You are right about Richard Stallman being a zealot, and about him accepting money for programming and not having a problem with that.
You are wrong about everything else. If you had read anything on the Gnu Project Website, you would know that Open Source Software is not Free Software and why that distinction is important. You might say "Important to Richard Stallman" and you woudl be correct and in good company, but I and probably many others think it is important to keep one's terms correct and understand subtle differences in such terms. At least if you are trying to attribute beliefs to someone, take a few pains to at least be sure you understand what their beliefs are. Richard Stallman is most certainly not and advocate of Open Source, but he is of Free Software, and there is a very important reason to call it "Free as in speech," because it is that very freedom he is most concerned about.
And though he does have many explanations of his positions, and has gone on about them at length to anyone who will listen, there are still people (even *gasp!* on slashdot) who are completely ignorant of his basic ideas and philosophies. Really, the articles I linked to aren't that long, and you really have only to skim them to realize the gist.
The book is not about "Unix Sucks and so we should use Windows" It is meant to be humorous and perhaps the hope is that future OS designers will not continue to repeat the msitakes of predecessors. I fear it is a vain hope. Why should there be hidden files on my computer at all?
The main reason the files with . in them were hidden in Unix is that your home directory is filled with config files and directories for various programs you like to run, and you will generally already know they are there, so you don't need ls to waste paper (before the days of the glass teletype) telling you over and over that.login.profile and.cshrc or whatever are there. but Microsoft, true to form, takes this concept that was originally just there for utilitarian reasons and turns it into "Let's hide crap from users and it will prevent them messing with the files." And Apple takes the same view, hiding files from users specifically because they wnat you to leave them alone.
Of course it means if mean nasty "hackers" put files on such computers and hide them the user is already trained not to touch them. And so they don't. I think it is a silly thing altogether. If I have a computer, I should know what is on it, and the OS should not try to hide it from me.
So honestly the whole point of OS critique in this vein is not zealotry and trying to get people to use another OS (after all, there is no perfect OS) but to legitemately critique bad points in the OS. Of course the problem has been that down the decades anyone who dares to criticize $OS is shouted down and booed by the OS zealots and cheered by zealots of $OS2 (pun unintended:P) and neitehr OS really gets better except by degrees and through extreme pain and fear of leaving legacy users behind.
Of course it's all academic anyway, and it is interesting the best the computer industry can come up with is Unix and Unix workalikes.
You are a troll. Show me a McDonald's that pays $9 an hour and I will show you a McDonald's that says "Do you want Freedom Fried with that" because they are in the congresscritter cafeteria.
No, most of us mean there are no jobs. read the posts from the guys who took random manual labour after having been in IT for years or even management. I had a good laugh about the pizza delivery suggestion. It is actually the best suggestion, but even these jobs were hard to find.
In the time I searched around, I found only two such jobs, one at an unscrupulous employer who literally robbed his workers, and the other in a very dangerous part of town where drivers were regularly attacked and accosted by gang members. The second guy had too many employees to give everyone even decent part time hours, and more applying every day. Thankfully he was smart and did not make his drivers carry more than $20 in cash (we had to pay the restaurant after each delivery). Of course given the area there were plenty of days with no tips at all, and the restaurant kept half the delivery fee, but it beat starving and helped make the unemployment not hurt so much.
Every industry is hurting, and yes IT workers are working at other jobs. I recently went to a guitar store and found one of the salesmen was a laid off IT worker. I find them everywhere, waiting my table if I go to a restaurant, cleaning the floor in the bathroom at the gas station, working the bar, waiting tables. And they are the lucky ones because they overcame the difficulty of being a newbie in their new position or they had some experience in another field somehow.
But this is exactly why technically savvy people often have trouble running businesses. They are not sharp businesspeople used to dealing with unscrupulous bastards like the poster above was dealing with.
Actually I had a similar experience, and I decided that even though there were probably ways to avoid trouble, like the maxim above, it still helped to have money for lawyers for frivolous lawsuits, and it did not do to have thin margins when people were going to be assholes and not pay you when you ordered their stuff, etc. I also learned I hated accounting and was not good at it.
If I ever start another business, I will do so when I have money for an attorney and an accountant, at minimum, plus a little extra for things like the odd refund, etc. I will also make sure I have planned the whole business in excruciating detail and have automated systems in place for tracking everything, proven with test data. But it was the dealing with unscrupulous people as customers that really hurt.
The problem with your assertion is that this is not a US-centric article and therefore does not need to be flagged as such. The web form clearly allows entering other countries' codes.
What the hell is wrong with you Europeans? I thought you had a better education system than we do in the US? If you had Read Tthe Fucking Article instead of just bullshitting, you would have found that not only can you enter data for any two letter code you please (including some that do not even exist) which clearly allows you to enter a country code in the case in which you do not live in a US State.
This system was designed to be as open as you want it to be, so quit griping and go post.:P
Our site has been developed and optimized for Microsoft Internet Explorer 5+ under Windows. Unfortunately, it does not seem to run on your computer.
Feel free to contact us by email or phone and we'll gladly send you an information package by the traditional postal way.
