Yeah, but there are hundreds of thousands of clueless IT managers in medium to large sized companies who are sitting ducks for vendors selling them ridiculously overpriced 15K drives to go in their absurdly overpriced SANs that end up being used as nothing more crappy little file servers.
Why?
Because it's easier and much safer to spend bucket-loads of your employers' money than it is to get a clue about technology or to make appropriately scaled decisions based on your actual needs.
Spending $150,000 proves you are important and can play in the big league, while spending $20K and saving your employer $130K just puts your neck on the chopping block when a drive fails (as all do, 15Krpm as often as cheap SATA...or more often) even though spending a few hundred more on some cold-spares would more than alleviate that risk.
and the vendor helps with glossy brochures to prove that you need to spend 10 times as much.
Also, "Shiny!". hardware fetishism leads to unwise purchasing decisions.
America must invade Ecuador in order to save this invaluable species.
They will, of course, need to change Ecuador's extradition laws so that the perpetrators of this volcano-based atrocity can be brought to justice, no matter what embassy they may try to escape to.
There won't be any mountain high enough so the silver lining is that the "elites" will vanish (but unfortunately they're more of a symptom than anything else), and that still won't be worth the misery and loss across the globe.
that's like saying ticks are a symptom of lyme disease, rather than the parasitic bacteria-carrying cause.
Saying you're going to pray for someone is a condescending put-down and dismissal. It's saying you're ignorant and misguided and can't help yourself so I'll ask my invisible magical friend to fix you.
It's all that and more if the person being "prayed for" is religious in any way - it's also a threat of witchcraft, invoking (fictional but still scary to a believer) divine powers.
If you want some glimmer of understanding about how non-christian but still religious people feel about being "prayed for" by christians, consider how a christian would feel about the following "blessing": 'May Satan bless you, keep you safe in his arms, and guide you to wisdom"
I'm an atheist so I'm not worried by the witchcraft elements (it's just superstitious mumbo-jumbo), but I'm still offended by the condescension of people offering to "pray for me". smarmy self-righteous fucks.
Taxation should be a dirty word for every American and the idea of paying you "fair share" is sad to read.
it's people like you who make me glad i don't live in america amongst the barbarians...glad i live somewhere civilised instead.
you're the kind of fuckwit who believes the "government is the source of all evil" propaganda that tells you to vote for the thieves and scumbags that will act in their corporate masters' interests (and against yours) to eliminate regulation, eliminate government services, reduce taxes for corporations and for the tiny handful of obscenely wealthy plutocrats and their families.
in short, you're a fucking moron. it's people like you, who swallow those lies and take them on as a personal religion, who are the direct cause for how fucked up america is, and how far you've strayed from your original grand republican experiment.
yeah, sure, you're not completely responsible, you're just idiot brainwashed sheep doing what you're told by billions of dollars worth of pro-corporate advertising, but you *could* wake up and see what's going on around you if you wanted to.
but it's easier and far more comfortable for you to believe that the brown stain on your nose is the smell of freedom, and not just some plutrocrat's shit.
and far easier to obediently treat those who have woken up as your enemy.
but he didn't say "...NOT!" which spoils the humour because Americans won't be able to recognise it as any form of sarcasm.
more to the point, that lack proves that it couldn't possibly have been sarcasm - it just doesn't work without "NOT!", you've got to let people know somehow not to take your words literally, that they should, in fact, negate them.
i don't know how it works in other PAYE countries, but in Australia income tax is deducted from your weekly/fortnightly/monthly pay by your employer and paid to the government.
Withheld tax is calculated based on your pay for that period, with a progressive tax scale (the first $18,200 you earn is tax free).
You are still expected to file a tax return every year, and there are all sorts of exemptions and deductions and expenses you can claim (e.g. if you have children, and you can claim the cost of tools or education required for your work). Deductions aren't subtracted directly from the tax you pay, they reduce your taxable income (e.g. if you earn $50K and have $2K worth of deductions, you pay tax as if you earned $48K). For most people, this results in a tax refund, especially if they spent any time not working or had irregular overtime.
