting better at it every day. It is one of the many things which makes our modern society possible and distinguishes it from the third world; probably one of the most important by virtue of its many benefits.
I don't think the problem is that these systems run Windows though that's certainly not helping the security situation. I believe the problem is more the secrecy these companies are taking as well and the inherent risk to the accuracy of the voting that comes with computerizing the process.
Yes, and windows requires that secrecy. First off, the operating system is closed source and cannot be modified. Second, although open source apps have been ported to the windows platform by making use of gcc and alien toolkits (like GTK+), software made using Visual C++ and the Microsoft native libraries is not the property of the programmer, but of Microsoft, by virtue of the virulent nature of the license for the Microsoft header files, APIS, and associated libraries. MIcrosoft has repeatedly said that developing open source software using these libraries is a violation of their license and the license for Visual C++.
The only hope is to use an open platform for this purpose.
teen sex -"porno actors"
Gray matter is not just a blog software...
Whatever. I suppose that when you write academic papers on teen sex it is about "hot lesbians" and XXX blowjobs. Just a few of the many uninformative sites that that search brings up.
They're fields of study, and as such you CAN do scientific work in them. Very few endevour to do so, and virtually all work done to date has been less than scientific, even if it claims to be.
I do not disagree. However most scientific and other academic journals would consider the research that is currently conducted in this area either far outside what their criteria require or at best offtopic. There may be parapsychology journals; it would not surprise me. But it and its kin are NOT widely recognized as serious science by academics in other fields, nor is the research and scholarship generally up to the rigourous standards such academics would require.
In my completely non-professional opinion, I can't imagine PBAs being medically necessary, but I think the authors of the recent PBA ban were foolish not to include that exemption because of SCOTUS concerns.
Neither did Bush, in his non-professional opinion. However, neither you nor Bush are doctors. Thank you for deciding that you know better than doctors who have dedicated their lives to medicine and spent years both preparing in school and working directly in the field in question.
For the record, partial birth abortions were never allowed as of Roe V Wade unless the mother's life was in danger. Some reasons the mother's life might be in danger include deformities of the skull, specifically an oversized skull with little or no brain inside. It is a rare condition but it does happen. This also means that even if the child were saved it will likely not survive very long, and even then will be a vegetable. Both mother and child are likely to die in childbirth in such cases. Or so say doctors. BUt we all know that random people on slashdot and GWB knwo better.
The PBA ban would have been nothing but a token gesture which did not in any way change the law (because PBAs have ALWAYS been banned except when the mother's life is in danger) unless it was absolute. In other words the only condition under which PBA was legal was when the mother's life was in danger, and this is now an illegal procedure. Thank you for declaring that we will make sure women die in childbirth in the united states of america. God will reward our resolve with the heads of our enemies the evil hippies and terrorists.
"It's not often I get to ask this politely... what planet are you on? This one rotates too fast (1670 km/hr at the equator, 670 km/hr at the Artic/Antarctic Circles)."
So long as it's summer chasing the sun ceases to be an issue within the Artic/Antartic Circles :)
But when it is summer in the arctic it is winter in the antarctic, and vice versa....
A- Conceited without reason
B- Self-interested to astronomic proportions
C- Frustratingly condescending and tunnel-visioned
D- Doesn't matter, it's all idiocy to me.
E - Cowboyneal
F - ????
G - Profit!
I am going with E personally, though I am starting to lean towards F.
Just use "-" to remove results you don't want. So, if "teen" returns too many results that involve sex, just do "teen -sex" and no pages with the word sex will be returned.
And what if you are writing about teen sex but not about 18 year old porno actors? ahhh yes I guess you are screwed then.
You haven't given any reason for not including an article on psychics in an encyclopedia. Why should I buy an entire book on psychics when perhaps all I'm interrested in is an encyclopedic article on psychics. (As well as perhaps a bunch of other topics that you don't find worthy of inclusion in an encyclopedia)
I'll bite. Maybe those editors do not think that pseudoscience and fantasy belong in a catalogue of scientific knowlege. You will also likely not find the corpus of various myths or the works of Asimov in the encyclopaedia.
Those people who consider work in that area scientific are few in number and small in influence. They therefore will be more likely to publish their work in highly specialized media such as tabloids or their book.
Your argument would be valid-- if wikipedia wasn't in constant peer review and written by many different people.