Note to Linux- and related activists : We know that trough the fact that our site only works correctly under Microsoft software, some 10% of the internet community will not be able to enjoy full surfing pleasure. Nevertheless, we DO NOT force anyone to do so, thus not forcing anyone to install Microsoft software. Nevertheless, if this seems unbearable to you, we will of course send you our files and scripts in order to allow you to set up a version of our site running under linux/netscape/opera/etc. by the way : we do not run Microsoft Server Software
Actually restaurants seem to be wary of hiring dot-com guys, even those with restaurant experience. They don't realize how bad the IT market is right now, perhaps, or then again I have noticed the restaurant market is pretty bad too. Probably restaurants are having no trouble finding experienced waitstaff who are currently waitstaff elsewhere or were in their last position and will be waitstaff forever, which is preferable to a dot-com person who may fly off when the economy comes back to normal.
You haven't been unemployed in this economy have you? Let me tell you it was no picnic. In over a year unemployed I got 3 interviews for IT positions. That was not because I did not try to look for a job. Usually there were no jobs to apply for. There was the BS on Monster and friends (usually jobs posted on Monster are filled, or the email address does not go to anyone, or the person who gets them says "What's this monster thing? They keep spamming my box for this job I never heard of!")
I faithfully sent my resume to every headhunting agency and company I could find, regularly searched the net for semi-random industries that might actually want to hire someone, everything I could think of. I did not just a statewde seach, but a worldwide search, though I mostly focused on jobs in the US. I found that most places, however, did not even want to talk to someone who was not already relocated.
I even relocated away from where I was living originally in hope of escaping the dot-bomb implosion elsewhere in the country, but it was to no avail, and eventually I ended up coming back. I have only recently got out of this mess, and this was because a company elsewhere in my state was looking for someone who had a very specific skillset and I happen to be very very good in this area and possess specific knowlege which is not available to most. Even then this required relocation, on my dime, but at least I am employed now.
It's easy to say something is easy if you have not done it yourself.
Actually they offer about 12months, or $11k, whichever runs out first. The cap was $319/week. If you worked at a minimum wage job, then you got $(319 * 0.25 - amountearnedfromjob ), unless you worked more than 40 hours, then you got nothing, or if the previosu equation equalled more than $319 then you get $319.
They provided extended benefits (well, I guess it comes from the government) as well.
Methinks that the poster (and most people who complain about XFree86 speeds) is using Gnome. XFree86 is actually pretty decent, and even with the Gnome that came with RedHat 5.x I have been able to get acceptable preformance on a 486 DX2/66 with 32MB RAM. Granted for the Win95 era 32MB was a lot (I was styling with 8MB at the time), but win95 woudl probably not install on this machine, or run properly.
But Gnome started having nautilus, and loading it in the background, and any distro with this kind of gnome crawled on the p-100 with 32MB I installed it on. Granted, performance pretty much returned once I killed the nautilus processes which were taking up 120MB. I think this is the source of the poster's trouble.
If he ran a more minimal window manager (I like fvwm2, so does ESR), or even ran gnome without nautilus (as I understand may be possible, though all the gnome programs I use try to trick me into loading nautilus as well, usually with the "help" link), he would have a better time with XFree86. But for many people, Linux == RedHat == Gnome + Nautilus just as Windows == Win98 + IE.
Actually every book I have read about NT4 talks about the original NT being designed by the architects for VMS, who were blatantly stolen away from DEC by Microsoft by being offered both more money and more autonomy. Microsoft has never tried to hide this. The issue of the BSD IP tools is somewhat of a different matter. I also heard rumour that Apple contracted a different company to do their IP stack. Honestly I think this is a good thing to do, anyway. You wat to make sure your IP stack conforms to everyone elses, and there are implementations available free/libre+gratis, so why not? If you use pretty much the same code as everyone else, it is likely your code will be compatable with everyone else's.
Now, what I propose is that you re-read that section, changing the appropriate words so that the subject is not child pornography, but violent video games instead. You point out two issues that distinguish the child porn issue from other possession laws. I would argue that the first point absolutely applies to violent video games. The second point is debatable, on both issues. I don't know what the statistics are regarding the number of gamers who commit violent acts (not just the high-profile Columbine-style acts, but violent acts in general), but I suspect they're rather low. I also don't know the statistics regarding the number of consumers of child porn who commit abusive acts on children, but I suspect it's much lower than most would guess.
Actually as I wrote this I was thinking of video games as well. But it is different from pornography in the means of use. In fact as I write this I was thinking of the ways in which I use both (no I do not use or tolerate kidpr0n), and I think one of the most important differences is that when I play a game there is a seperation of action such that I see myself as playing a game about doing violent things, and it is a vicarious enjoyment of those things akin to watching a television show of someone doing those things.
Pornography is more personal. Firstly in order for it to work, it has to depict something the user enjoys doing or would like to do him/herself (also the overwhelming majority of users of pornography are male, which presents a physical impossibility of using unsavoury porn). When it is used, the person becomes the actor, and thinks what it woudl be like to do those things. It is true the person does not always act on his desires. This is still fantasy we are talking about, which is the primary link between this and video games.
I do not believe that pornography makes people degenerates or likely to commit sexual crimes, and in fact the relevant studies have never been able to show such links. However, my contention is that the desire to abuse children is a bad desire to have, and that use of child pornography requires that desire. I think in such cases it is right to try and help that person.
There's no doubt it's a thorny issue. In any issue, I tend to lean toward the idea of punishing those who act, and not those who have the potential to act.