You're also supposed to declare in your tax return any other income you may have received (interest from investments, share dividends, capital gains, etc). For people who make significant incomes in this way, they end up with a tax bill to pay.
e.g. someone making $50,000 in a year would end up paying abut $8600 tax over that year, including the 1.5% medicare levy but not including any deductions. That works out to an effective tax rate of 17% - which isn't too bad considering that it pays for roads, schools, universities, hospitals, police, tax collectors:), army, navy, pharmaceutical benefits scheme (subsidised and price-regulated drugs - pharma companies hate it, people love it. PBS-approved drugs cost a maximum of $35 for a month's supply, but usually less - or about $5 if you're a pensioner or unemployed), infrastructure projects like the NBN, and thousands of other government services. it's not perfect, and money is wasted, and nearly everyone can think of some things that they'd rather their tax money wasn't spent on but the benefits greatly outweigh the cost.
i was probably being a bit too subtle for you so i'll spell it out clearly and simply:
i don't like animated gifs distracting from the content of a web page.
similarly, i don't like animations or sound effects on my computer's desktop - i disable all that shit, it doesn't add anything of value (quite the contrary).
31 days of annoying animated gifs. 31 days of having to scroll every slashdot window and tab to get the distractions off the screen. slightly less than 31 days of wondering "when will they stop with this annoying shit?"
animations are the main reason i block ads. non-animated ads don't annoy me anywhere near as much, they're not as in-your-face distracting. animated non-ads annoy me almost as much as animated ads.
trying to read with animations on screen is about as pleasant as trying to listen to music while some arsehole is shouting at you with a megaphone held up to your ear.
It seems to be mostly a Python-based automated system administration tool set for managing big machine farms.
it might seem like that on the surface, but in practice it's more like what a bunch of python programmers with little experience and no interest in systems administration might image a systems admin tool would be like.
don't get me wrong, i like openstack, i use and work with it every day - but it's painfully obvious that the developers think only in terms of python and json and really don't give a shit about having useful command line tools....their attitude seems to be that anything you want to do, you should code yourself in python. the concept of wrapping good general-purpose command line tools with shell code seems completely alien to them.
which is a shame... openstack is good, but it could be much better if it had more sysadmin input in the design rather than just programmer input (and far less input from programmers infatuated by web development fads).
Do you know how a city water system works? that's a marvelous creation. Do you understand the metallurgy used to create a nail? do you know the variety of chemical choices the can be made when making gas?
in short, no. i have only a vague, low-detail understanding of these and millions of other things.
However, I also have something called 'curiosity' and another called 'the ability and willingness to learn'. If i ever get into a situation where my understanding of something is important then i learn it. and i *often* read up on topics just for the hell of it, even though it currently has no practical benefit for me, just for the sheer joy of learning something new and interesting.
and, often, the non-practical or useless knowledge i've picked up turns out to be useful at some point in time, either to solve a specific problem or as general knowledge of how things work, or helps me understand something that i really do need to know.
i'm 45 now, and i've been doing this all my life. and i still wish i had the net and wikipedia back when i was a kid, i wanted them before i knew what they were called but both were still science-fiction in the 70s.
The vast majority of marvelous thing that you use you don't really care how they work in any real detail.
nope, but if i ever need to or if they manage to spark my curiosity one day (or be related - directly or through a serendipitous journey of discovery - to something i am interested in) then i will learn whatever I need/want to know about them.
Not creepy, human. No one can be interested in everything
nope, it's not that simple. being dull and incurious is just *one* of the many ways of being human. some people are curious and capable and willing to learn. some (most?) are not. some are highly focused on extremely narrow areas of interest, some have broad and voracious appetites for knowledge, and some don't want to know anything at all.
also, intelligence and curiosity is the number one thing that separates us from most other animals (although with some animals it's pretty obvious that it's a matter of degree not some essential "magical" difference - chimps, crows, and even dogs for example). IMO it's quite easy to make the argument that those who are curious and intelligent are *more human* than those who are not as curiosity and intelligence are *defining traits* of a human.
