It was Andrea Dworkin in the 80s who really pushed the idea in academia that any penetrative sex was inherently violent (though I don't recall if she ever directly addressed the question of male-male penetration). there were a number of second-wave feminists who sort of rallied around that concept, elaborating that because women were disadvantaged economically and socially that it was difficult if not impossible for a woman to truly give consent to sex.
This ultimately led to the false idea that Dworkin and McKinnon or others had claimed all sex was rape, which they hadn't, although they certainly seemed to think a large majority of heterosexual sex was nonconsensual and violent, so depending on your point of view it may simply be splitting hairs either way.
This all set up the stage for the third-wave "sex positive" feminists, who were largely in reaction to the earlier group, and it's a pretty deep philosophical schism that continues to be debated in almost any large group of women today. That's how you can have some feminists arguing that all pornography is inherently advocating violence against women, while at the same time the Suicide Girls consider themselves to be striking a blow for feminism.
It's pretty much consistently women who have the final say in mating; men make the overture, women accept.
I can't remember where I first heard it, but it was a pretty insightful and generally accurate statement: Women are the gatekeepers for sex, while men are the gatekeepers for relationships.
So you're basically saying that the nice guys aren't really nice, they are just pretending to be nice because they think it will win them girls. I call bullshit on that.
For the majority of males under, say, 25 years old, yeah, "nice guys" are just as full of shit as "bad boys". Nice Guys generally think they're earning some sort of karma points that entitle them to get affection from women. That's just as manipulative and deceitful as anything those guys bitch about others (both men and women) doing.
Of course, both men and women generally mature, and eventually come to realize that there's a difference between being a genuinely good man and just being a Nice Guy. Nearly every sane woman over 25 wants a good man, not a bad boy or a nice guy. But of course from 18-25, it certainly makes sense to be the bad boy since that's where all the action is.
I literally have no idea what your comment is supposed to mean. There's never been any question that the taps were requested by the Justice Department on authority of the AG, the issue has been whether or not they violated the Constitution (which the AG has no authority to override) or the FISA laws passed by Congress (which again, the AG has no authority to override).
Then I fail to see your point since a JUDGE decides what is and is not legal.
Then you continue to fail epically at this conversation, since the entire purpose of this bill is to hand off the immunity choice to the AG. All he has to do is send a letter and the telco is given immunity by Congress. Sure, a court might overrule that provision, but we're discussing the legislation right now and that's what the bill just passed by the House says.
When I talk to my Linux friends about computers, we talk about security problems and how to fix them
The it sounds like you aren't comparing Apple users with Linux users, you're comparing computer users to computer programmers. Anyone with the ability to fix a security problem of course isn't going to take security for granted, the same way an OB/GYN doesn't take successful delivery of a baby for granted. But most users of any OS simply take it for granted that their system will function the way it is supposed to.
I don't know many Linux programmers who worry about prepress technology, but I talk about prepress all the time with Apple users -- does that mean Linux programmers never print anything? Does it mean Linux doesn't support printing at all?
Clearly they weren't "far superior", or customers would have preferred them.
Whether customers prefer something has no inherent relation to the financial success of the company making a product or its success in the market. Whether the other factors that prevent a product from becoming a success are "fair" or "unfair" is a conversation that has to touch on economics, psychology, politics, etc. But there's no logical or economic basis by which you can claim the success of a product is proof of its market quality (or that a failure of a product is proof that customers didn't/wouldn't prefer it, or that it wasn't superior).
The most famous example was probably Tucker Motors, which was ahead of all competitors in virtually every area but was destroyed precisely because it was such a significant competitive threat to a massively influential industry.
Gates is certainly correct that what MS brought to the personal computer industry was an unprecedented level of business acumen -- understanding how the use of exclusive contracts, marketing alliances, and technical measures could cut off avenues of distribution and exposure for other products in a market, even ones many customers would have preferred to use at a price premium.
No, it's because I'm not silly enough to use logic that dictates basically every single company in the world is a "monopoly", and any company choosing to sell their product cheaper is "abusing their monopoly".
Nobody else is making those claims, either. If you want to be disingenuous in your responses, have fun, but don't delude yourself into thinking anyone is either fooled or entertained. As soon as you want to participate in the adult conversation by responding to what people say rather than your deliberate mischaracterizations, you'll probably get more responses, and may even learn something about either the history of the computer market or basic social skills.
I'm pretty sure the French (and related areas) were bloody happy to see us at the time.