Definitely an interesting discussion.
Agreed, and agreed. I do not think it makes sense to punish people in most cases, really, but that is an aside. And I never advocated punishing people who possess child pornography. I am suggesting society should intervene in such cases and shoudl mandate some kind of treatment. I am also suggesting that we shoudl make sure as a society that we reinforce the stigma of child abuse so that people continue to believe it is a bad thing to do. If we enable child abusers by saying their desires are okay rather than saying it is an indication of mental sickness and likely rooted in past abuse of their own, we are helping no one at all.
This is true.. there is always the option to pay $600 for hardware then $150 per month to the satellite monopoly. So I get the choice between three monopolies! yeah!
Of course whereas my main bitch about my cable provider is that once in awhile I have to hook up a windows computer with no firewalls on it to reregister my cable modem because they think it is fun to do, and that when this does not work they have clueless morons in support who do not even know what is going on with their system (and even get the monkey questions like "what kind of settinsg should be in IE to make this stupid registration program work" wrong), I have been told repeatedly by satellite providers that proprietary software that only works in windows will be required to connect *at all.* And I don't have $750 to waste on finding out if this is a monkey answer or the absolute truth, but since I found no one on the internet that uses Linux to connect to one of these systems, I am thinking it is likely true.:P
Spam is not a "minor inconvenience." It most certainly is a societal problem. It is an outgrowth of the synthesis of several other problems in our society, and in act the most extreme form of some of them. It is an unwanted advertisement for false goods which to add insult to injury the end-user ends up paying for. Right now there is a serious deficit in IT jobs, but companies are paying billions of dollars on spam. Wouldn't it be nice if they could spend that money on more workers?
Spam is so bad right now it accounts for over 50% of email handled by a lot of providers. It accounts for significant amounts of total internet traffic. Now think about that, spam and kazaa take up pretty much the whole internet. Why do you think these are areas ISPs are starting to focus on?
Spam has at times caused smaller companies' mail servers to crash. When the white house mail server crashed because it took in too much mail a few years ago, I wonder how much of that mail was spam? Great so now spam is keeping us from contacting our government.
People have been trying to point out since the beginnings of the commercial internet (and actually somewhat before that time) that spam was a monster that would just grow and grow and get worse if we do not address it "real soon now." Well, here we are at a stage where many billions in my and your tax dollars and internet fees and cable fees and telephone charges are going not to improve education, not to fund the rebuilding of Iraq, not to try and fix the big fucking potholes in the interstate highway system, but instead, to pay for the actions of spammers, some of whom (the Nigerian money spam) might just be linked to al qaeda. (The Nigerian money spam predates the Internet actually, and is linked to powerful multinational Nigerian gangs who I would not be surprised if they dealt with al qaeda, if only to get more heroin.)
So it's not just a "minor inconvenience." Paying $100 for the Nikes made by asian kids who don't get $1 a week is a minor inconvenience. Spam is a serious problem.:P
When you download spam, it costs money. It is worse for people on dialup, and was really bad for people who are on dialup and also pay per minute charges. I understand that in small underdeveloped areas, like Europe, this is still common place;).
Even if you don't pay per-minute charges, your ISP pays a fee based on the amount of traffic it handles. A very significant amount of this traffic is spam. This raises the price you pay your ISP. AOL is suing a few spam companies who cost them millions of dollars all by their lonesome.
Ok, so those are the costs you probably don't see, and maybe you don't care about those. You may not be paying additional fees just to have a "bigger mailbox" so all the spam can fit in there like many end-users do. (This is slashdot, so you have your own mail server on DSL running your favorite linux distro and have 120GB just for your mail right?) But like many things, spam is only free if your time is worthless. How much time do you spend going through your mailbox sorting out what is spam and what is not? Reconfiguring mail filters? Pushing the delete key until your fingers hurt? That time is money, mon frere, which could probably better be spent garnering valuable slashdot karma!
Re:Interesting fact (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 28, @10:59AM (#5824780) Last I checked this was a free market. If an ISP starts doing it and users aren't happy with it, then they can leave and find an ISP that doesn't. It's not rocket science.
You are very funny. Broadband a free market? Let me clue you in, compadre. Broadband in most places it exists is run by a monopoly. In many areas you only get one choice, period. In some places you are lucky and get to choose between cable modem provided by the cable monopoly and dsl provided by the telephone monopoly. If you are lucky there are multiple ISP companies who will all resell the exact same telephone monopoly's DSL to you.
This is all determined by where you live, and to this day it is a real PITA to find out ahead of time what broadband is available where. It is possible, but it is very diffictult and oddly enough only the cable companies seem usually to be smart enough to have figured out that I might want to make sure their service is available in an area *first* and then move there. DSL can be checked if you know a phone number nearby (since there must be an established landline phone number for them to check anything) but even then it is not certain.
So, presumably I (who am annoyed to find out that despite my previous research I have a cable ISP which sucks in various unsavoury ways and the only DSL possibly available is from an even worse company, will be guaranteed at a slowers speed and more expensive) being unhappy with my service could find an area that has a different company and move there, though of course this requires dealing with the place I live now (lease, job, etc.) Sure it is a free market, if you are a real nomad.