(but then, it pisses me off when i see the claim - either explicit or implicit - that ignorance and emotional incontinence is people just "being human" when actually they're just being stupid and arseholes)
In general, everybody dealing with computers can benefit from a bit of programming knowledge, not only admins. The rule of thumb is: if you're doing a repetitive, braindead job, you're doing it wrong. Computers are built to do exactly that. A small script can automate a lot of work for you, if you have that skill it can help you tremendously.
Let me guess, you're a developer?
I'm a sysadmin (and all of my coding is systems automation and data mangling stuff - i have no interest in applications development or coding something more than a few hundred lines in size) and think that's a perfectly normal and reasonable attitude to have.
doing stuff manually is boring, time-consuming, and prone to error. for repetitive (or even just one-off but large tasks) I'd rather write a script to do it - even if the script is effectively little more than an executable plan of action, I still come out ahead because writing the script forces me to think about what I'm about to do, what every little step is, what might go wrong at each stage, and so on.
also, writing a script is more interesting work than doing it manually....even if it doesn't save any time, it makes my job more interesting, so i'm less likely to get bored and start job hunting.
my languages of choice are bash, sed, awk, perl, and occasionally python. Sometimes I debug and make tiny fixes to programs written in C or Fortran or some other language. these are all what I would consider to be normal skills, a minimum to be expected of anyone doing sysadmin work.
Yes, yes and it'd be great if developers understand a little about sysadmin so they knew how their software would be run...
yes, that would be great too. my work would be much simpler if devs had a clue about systems.
A troll, the modern internet variety at least, is something that is annoying but mostly harmless. Patent Trolls are anything but harmless.
They're more like Patent Privateers - except that instead of having letters of marque to attack foreign shipping, they have letters of marque to attack local companies and any foreign company trying to do business locally.
Worse, not satisfied with destroying their own economy, the US is repeatedly trying to extend their jurisdiction with ACTA, SOPA, so-called "Free Trade Agreements" and the like.
Marx was right, capitalism will eat itself...and patent privateers are just one of the more obvious carnivores. The capitalist ecosystem has evolved predators and, as is common with predators, both the young and the old & tired are the easy prey.
It's not the politicians who need murdering, politicians are just the stooges, it's the lobbyists and lawyers, and CEOs of mega-corporations, and shareholders with significant shares of same.
They need to understand that declaring war on the people of the world has direct personal consequences that are not excused just because they're acting as the agent of a monstrous inhuman artificial life-form.
(note for cretins who want to take this as a serious call to action: it is not. It is is a sarcastic reaction against idiotic blaming of 'da ebil gubmint' for evil shit done by *corporations*. governments are not the source of all evil. I'm not saying that some CEOs etc don't deserve a bullet to the head, just that this post is sarcasm, not incitement)
Under the current rules, third parties can never win or achieve anything in the US.
What you yanks need is electoral form, including:
1. Compulsory voting. It tends to suppress the loony extremes (of all sides) and makes politicians start pandering to the politically apathetic majority rather than extremist nut-cases. If you ever take the time to look at the american political system from the outside you'll realise what an amazingly good thing this would be. Your politicians are scary...they're completely insane. It's terrifying that these lunatics could be elected to positions of power in the world's one remaining superpower....it's even more terrifying that these people could have that power at a time when the america empire is collapsing - your influence and global political relevance are dwindling.
I know many of you yanks think compulsory voting is immoral or something, that if someone's apathetic then they don't deserve the vote....but a) being politically apathetic means they just want to be left alone, they're not volunteering to be shat on, and b) they're most likely apathetic because (under the current system) it makes no difference whether they vote or not.