But that is the problem. It is peer review by random people on the internet. There is no guarantee of authenticity of any of the data. Neither is it likely that any recognized expert in a given domain will be involved at any point in this process. They will be too busy writing for the Encyclopaedia Britannica (which is available online) or internationally recognized and peer-reviewed academic journals (in which the peers who are doing the reviewing are all recognized experts in the domain in question.)
By the way there are indeed recognized experts, and indeed university degrees, available for each of the subjects you have mentioned.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=encyclope dia
I don't see anything referring to "authority". You're just pulling shit out of your ass.
How do you determine authority? What, does it depend if X amount of people believe them to be telling the truth?
Great, so the wiki dictionary does not think that the wiki encyclopaedia needs authority. Outstanding! I think we should find the wiki magazine that awards a +5 informative to this nugget of information. Oh well, slashdot will have to do.
In order for the articles for a body of knowlege to be considered accurate, they would have to be authoritative. To that end, they should be compiled by recognized authorities in the field in question. The history of the encyclopedia britannica illustrates this point. Section on psychoanalysis written by Sigmund Freud makes more sense than section on psychoanalysis by J Random Hacker on the internet, or Mr Trollsworth for that matter.
For what it is worth, you are probably an authority on the video games you were writing about. I am not sure since there are no links to your contributions.
Your analysis is wrong. How would it be any different from other p2p apps ? They don't outlaw Kazaa or whathaveyou because nobody would buy their service, since using p2p in general adds to the value. There is absolutely no difference. You're wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Wrong.
Actually broadband companies have repeatedly defined p2p apps as a "server" and therefore a violation of their TOS. If you serve content in any way you violate TOS and can be banned. They usually only attack you if you have been serving out more than what they calculate as your share or what is normal, but of course they never define in any objective overt way what is normal. So, yes they do ban p2p.
you know, your crapflooding would be a lot more interesting if that link didn't lead to a completely worthless webpage for figuring out what the hell you're talking about
Apparently it was a blog site which was slashdotted thanks to trolls and now is off the net :P
Basically, he's a skinny, stinky geek. So he needs some mcdonalds and some freshening agents. Or maybe he's a phat yet fresh dude and he's just getting the gifts everyone knows he'll love.
I got a toblerone the size of my arm and some pomade. I have no idea what that means...
Oh, and I got a nice compliment about my sexual prowess. I wanted it in writing so I could show it to all the ladies (and get em all up ons yo), but no dice :\
Don't worry; be happy. You'll be a thousandaire in no time, yo! :) BTW was it Dapper Dan or Fop? :)
Guy who submited this got toothpaste, tic-tacs and deo-spray.
He finds that choice wierd but perhaps his friends are sending a message?
My take on it would have been that they think he is cheap and he stinks. There is no other reason to get personal hygeine products for someone than to hope to God they use them. The McDonalds gift certs were probably to say that he is cheap; or he eats too much fucking fast food, I dunno...
"Being On Microsoft Schools Agreement means that any PC will thus cost money each year in the per-PC fees EVEN IF ITS USED WITH LINUX/*BSD. Don't matter - as long as its a Pentium class PC its fee liable."
Am I understanding this correctly? That you have to pay a fee for every Pentium class PC you have, even if it doesn't have Microsoft crap on it?!
If so, find the moron responsible for signing such a contract, and slap him/her silly.
This is Microsoft's standard contract. You dont get a different one. If you do not buy this contract you go to BSA-land. Under this contract you pay for a windows license on computers even if they run Linux, and even if you bought them with an OEM-licensed copy of Windows. So you pay for Windows at least twice in most cases.
You cannot decrease the number of computers under this contract. You can only increase it, and at a rate determined by Microsoft. This means that you may be paying for more licenses than you have computers.
This is the license they are offering schools, businesses, and governments, and they are lapping them up like hotcakes. It was Microsoft's plan to survive the dot-bomb and kill Linux, and it is working.
Recently the Federal government found out they had been being overcharged for years, in part by paying small business prices for things rather than enterprise prices. Their reaction was to buy more microsoft software than ever.
"I've noticed the open/close door sound from Doom a lot more than the end spawn cube sound."
This sound effect's most popular first use comes from the movie Aliens.
Didn't Star Trek do that first? Then again, Star Wars has wooshing doors, too. Damn you slashdot! Now I have to go over a bunch of geeky movies and games comparing sound effects! :)
<p><I> The server will be slashdotted because of the Linus picture IMO.</i> /pages/watchmen/pictures/pic01/linus4.jpg was not found on this server.</p> />
<p>Not only is it slashdotted, but it seems to have a custom 404 that has html errors so it shows the actual code instead of displaying the error:
<block>
<p><!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>404 Not Found</title>
</head><body>
<h1>N ot Found</h1>
<p>The requested URL
<p>Additionally, a 404 Not Found
error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.</p>
<hr
<address>Apache/2.0.40 Server at www.wbglinks.net Port 80</address>
</body></html>
</block>
The WMD's, especially the nuclair ones, can be inspected succesfully in: USA, France, China, Israel among others. But not Iraq.