I am not advocating putting prison officials in charge of mental health, and no one should, unless the aim is to reduce mental health. Likewise, among mental health professionals the question of how to adequately and successfully treat pedophiles (or whether it is possible) is far from satisfactorily answered. I would also hasten to point out that our mental health systems in general could stand serious reform, as could our prison system.
The question we are dealing with here is as old as philosophy itself: the question of what to do with those who cause problems in our society and by what criteria we judge such troublemakers. And whereas our general answers to these questions arguably need serious tweaking, we have to understand what we are dealing with here. We are talking about how to deal with a person who enjoys harming children, and how to best prevent them doing it, primarily because we have decided that harming children is wrong and we don't want it to happen in our society.
Now in the case of kidpr0n, the person in possession of said contraband may not have actually harmed a child. I think no one will argue whether we should do something about the person who actually harms children and is proven to do so beyond any reasonable doubt. The question here is what we do with someone who we only currently know to be in possession of pictures of children being harmed.
This question touches on two areas in which I am generally loathe to yield power to government; one being the legislation of thoughts, feelings and urges and another being creating laws against simple possession. The problem with laws of possession is there is no act involved, and no discernment of intent. Likewise the method by which these things come into one's possession is rarely part of the determination of the crime. Contraband can be planted by enemies or police, can end up in one's possession accidentally, whatever, and it does not generally matter unless the defendant can prove innocence (as this man is supposed to have done). There are many other problems with laws of possession in and of themselves and any question involving such is therefore rather thorny.
However there are several important points specific to the kidpr0n case. One is that the simple fact someone has an interest in obtaining these items should be a red flag, both to them and to anyone else privy to such information. Since the sole use of any pornography is to fantasize about the events depicted in the pornography, the person interested in such things is not only thinking about re-enacting these events, but enjoys the re-enactment. They are thinking at least on some level that harming children is good or enjoyable, at least for them. Another important difference is they are likely to act on these urges if they remain unchecked, and the victim will be an innocent child. At heart of our society's injunction against pedophilia is the idea that children need to be protected form the urges of adults.
So the question is, how do we deal with a person who feels these urges and finds themselves treading the path to the dark side? My contention, and that of the officials interviewed for this case, is that that person should be encouraged to seek professional mental help as soon as possible. It's not just to protect me and my children that I feel this way. I think for the person themselves this is the best course, because there are usually reasons the person has such feelings, often unresolved abuse they received as a child themselves. Besides is it really better for them to continue with this awful secret than to seek help?
In that we agree, but you likewise claimed "not one shot was fired" and marginalized the many acts of terror on both sides. I was trying to point out this is a distortion of history and ignores the struggle which led up to what point. A similar scenario would be the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Yes, most of the leaders, like Martin Luther King, were non-violent, and ultimately these rights were secured through nonviolent means (legislation, court cases, etc). But to say even in this case "not one shot was fired" is to disregard the truth of the matter. There were many shots fired on both sides, and dogs and firehoses and axe-handles were involved. People went to jail. The National Guard and the Police got involved at various points.
I guess what you meant to do was say that the ANC's rise was due to non violent struggle and they did not violently take over the government. But in South Africa, as in the United States, there were many who did not agree with the non-violent stance, and acted on their beliefs. Likewise those in power used every kind of violence, including torture, chemical and biological warfare, and yes, many many shots fired. There were even reports the South African government had bought nuclear weapons from Israel, and recently it surfaced that they were trying to come up with a virus tat would attack people with specific genetic markers in hope of coming up with one that would kill only black people.
Ultimately, through non violent and democratic means, power changed hands. But there was a mightily violent struggle in the interim.
Yes Osama and Saddam have lots of wealth and are extremists, but the people doing the dying are poor and oppressed.
More to the point, they are rich *because* they were extremists. Granted Ossama was also a construction magnate. But he raked in tons of cash by claiming to be a fighter for Islam while not spending one penny of his own, and lived richly off the proceeds, like any other televangelist. Saddam likewise robbed his country and lived off of the taxes of the Iraqis in lavish style, and used extreme tactics to obtain and maintain power in order to retain that style.
These people's extremism was not a true belief, but a way to cash in on the belief of otehrs, with armies of followers who were themselves both very poor and willing to die for the belief. Ossama and Saddam will never be martyrs. If anything they can go chill in Idi Amin's palace in Saudi.
And I'm just the opposite, this is the one move they've made that I can almost agree with. Why should my U.S. tax dollars get sent to someone in Canada, when there are probably any number of highly qualified programmers here in the U.S. who could do this work?
Name an OS written by American programmers that hasn't had a remote root exploit in 5 years and includes extensive cryptographic tools. Now is the lead programmer for that project available to work for a University project *right now* for the DoD at the usual univeristy salary? If you can find such a person, it is your patriotic duty as an American to notify your local Homeland Security office so they can be detained immediately for questioning!:)
In my previous post, I rebutted your assertions about the network behaviour of X11. Your assertion that the GUI would be more stable if it was in the kernel defies belief. Clearly the less things in the kernel the better, because anything which goes in the kernel can crash the whole machine if it goes south. At least with the GUI away form the kernel, when Mozilla crashes my XFree86 server my whole machine does not go down, just all the local gui stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
You are right about Richard Stallman being a zealot, and about him accepting money for programming and not having a problem with that.