2. Some form of preferential voting so that voting for third-party or independent candidates is not a complete waste of a vote....You can vote for your favoured third-party candidate knowing that if he/she doesn't win, you vote will pass to your 2nd choice (and then to your third then fourth, etc choices).
The Condorcet method is good but probably beyond what the average vote can understand, Alternative Ballot is also good and easy enough for the average voter to understand.
3. State-level reform of your electoral college system - specifically eliminate winner-takes-all as an option. if 51% of the voters in a state prefer candidate A as president then that candidate should get 51% of that state's presidential votes, not 100%.
4. Paper ballots.
5. Make it harder (if not impossible) to disenfranchise people from their vote. Dropping people from electoral rolls should only be done *individually* never in bulk, with hand-signed (not automated) notification from the State's top electoral official at least six months before it affects a person's voting rights (if there's an election before then, they're still entitled to vote). Notification must include the cause, and legal causes must be strictly limited. *ANY* objection by the individual should immediately re-instate their voting rights until and unless the state can show cause in court why that individual should be disenfranchised.
6. Even felons should have voting rights, even while serving their sentences - but certainly once they've done their time. This is especially important when you consider that many felonies are victimless crimes like drug use....if a law is wrong then those convicted of it need to be able to vote to get that law changed.
You also need massive campaign finance reform (in short: ban all campaign contributions above, say $50 per person per year. complete ban on contributions from non-natural persons - corporations, lobby groups, religious organisations, etc).
Finally, you've got thousands of nukes. You can afford to drop a few on FOX news' HQ. Try it, you'll be glad you did.
No, this is not a tragedy of the commons, this is yet another example of externalising expenses - same as dumping toxic shit into a river or burning coal to generate electricity.
Unless there's a bill to pay or laws to prohibit it, you can get away with pretending that the expense of managing and disposing of your waste doesn't exist (and, magically, for YOU it doesn't exist).
You get the benefit of your waste-producing activity, but everyone else has to pay for it.
The "Tragedy of the Commons" is a popular meme for libertarian types who want everything to be owned (preferably by them so they can extract monopoly rents from the previously public resource)...and because TTotC is a such a popular and self-serving meme they are selectively blind to the thousands upon thousands of examples of privately-owned resources which are completely trashed because their only value to their owner is in the maximum extraction of profit in the shortest time (strip mining, toxic or radioactive tailings dams, clear-fell logging for example) or as a dumping ground for waste from some other activity.
But a commons doesn't have to be owned to be managed successfully, it just has to be regulated - so that, e.g, one private company can't take a giant dump in everyone else's favourite picnic spot. Regulation, however, is anathema to libertarian types. They feel that if they want to lay a turd on someone else's picnic blanket, either directly or a few miles upstream, then they should be able to do so - "Freedom!"
You're not too old at 40 (hell, 60 or 80 wouldn't be too old)....but if you haven't been keeping up with technology for your own interest, then you probably don't have the aptitude for it.
or maybe it's just.NET that doesn't interest you - in that case, find some area of software development that DOES interest you and start playing/learning.
and if playing with and learning technology seems like a chore then you really don't have the aptitude.
sorry to sound so harsh but for programming, aptitude and motivation count for a lot more than training. training can, at best, get you started - an introduction. you won't master it without the personal interest in the subject.
why the fuck would telling the truth 'reflect poorly; on either Linus or the Linux community.
Romney IS a fucking moron (or, at least, goes above-and-beyond to pander to morons that he is completely indistinguishable from one), and Mormonism IS batshit insane (as are all other religions, but Mormonism is pretty fucking crazy - not quite as crazy as scientology, but not far off it either. religion founded by a con-man, and only an idiot would believe the golden tablets story. the magic fucking underpants are laughable. what's not laughable are the nutcase patriarch survivalist forced-"marriage" rape compounds - i've got no problem with polygamy, or polygyny or any other form of polyamory but raping teenage girls is just unnacceptable)
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Yeah, but there are hundreds of thousands of clueless IT managers in medium to large sized companies who are sitting ducks for vendors selling them ridiculously overpriced 15K drives to go in their absurdly overpriced SANs that end up being used as nothing more crappy little file servers.