The claim of WMD's was a Weapon of Mass Distraction. Unproofed FUD to make the common people live in fear. Just like SCO is for now.
Anyone who believes either is a complete dork. Proof first; innocent until proven.
When the Bush administration was drumming up support for the war they said they had incontrovertable evidence that there were WMDs. They claimed they knew what weapons Saddam had and where they were. They said they had pictures, spy reports, tons of intelligence. They have yet to produce even this. They claim that if there were not weapons they were fooled by bad intelligence, but they refuse to share even what they were looking at that had them so convinced!
If they really knew what they claimed they knew, they would have found the weapons already. Personally, I would not be surprised if Saddam had hidden something in Syria. BUt he did not hide himself in Syria. So maybe the Syrians were afraid of the stench of death about him. Besides, in the first gulf war, he tried to send weapons, planes, and troops to hide in neighbouring countries. The governments of these countries kept it all. So maybe Saddam hid stuff in Syria but it is Syria's WMD now. After all they are more dangerous than Saddam to both the US and Israel as well as to their own people.
The way Sadam was oppressing and torturing his own people made it a moral imperative to stop him (Because the US could stop the terror and improve the lives of Iraq people, as well the US had the legal right to do so)
If Bush had used this as a reason to attack Iraq, I would have supported the war and so would a lot of the people who oppose him now. But he explicitly promised that democracy in Iraq would not happen, and has explicitly acted to prevent it happening. Further, for 20-odd years the US government not only did not care what Saddam did to his people, but helped him do it better by supplying and enabling him. To pretend that he is the good guy and great liberator now is crass and cynical on the part of President Bush.
Have you looked at the timeline they have set up? Iraq is not to get an election for a constitutional convention until 2005. After the constituition is finally agreed upon maybe there will be an interim government. Elected government is not even on the table. Until then Iraq is to be occupied militarily, denied basic services like a police force and a government infrastructure (to do things like maintain roads, take away the garbage, keep the lights on, etc etc). That's no kind of plan in my book.
"if SCO succeeds and we end up with our back against the wall we can put something else on those boxes and carry on."
I disagree. Migrating will not be so easy. And also while the time linux was used SCO may ask people to pay up the 'license fee'.
The fact that Linux is a UNIX workalike, and the fact that most of the enterprise applications that run on Linux also run on commercial UNIX flavours like Solaris means that it is a lot easier to migrate to UNIX than it would be to or from Windows. Since Solaris is in the clear, so is one's choice IMHO.
x86 Solaris can be used on the same machines as Linux, or one can migrate to SPARC. Migrating to SPARC will be harder for sure, but either way the cost of the Solaris licenses will be less than dealing with SCO or any lawyers. TCO will still be less than Windows and you can have a happy day.
Understand the limitations of the tool you choose to work with and live with it or use a different tool. Nobodies forcing you to use any specific tool.
No, but somebody is trumpeting the lory of that tool as end-all-be-all, while simply ignoring the points of people who dare to break rank, spurn the kool-aid, and point out flaws. I swear every damn slashdot article about open source tools has some thread like this. And every time we get some version of "love it or leave it." What happened to actually trying to improve on the basis of valid criticism?
The article and the posts following it seem to promote MySQL as a production database to compete with Oracle. It is clear that while it is a nice database with good features and is useful for many projects, it lacks many things which DBAs like about RDBMS systems like Oracle. It is also clear that if any of the posts here and linked articles accurately describe MySQL behaviour it violates some very basic rules of software design.
"Defect" is also a difficult term to define. Some errors are much worse than others. It's not all about numbers, folks. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that MySQL isn't a great product. I just get skeptical when I hear things talked about in terms of "better" and "best."
Defect was also defined in the article.
It is difficult to quantify these things, true. BUt if you clearly define your terms and domain it is possible to get data. In this case they defined a set of common programming mistakes as defects and then compared the corpus of corporate closed source code they had reviewed to the MySQL code and found the number of defects per thousand lines was 6 times less.
Of course, this does not speak to design quality or the presence of mistakes which are harder to find than those for which they tested.