You are wrong about everything else. If you had read anything on the Gnu Project Website, you would know that Open Source Software is not Free Software and why that distinction is important. You might say "Important to Richard Stallman" and you woudl be correct and in good company, but I and probably many others think it is important to keep one's terms correct and understand subtle differences in such terms. At least if you are trying to attribute beliefs to someone, take a few pains to at least be sure you understand what their beliefs are. Richard Stallman is most certainly not and advocate of Open Source, but he is of Free Software, and there is a very important reason to call it "Free as in speech," because it is that very freedom he is most concerned about.
And though he does have many explanations of his positions, and has gone on about them at length to anyone who will listen, there are still people (even *gasp!* on slashdot) who are completely ignorant of his basic ideas and philosophies. Really, the articles I linked to aren't that long, and you really have only to skim them to realize the gist.
The book is not about "Unix Sucks and so we should use Windows" It is meant to be humorous and perhaps the hope is that future OS designers will not continue to repeat the msitakes of predecessors. I fear it is a vain hope. Why should there be hidden files on my computer at all?
The main reason the files with . in them were hidden in Unix is that your home directory is filled with config files and directories for various programs you like to run, and you will generally already know they are there, so you don't need ls to waste paper (before the days of the glass teletype) telling you over and over that .login .profile and .cshrc or whatever are there. but Microsoft, true to form, takes this concept that was originally just there for utilitarian reasons and turns it into "Let's hide crap from users and it will prevent them messing with the files." And Apple takes the same view, hiding files from users specifically because they wnat you to leave them alone.
Of course it means if mean nasty "hackers" put files on such computers and hide them the user is already trained not to touch them. And so they don't. I think it is a silly thing altogether. If I have a computer, I should know what is on it, and the OS should not try to hide it from me.
So honestly the whole point of OS critique in this vein is not zealotry and trying to get people to use another OS (after all, there is no perfect OS) but to legitemately critique bad points in the OS. Of course the problem has been that down the decades anyone who dares to criticize $OS is shouted down and booed by the OS zealots and cheered by zealots of $OS2 (pun unintended :P) and neitehr OS really gets better except by degrees and through extreme pain and fear of leaving legacy users behind.
Of course it's all academic anyway, and it is interesting the best the computer industry can come up with is Unix and Unix workalikes.
You are a troll. Show me a McDonald's that pays $9 an hour and I will show you a McDonald's that says "Do you want Freedom Fried with that" because they are in the congresscritter cafeteria.
No, most of us mean there are no jobs. read the posts from the guys who took random manual labour after having been in IT for years or even management. I had a good laugh about the pizza delivery suggestion. It is actually the best suggestion, but even these jobs were hard to find.
In the time I searched around, I found only two such jobs, one at an unscrupulous employer who literally robbed his workers, and the other in a very dangerous part of town where drivers were regularly attacked and accosted by gang members. The second guy had too many employees to give everyone even decent part time hours, and more applying every day. Thankfully he was smart and did not make his drivers carry more than $20 in cash (we had to pay the restaurant after each delivery). Of course given the area there were plenty of days with no tips at all, and the restaurant kept half the delivery fee, but it beat starving and helped make the unemployment not hurt so much.
Every industry is hurting, and yes IT workers are working at other jobs. I recently went to a guitar store and found one of the salesmen was a laid off IT worker. I find them everywhere, waiting my table if I go to a restaurant, cleaning the floor in the bathroom at the gas station, working the bar, waiting tables. And they are the lucky ones because they overcame the difficulty of being a newbie in their new position or they had some experience in another field somehow.
But this is exactly why technically savvy people often have trouble running businesses. They are not sharp businesspeople used to dealing with unscrupulous bastards like the poster above was dealing with.
Actually I had a similar experience, and I decided that even though there were probably ways to avoid trouble, like the maxim above, it still helped to have money for lawyers for frivolous lawsuits, and it did not do to have thin margins when people were going to be assholes and not pay you when you ordered their stuff, etc. I also learned I hated accounting and was not good at it.
If I ever start another business, I will do so when I have money for an attorney and an accountant, at minimum, plus a little extra for things like the odd refund, etc. I will also make sure I have planned the whole business in excruciating detail and have automated systems in place for tracking everything, proven with test data. But it was the dealing with unscrupulous people as customers that really hurt.
The problem with your assertion is that this is not a US-centric article and therefore does not need to be flagged as such. The web form clearly allows entering other countries' codes.
What the hell is wrong with you Europeans? I thought you had a better education system than we do in the US? If you had Read Tthe Fucking Article instead of just bullshitting, you would have found that not only can you enter data for any two letter code you please (including some that do not even exist) which clearly allows you to enter a country code in the case in which you do not live in a US State.
This system was designed to be as open as you want it to be, so quit griping and go post. :P
I wanted to, but all I got was:
Our site has been developed and optimized for Microsoft Internet Explorer 5+ under Windows. Unfortunately, it does not seem to run on your computer.
Feel free to contact us by email or phone and we'll gladly send you an information package by the traditional postal way.