Why?
Because it's easier and much safer to spend bucket-loads of your employers' money than it is to get a clue about technology or to make appropriately scaled decisions based on your actual needs.
Spending $150,000 proves you are important and can play in the big league, while spending $20K and saving your employer $130K just puts your neck on the chopping block when a drive fails (as all do, 15Krpm as often as cheap SATA...or more often) even though spending a few hundred more on some cold-spares would more than alleviate that risk.
and the vendor helps with glossy brochures to prove that you need to spend 10 times as much.
Also, "Shiny!". hardware fetishism leads to unwise purchasing decisions.
America must invade Ecuador in order to save this invaluable species.
They will, of course, need to change Ecuador's extradition laws so that the perpetrators of this volcano-based atrocity can be brought to justice, no matter what embassy they may try to escape to.
Why bother waiting when GNU Octave already runs on Android? Without the hassle (and expense) of proprietary software licensing.
Also available are GNU R (and thus CRAN), and python (with numpy and scipy) and numerous other free alternatives.
"We refer you to the reply given in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram."
that's like saying ticks are a symptom of lyme disease, rather than the parasitic bacteria-carrying cause.
well, they've got a point you know.
he's black - how could he possibly be a real citizen? he's not even a real human being.
may as well elect a chimp to be president. or, worse, a woman.
Saying you're going to pray for someone is a condescending put-down and dismissal. It's saying you're ignorant and misguided and can't help yourself so I'll ask my invisible magical friend to fix you.
It's all that and more if the person being "prayed for" is religious in any way - it's also a threat of witchcraft, invoking (fictional but still scary to a believer) divine powers.
If you want some glimmer of understanding about how non-christian but still religious people feel about being "prayed for" by christians, consider how a christian would feel about the following "blessing": 'May Satan bless you, keep you safe in his arms, and guide you to wisdom"
I'm an atheist so I'm not worried by the witchcraft elements (it's just superstitious mumbo-jumbo), but I'm still offended by the condescension of people offering to "pray for me". smarmy self-righteous fucks.
it's people like you who make me glad i don't live in america amongst the barbarians...glad i live somewhere civilised instead.
you're the kind of fuckwit who believes the "government is the source of all evil" propaganda that tells you to vote for the thieves and scumbags that will act in their corporate masters' interests (and against yours) to eliminate regulation, eliminate government services, reduce taxes for corporations and for the tiny handful of obscenely wealthy plutocrats and their families.
in short, you're a fucking moron. it's people like you, who swallow those lies and take them on as a personal religion, who are the direct cause for how fucked up america is, and how far you've strayed from your original grand republican experiment.
yeah, sure, you're not completely responsible, you're just idiot brainwashed sheep doing what you're told by billions of dollars worth of pro-corporate advertising, but you *could* wake up and see what's going on around you if you wanted to.
but it's easier and far more comfortable for you to believe that the brown stain on your nose is the smell of freedom, and not just some plutrocrat's shit.
and far easier to obediently treat those who have woken up as your enemy.
but he didn't say "...NOT!" which spoils the humour because Americans won't be able to recognise it as any form of sarcasm.
more to the point, that lack proves that it couldn't possibly have been sarcasm - it just doesn't work without "NOT!", you've got to let people know somehow not to take your words literally, that they should, in fact, negate them.
i don't know how it works in other PAYE countries, but in Australia income tax is deducted from your weekly/fortnightly/monthly pay by your employer and paid to the government.
Withheld tax is calculated based on your pay for that period, with a progressive tax scale (the first $18,200 you earn is tax free).