Note to Linux- and related activists : We know that trough the fact that our site only works correctly under Microsoft software, some 10% of the internet community will not be able to enjoy full surfing pleasure. Nevertheless, we DO NOT force anyone to do so, thus not forcing anyone to install Microsoft software. Nevertheless, if this seems unbearable to you, we will of course send you our files and scripts in order to allow you to set up a version of our site running under linux/netscape/opera/etc.
by the way : we do not run Microsoft Server Software
Actually restaurants seem to be wary of hiring dot-com guys, even those with restaurant experience. They don't realize how bad the IT market is right now, perhaps, or then again I have noticed the restaurant market is pretty bad too. Probably restaurants are having no trouble finding experienced waitstaff who are currently waitstaff elsewhere or were in their last position and will be waitstaff forever, which is preferable to a dot-com person who may fly off when the economy comes back to normal.
You haven't been unemployed in this economy have you? Let me tell you it was no picnic. In over a year unemployed I got 3 interviews for IT positions. That was not because I did not try to look for a job. Usually there were no jobs to apply for. There was the BS on Monster and friends (usually jobs posted on Monster are filled, or the email address does not go to anyone, or the person who gets them says "What's this monster thing? They keep spamming my box for this job I never heard of!")
I faithfully sent my resume to every headhunting agency and company I could find, regularly searched the net for semi-random industries that might actually want to hire someone, everything I could think of. I did not just a statewde seach, but a worldwide search, though I mostly focused on jobs in the US. I found that most places, however, did not even want to talk to someone who was not already relocated.
I even relocated away from where I was living originally in hope of escaping the dot-bomb implosion elsewhere in the country, but it was to no avail, and eventually I ended up coming back. I have only recently got out of this mess, and this was because a company elsewhere in my state was looking for someone who had a very specific skillset and I happen to be very very good in this area and possess specific knowlege which is not available to most. Even then this required relocation, on my dime, but at least I am employed now.
It's easy to say something is easy if you have not done it yourself.
Actually they offer about 12months, or $11k, whichever runs out first. The cap was $319/week. If you worked at a minimum wage job, then you got $(319 * 0.25 - amountearnedfromjob ), unless you worked more than 40 hours, then you got nothing, or if the previosu equation equalled more than $319 then you get $319.
They provided extended benefits (well, I guess it comes from the government) as well.
Methinks that the poster (and most people who complain about XFree86 speeds) is using Gnome. XFree86 is actually pretty decent, and even with the Gnome that came with RedHat 5.x I have been able to get acceptable preformance on a 486 DX2/66 with 32MB RAM. Granted for the Win95 era 32MB was a lot (I was styling with 8MB at the time), but win95 woudl probably not install on this machine, or run properly.
But Gnome started having nautilus, and loading it in the background, and any distro with this kind of gnome crawled on the p-100 with 32MB I installed it on. Granted, performance pretty much returned once I killed the nautilus processes which were taking up 120MB. I think this is the source of the poster's trouble.
If he ran a more minimal window manager (I like fvwm2, so does ESR), or even ran gnome without nautilus (as I understand may be possible, though all the gnome programs I use try to trick me into loading nautilus as well, usually with the "help" link), he would have a better time with XFree86. But for many people, Linux == RedHat == Gnome + Nautilus just as Windows == Win98 + IE.
Actually every book I have read about NT4 talks about the original NT being designed by the architects for VMS, who were blatantly stolen away from DEC by Microsoft by being offered both more money and more autonomy. Microsoft has never tried to hide this. The issue of the BSD IP tools is somewhat of a different matter. I also heard rumour that Apple contracted a different company to do their IP stack. Honestly I think this is a good thing to do, anyway. You wat to make sure your IP stack conforms to everyone elses, and there are implementations available free/libre+gratis, so why not? If you use pretty much the same code as everyone else, it is likely your code will be compatable with everyone else's.
Now, what I propose is that you re-read that section, changing the appropriate words so that the subject is not child pornography, but violent video games instead. You point out two issues that distinguish the child porn issue from other possession laws. I would argue that the first point absolutely applies to violent video games. The second point is debatable, on both issues. I don't know what the statistics are regarding the number of gamers who commit violent acts (not just the high-profile Columbine-style acts, but violent acts in general), but I suspect they're rather low. I also don't know the statistics regarding the number of consumers of child porn who commit abusive acts on children, but I suspect it's much lower than most would guess.
Actually as I wrote this I was thinking of video games as well. But it is different from pornography in the means of use. In fact as I write this I was thinking of the ways in which I use both (no I do not use or tolerate kidpr0n), and I think one of the most important differences is that when I play a game there is a seperation of action such that I see myself as playing a game about doing violent things, and it is a vicarious enjoyment of those things akin to watching a television show of someone doing those things.
Pornography is more personal. Firstly in order for it to work, it has to depict something the user enjoys doing or would like to do him/herself (also the overwhelming majority of users of pornography are male, which presents a physical impossibility of using unsavoury porn). When it is used, the person becomes the actor, and thinks what it woudl be like to do those things. It is true the person does not always act on his desires. This is still fantasy we are talking about, which is the primary link between this and video games.
I do not believe that pornography makes people degenerates or likely to commit sexual crimes, and in fact the relevant studies have never been able to show such links. However, my contention is that the desire to abuse children is a bad desire to have, and that use of child pornography requires that desire. I think in such cases it is right to try and help that person.
There's no doubt it's a thorny issue. In any issue, I tend to lean toward the idea of punishing those who act, and not those who have the potential to act.
Definitely an interesting discussion.
Agreed, and agreed. I do not think it makes sense to punish people in most cases, really, but that is an aside. And I never advocated punishing people who possess child pornography. I am suggesting society should intervene in such cases and shoudl mandate some kind of treatment. I am also suggesting that we shoudl make sure as a society that we reinforce the stigma of child abuse so that people continue to believe it is a bad thing to do. If we enable child abusers by saying their desires are okay rather than saying it is an indication of mental sickness and likely rooted in past abuse of their own, we are helping no one at all.
This is true.. there is always the option to pay $600 for hardware then $150 per month to the satellite monopoly. So I get the choice between three monopolies! yeah!
Of course whereas my main bitch about my cable provider is that once in awhile I have to hook up a windows computer with no firewalls on it to reregister my cable modem because they think it is fun to do, and that when this does not work they have clueless morons in support who do not even know what is going on with their system (and even get the monkey questions like "what kind of settinsg should be in IE to make this stupid registration program work" wrong), I have been told repeatedly by satellite providers that proprietary software that only works in windows will be required to connect *at all.* And I don't have $750 to waste on finding out if this is a monkey answer or the absolute truth, but since I found no one on the internet that uses Linux to connect to one of these systems, I am thinking it is likely true. :P
Spam is not a "minor inconvenience." It most certainly is a societal problem. It is an outgrowth of the synthesis of several other problems in our society, and in act the most extreme form of some of them. It is an unwanted advertisement for false goods which to add insult to injury the end-user ends up paying for. Right now there is a serious deficit in IT jobs, but companies are paying billions of dollars on spam. Wouldn't it be nice if they could spend that money on more workers?
Spam is so bad right now it accounts for over 50% of email handled by a lot of providers. It accounts for significant amounts of total internet traffic. Now think about that, spam and kazaa take up pretty much the whole internet. Why do you think these are areas ISPs are starting to focus on?
Spam has at times caused smaller companies' mail servers to crash. When the white house mail server crashed because it took in too much mail a few years ago, I wonder how much of that mail was spam? Great so now spam is keeping us from contacting our government.
People have been trying to point out since the beginnings of the commercial internet (and actually somewhat before that time) that spam was a monster that would just grow and grow and get worse if we do not address it "real soon now." Well, here we are at a stage where many billions in my and your tax dollars and internet fees and cable fees and telephone charges are going not to improve education, not to fund the rebuilding of Iraq, not to try and fix the big fucking potholes in the interstate highway system, but instead, to pay for the actions of spammers, some of whom (the Nigerian money spam) might just be linked to al qaeda. (The Nigerian money spam predates the Internet actually, and is linked to powerful multinational Nigerian gangs who I would not be surprised if they dealt with al qaeda, if only to get more heroin.)
So it's not just a "minor inconvenience." Paying $100 for the Nikes made by asian kids who don't get $1 a week is a minor inconvenience. Spam is a serious problem. :P
When you download spam, it costs money. It is worse for people on dialup, and was really bad for people who are on dialup and also pay per minute charges. I understand that in small underdeveloped areas, like Europe, this is still common place ;).
Even if you don't pay per-minute charges, your ISP pays a fee based on the amount of traffic it handles. A very significant amount of this traffic is spam. This raises the price you pay your ISP. AOL is suing a few spam companies who cost them millions of dollars all by their lonesome.
Ok, so those are the costs you probably don't see, and maybe you don't care about those. You may not be paying additional fees just to have a "bigger mailbox" so all the spam can fit in there like many end-users do. (This is slashdot, so you have your own mail server on DSL running your favorite linux distro and have 120GB just for your mail right?) But like many things, spam is only free if your time is worthless. How much time do you spend going through your mailbox sorting out what is spam and what is not? Reconfiguring mail filters? Pushing the delete key until your fingers hurt? That time is money, mon frere, which could probably better be spent garnering valuable slashdot karma!
People living in Moscow today are much more afraid of the mafia than they are of Putin's administration.
Wow, you mean there is a noticable difference? If that were true it would mean Russia had made serious improvements over previous decades.
Re:Interesting fact (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 28, @10:59AM (#5824780)
Last I checked this was a free market. If an ISP starts doing it and users aren't happy with it, then they can leave and find an ISP that doesn't. It's not rocket science.
You are very funny. Broadband a free market? Let me clue you in, compadre. Broadband in most places it exists is run by a monopoly. In many areas you only get one choice, period. In some places you are lucky and get to choose between cable modem provided by the cable monopoly and dsl provided by the telephone monopoly. If you are lucky there are multiple ISP companies who will all resell the exact same telephone monopoly's DSL to you.
This is all determined by where you live, and to this day it is a real PITA to find out ahead of time what broadband is available where. It is possible, but it is very diffictult and oddly enough only the cable companies seem usually to be smart enough to have figured out that I might want to make sure their service is available in an area *first* and then move there. DSL can be checked if you know a phone number nearby (since there must be an established landline phone number for them to check anything) but even then it is not certain.
So, presumably I (who am annoyed to find out that despite my previous research I have a cable ISP which sucks in various unsavoury ways and the only DSL possibly available is from an even worse company, will be guaranteed at a slowers speed and more expensive) being unhappy with my service could find an area that has a different company and move there, though of course this requires dealing with the place I live now (lease, job, etc.) Sure it is a free market, if you are a real nomad.