You are still expected to file a tax return every year, and there are all sorts of exemptions and deductions and expenses you can claim (e.g. if you have children, and you can claim the cost of tools or education required for your work). Deductions aren't subtracted directly from the tax you pay, they reduce your taxable income (e.g. if you earn $50K and have $2K worth of deductions, you pay tax as if you earned $48K). For most people, this results in a tax refund, especially if they spent any time not working or had irregular overtime.
You're also supposed to declare in your tax return any other income you may have received (interest from investments, share dividends, capital gains, etc). For people who make significant incomes in this way, they end up with a tax bill to pay.
e.g. someone making $50,000 in a year would end up paying abut $8600 tax over that year, including the 1.5% medicare levy but not including any deductions. That works out to an effective tax rate of 17% - which isn't too bad considering that it pays for roads, schools, universities, hospitals, police, tax collectors :), army, navy, pharmaceutical benefits scheme (subsidised and price-regulated drugs - pharma companies hate it, people love it. PBS-approved drugs cost a maximum of $35 for a month's supply, but usually less - or about $5 if you're a pensioner or unemployed), infrastructure projects like the NBN, and thousands of other government services. it's not perfect, and money is wasted, and nearly everyone can think of some things that they'd rather their tax money wasn't spent on but the benefits greatly outweigh the cost.
no.
i was probably being a bit too subtle for you so i'll spell it out clearly and simply:
i don't like animated gifs distracting from the content of a web page.
similarly, i don't like animations or sound effects on my computer's desktop - i disable all that shit, it doesn't add anything of value (quite the contrary).
31 days of annoying animated gifs. 31 days of having to scroll every slashdot window and tab to get the distractions off the screen. slightly less than 31 days of wondering "when will they stop with this annoying shit?"
animations are the main reason i block ads. non-animated ads don't annoy me anywhere near as much, they're not as in-your-face distracting. animated non-ads annoy me almost as much as animated ads.
trying to read with animations on screen is about as pleasant as trying to listen to music while some arsehole is shouting at you with a megaphone held up to your ear.
my vote is also for none of them.
it might seem like that on the surface, but in practice it's more like what a bunch of python programmers with little experience and no interest in systems administration might image a systems admin tool would be like.
don't get me wrong, i like openstack, i use and work with it every day - but it's painfully obvious that the developers think only in terms of python and json and really don't give a shit about having useful command line tools....their attitude seems to be that anything you want to do, you should code yourself in python. the concept of wrapping good general-purpose command line tools with shell code seems completely alien to them.
which is a shame... openstack is good, but it could be much better if it had more sysadmin input in the design rather than just programmer input (and far less input from programmers infatuated by web development fads).
in short, no. i have only a vague, low-detail understanding of these and millions of other things.
However, I also have something called 'curiosity' and another called 'the ability and willingness to learn'. If i ever get into a situation where my understanding of something is important then i learn it. and i *often* read up on topics just for the hell of it, even though it currently has no practical benefit for me, just for the sheer joy of learning something new and interesting.
and, often, the non-practical or useless knowledge i've picked up turns out to be useful at some point in time, either to solve a specific problem or as general knowledge of how things work, or helps me understand something that i really do need to know.
i'm 45 now, and i've been doing this all my life. and i still wish i had the net and wikipedia back when i was a kid, i wanted them before i knew what they were called but both were still science-fiction in the 70s.
nope, but if i ever need to or if they manage to spark my curiosity one day (or be related - directly or through a serendipitous journey of discovery - to something i am interested in) then i will learn whatever I need/want to know about them.
nope, it's not that simple. being dull and incurious is just *one* of the many ways of being human. some people are curious and capable and willing to learn. some (most?) are not. some are highly focused on extremely narrow areas of interest, some have broad and voracious appetites for knowledge, and some don't want to know anything at all.
also, intelligence and curiosity is the number one thing that separates us from most other animals (although with some animals it's pretty obvious that it's a matter of degree not some essential "magical" difference - chimps, crows, and even dogs for example). IMO it's quite easy to make the argument that those who are curious and intelligent are *more human* than those who are not as curiosity and intelligence are *defining traits* of a human.