I am not advocating putting prison officials in charge of mental health, and no one should, unless the aim is to reduce mental health. Likewise, among mental health professionals the question of how to adequately and successfully treat pedophiles (or whether it is possible) is far from satisfactorily answered. I would also hasten to point out that our mental health systems in general could stand serious reform, as could our prison system.
The question we are dealing with here is as old as philosophy itself: the question of what to do with those who cause problems in our society and by what criteria we judge such troublemakers. And whereas our general answers to these questions arguably need serious tweaking, we have to understand what we are dealing with here. We are talking about how to deal with a person who enjoys harming children, and how to best prevent them doing it, primarily because we have decided that harming children is wrong and we don't want it to happen in our society.
Now in the case of kidpr0n, the person in possession of said contraband may not have actually harmed a child. I think no one will argue whether we should do something about the person who actually harms children and is proven to do so beyond any reasonable doubt. The question here is what we do with someone who we only currently know to be in possession of pictures of children being harmed.
This question touches on two areas in which I am generally loathe to yield power to government; one being the legislation of thoughts, feelings and urges and another being creating laws against simple possession. The problem with laws of possession is there is no act involved, and no discernment of intent. Likewise the method by which these things come into one's possession is rarely part of the determination of the crime. Contraband can be planted by enemies or police, can end up in one's possession accidentally, whatever, and it does not generally matter unless the defendant can prove innocence (as this man is supposed to have done). There are many other problems with laws of possession in and of themselves and any question involving such is therefore rather thorny.
However there are several important points specific to the kidpr0n case. One is that the simple fact someone has an interest in obtaining these items should be a red flag, both to them and to anyone else privy to such information. Since the sole use of any pornography is to fantasize about the events depicted in the pornography, the person interested in such things is not only thinking about re-enacting these events, but enjoys the re-enactment. They are thinking at least on some level that harming children is good or enjoyable, at least for them. Another important difference is they are likely to act on these urges if they remain unchecked, and the victim will be an innocent child. At heart of our society's injunction against pedophilia is the idea that children need to be protected form the urges of adults.
So the question is, how do we deal with a person who feels these urges and finds themselves treading the path to the dark side? My contention, and that of the officials interviewed for this case, is that that person should be encouraged to seek professional mental help as soon as possible. It's not just to protect me and my children that I feel this way. I think for the person themselves this is the best course, because there are usually reasons the person has such feelings, often unresolved abuse they received as a child themselves. Besides is it really better for them to continue with this awful secret than to seek help?
In that we agree, but you likewise claimed "not one shot was fired" and marginalized the many acts of terror on both sides. I was trying to point out this is a distortion of history and ignores the struggle which led up to what point. A similar scenario would be the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Yes, most of the leaders, like Martin Luther King, were non-violent, and ultimately these rights were secured through nonviolent means (legislation, court cases, etc). But to say even in this case "not one shot was fired" is to disregard the truth of the matter. There were many shots fired on both sides, and dogs and firehoses and axe-handles were involved. People went to jail. The National Guard and the Police got involved at various points.
I guess what you meant to do was say that the ANC's rise was due to non violent struggle and they did not violently take over the government. But in South Africa, as in the United States, there were many who did not agree with the non-violent stance, and acted on their beliefs. Likewise those in power used every kind of violence, including torture, chemical and biological warfare, and yes, many many shots fired. There were even reports the South African government had bought nuclear weapons from Israel, and recently it surfaced that they were trying to come up with a virus tat would attack people with specific genetic markers in hope of coming up with one that would kill only black people.
Ultimately, through non violent and democratic means, power changed hands. But there was a mightily violent struggle in the interim.
Yes Osama and Saddam have lots of wealth and are extremists, but the people doing the dying are poor and oppressed.
More to the point, they are rich *because* they were extremists. Granted Ossama was also a construction magnate. But he raked in tons of cash by claiming to be a fighter for Islam while not spending one penny of his own, and lived richly off the proceeds, like any other televangelist. Saddam likewise robbed his country and lived off of the taxes of the Iraqis in lavish style, and used extreme tactics to obtain and maintain power in order to retain that style.
These people's extremism was not a true belief, but a way to cash in on the belief of otehrs, with armies of followers who were themselves both very poor and willing to die for the belief. Ossama and Saddam will never be martyrs. If anything they can go chill in Idi Amin's palace in Saudi.
And I'm just the opposite, this is the one move they've made that I can almost agree with. Why should my U.S. tax dollars get sent to someone in Canada, when there are probably any number of highly qualified programmers here in the U.S. who could do this work?
Name an OS written by American programmers that hasn't had a remote root exploit in 5 years and includes extensive cryptographic tools. Now is the lead programmer for that project available to work for a University project *right now* for the DoD at the usual univeristy salary? If you can find such a person, it is your patriotic duty as an American to notify your local Homeland Security office so they can be detained immediately for questioning! :)
In other words "Why move the mountain when we can simply satisfy the basic need to see it."
And that's a perfect Microsoft answer. Now where did my Program Files go again? ;)
In my previous post, I rebutted your assertions about the network behaviour of X11. Your assertion that the GUI would be more stable if it was in the kernel defies belief. Clearly the less things in the kernel the better, because anything which goes in the kernel can crash the whole machine if it goes south. At least with the GUI away form the kernel, when Mozilla crashes my XFree86 server my whole machine does not go down, just all the local gui stuff.