(but then, it pisses me off when i see the claim - either explicit or implicit - that ignorance and emotional incontinence is people just "being human" when actually they're just being stupid and arseholes)
I'm a sysadmin (and all of my coding is systems automation and data mangling stuff - i have no interest in applications development or coding something more than a few hundred lines in size) and think that's a perfectly normal and reasonable attitude to have.
doing stuff manually is boring, time-consuming, and prone to error. for repetitive (or even just one-off but large tasks) I'd rather write a script to do it - even if the script is effectively little more than an executable plan of action, I still come out ahead because writing the script forces me to think about what I'm about to do, what every little step is, what might go wrong at each stage, and so on.
also, writing a script is more interesting work than doing it manually....even if it doesn't save any time, it makes my job more interesting, so i'm less likely to get bored and start job hunting.
my languages of choice are bash, sed, awk, perl, and occasionally python. Sometimes I debug and make tiny fixes to programs written in C or Fortran or some other language. these are all what I would consider to be normal skills, a minimum to be expected of anyone doing sysadmin work.
yes, that would be great too. my work would be much simpler if devs had a clue about systems.
A troll, the modern internet variety at least, is something that is annoying but mostly harmless. Patent Trolls are anything but harmless.
They're more like Patent Privateers - except that instead of having letters of marque to attack foreign shipping, they have letters of marque to attack local companies and any foreign company trying to do business locally.
Worse, not satisfied with destroying their own economy, the US is repeatedly trying to extend their jurisdiction with ACTA, SOPA, so-called "Free Trade Agreements" and the like.
Marx was right, capitalism will eat itself...and patent privateers are just one of the more obvious carnivores. The capitalist ecosystem has evolved predators and, as is common with predators, both the young and the old & tired are the easy prey.
Bezos should back up his words with some action - like renouncing his company's bogus patents.
I'm still boycotting Amazon over the one-click patent. Haven't bought a single item from them since the late 90s.
It's not the politicians who need murdering, politicians are just the stooges, it's the lobbyists and lawyers, and CEOs of mega-corporations, and shareholders with significant shares of same.
They need to understand that declaring war on the people of the world has direct personal consequences that are not excused just because they're acting as the agent of a monstrous inhuman artificial life-form.
(note for cretins who want to take this as a serious call to action: it is not. It is is a sarcastic reaction against idiotic blaming of 'da ebil gubmint' for evil shit done by *corporations*. governments are not the source of all evil. I'm not saying that some CEOs etc don't deserve a bullet to the head, just that this post is sarcasm, not incitement)
There's only one way to defeat such awesome predictive powers...lotteries are going to have to start using hexadecimal.
Under the current rules, third parties can never win or achieve anything in the US.
What you yanks need is electoral form, including:
1. Compulsory voting. It tends to suppress the loony extremes (of all sides) and makes politicians start pandering to the politically apathetic majority rather than extremist nut-cases. If you ever take the time to look at the american political system from the outside you'll realise what an amazingly good thing this would be. Your politicians are scary...they're completely insane. It's terrifying that these lunatics could be elected to positions of power in the world's one remaining superpower....it's even more terrifying that these people could have that power at a time when the america empire is collapsing - your influence and global political relevance are dwindling.
I know many of you yanks think compulsory voting is immoral or something, that if someone's apathetic then they don't deserve the vote....but a) being politically apathetic means they just want to be left alone, they're not volunteering to be shat on, and b) they're most likely apathetic because (under the current system) it makes no difference whether they vote or not.
2. Some form of preferential voting so that voting for third-party or independent candidates is not a complete waste of a vote....You can vote for your favoured third-party candidate knowing that if he/she doesn't win, you vote will pass to your 2nd choice (and then to your third then fourth, etc choices).
The Condorcet method is good but probably beyond what the average vote can understand, Alternative Ballot is also good and easy enough for the average voter to understand.
3. State-level reform of your electoral college system - specifically eliminate winner-takes-all as an option. if 51% of the voters in a state prefer candidate A as president then that candidate should get 51% of that state's presidential votes, not 100%.
4. Paper ballots.
5. Make it harder (if not impossible) to disenfranchise people from their vote. Dropping people from electoral rolls should only be done *individually* never in bulk, with hand-signed (not automated) notification from the State's top electoral official at least six months before it affects a person's voting rights (if there's an election before then, they're still entitled to vote). Notification must include the cause, and legal causes must be strictly limited. *ANY* objection by the individual should immediately re-instate their voting rights until and unless the state can show cause in court why that individual should be disenfranchised.
6. Even felons should have voting rights, even while serving their sentences - but certainly once they've done their time. This is especially important when you consider that many felonies are victimless crimes like drug use....if a law is wrong then those convicted of it need to be able to vote to get that law changed.
You also need massive campaign finance reform (in short: ban all campaign contributions above, say $50 per person per year. complete ban on contributions from non-natural persons - corporations, lobby groups, religious organisations, etc).
Finally, you've got thousands of nukes. You can afford to drop a few on FOX news' HQ. Try it, you'll be glad you did.
No, this is not a tragedy of the commons, this is yet another example of externalising expenses - same as dumping toxic shit into a river or burning coal to generate electricity.
Unless there's a bill to pay or laws to prohibit it, you can get away with pretending that the expense of managing and disposing of your waste doesn't exist (and, magically, for YOU it doesn't exist).
You get the benefit of your waste-producing activity, but everyone else has to pay for it.
The "Tragedy of the Commons" is a popular meme for libertarian types who want everything to be owned (preferably by them so they can extract monopoly rents from the previously public resource)...and because TTotC is a such a popular and self-serving meme they are selectively blind to the thousands upon thousands of examples of privately-owned resources which are completely trashed because their only value to their owner is in the maximum extraction of profit in the shortest time (strip mining, toxic or radioactive tailings dams, clear-fell logging for example) or as a dumping ground for waste from some other activity.
But a commons doesn't have to be owned to be managed successfully, it just has to be regulated - so that, e.g, one private company can't take a giant dump in everyone else's favourite picnic spot. Regulation, however, is anathema to libertarian types. They feel that if they want to lay a turd on someone else's picnic blanket, either directly or a few miles upstream, then they should be able to do so - "Freedom!"
You're not too old at 40 (hell, 60 or 80 wouldn't be too old)....but if you haven't been keeping up with technology for your own interest, then you probably don't have the aptitude for it.
or maybe it's just .NET that doesn't interest you - in that case, find some area of software development that DOES interest you and start playing/learning.
and if playing with and learning technology seems like a chore then you really don't have the aptitude.
sorry to sound so harsh but for programming, aptitude and motivation count for a lot more than training. training can, at best, get you started - an introduction. you won't master it without the personal interest in the subject.
Does the recent Apple vs Samsung patent case ring any bells?
why the fuck would telling the truth 'reflect poorly; on either Linus or the Linux community.
Romney IS a fucking moron (or, at least, goes above-and-beyond to pander to morons that he is completely indistinguishable from one), and Mormonism IS batshit insane (as are all other religions, but Mormonism is pretty fucking crazy - not quite as crazy as scientology, but not far off it either. religion founded by a con-man, and only an idiot would believe the golden tablets story. the magic fucking underpants are laughable. what's not laughable are the nutcase patriarch survivalist forced-"marriage" rape compounds - i've got no problem with polygamy, or polygyny or any other form of polyamory but raping teenage girls is just unnacceptable)
you atheists love to take all the fun out of things, don't you?
Eliminate the human sacrifice now and next you'll be saying we have to get rid of our Steve Jobs altars.