Indeed, just as the Kuwaitis were happy to see us when we helped them reverse an invasion of their land. Getting help from an ally is usually a pretty good thing.
Remind me, which foreign army did we push out of Iraq? Oh, wait, WE ARE the foreign army in Iraq.
I can't imagine the average Iraqi is any happier about their Vichy government than the average Frenchman was.
People are outraged about Iraq and not about Afghanistan.
Indeed, the thing that pisses me off more than anything is that we went into Iraq when we hadn't finished the mission in Afghanistan. There's still a mass-murderer near there, who killed over 3,000 people on American soil, and the President decided to just pull most of the most highly-trained people pursuing him off the case and send them elsewhere. If we hadn't blown our international credibility on Iraq, nobody anywhere would have criticized us for anything we did to pursue bin Laden.
Um, most people do expect that there will be layoffs and cutbacks when a company is losing money. It's certainly not uncommon. Getting let go with 10 minutes notice is a pretty steep pay cut by any standard.
I'm glad you're not my boss, though. Not only do you seem to be completely clueless about the value of experience and qualifications (no, interns or Indians really can't replace most skilled labor, no matter what your consultants try to sell you for $600/hour), you seem to be downright contemptuous of anyone who isn't sufficiently grateful that they aren't homeless and starving.
Of course, given your words here, I suspect all your qualified people have already quit, so hiring a bunch of Indians probably WOULD be just as good as whomever has such lack of career options as to stick around and take your attitude.
It makes me think of all the ads I see on craigslist where companies want to pay $10/hour for someone to do some technical job, inevitably they get several replies telling them what cheapskates they are and that nobody qualified would apply. The beauty is, they'll get all sorts of unqualified people applying, and then when the project fails, they'll pat themselves on the back for being so smart as not to pay more than $10/hour, because after all, if the cheap ones couldn't do the job, the more expensive ones would have just wasted even more money!
Where has anyone given the impression that Apple engineers are lazy and incompetent? I think maybe you're projecting from your own sense of not being recognized or something here. If anyone at Apple thought they didn't have great engineers, they wouldn't bother to push them to make great products. Nobody I know at Apple (even in traditionally clueless divisions like marketing) thinks the engineers and programmers are anything but the lifeblood and foundation of the company.
But yes, much of what Apple was originally and is again now, is due to Jobs' marketing savvy and seemingly magical ability to know when a device is ready (as opposed to needing another 3 months of work) and how people can be doing something in the future without worrying so much about the limitations the rest of us are aware of. There are lots of people who are great long-term visionaries, and lots of folks who are great engineers capable of building most anything you can imagine, but there are very few short-term visionaries capable of really knowing what needs to be built 12-24 months from now.
If you've never worked with a fantastically inspirational and inspired boss, it's hard to understand. Sure, over the long term it can be tiring, and after the twentieth time you go back to the drawing board because his inspiration just doesn't match up with the laws of physics, you want to set his house on fire. But when every talented engineer in the room says something is impossible, and the boss insists you do it anyway, and 6 months later you're all amazed because you managed to make it work -- that's a great feeling.
Most programmers, designers, and engineers I know complain that projects get rushed out the door before they're done, that they never get a chance to really use iterative design techniques to create a better widget, because once it is "good enough", they have to put it in a box and move on to the next project. Being able to work at a company where "good enough" is NOT good enough, is what many people dream about -- knowing that you can create the whole project, then throw it out and do it RIGHT, is a blessing. Yeah, if you just want a job with direct deposit where you don't have to do much other than punch the clock, it isn't the best company to work for. But if you want to create products people will use every day -- and LOVE USING -- while keeping enough time for family and a normal life, it's a pretty great company.
At my previous employer, I remember so many times running into people just not wanting to face the truth to maintain political quagmire and then when the project goes live it's nothing but spin despite massive failures or high support costs.
One thing other folks haven't mentioned is the lower atmospheric pressure. I know when we've used laptops in high altitude situations, the LCD displays would sometimes crap out because they are essentially laminates, and separated when the environmental expectation for ambient pressure were not met.
Of course that specific problem won't affect a switch, but there may be some other unexpected way in which atmospheric pressure is involved. It isn't necessarily easily tested in a high-altitude chamber, since (as with many things) the effect can be cumulative and depend on other factors like being jostled during use.
In fact, I think it is highly likely that the building blocks formed here in isolation just due to the volume comparison problem.
Yeah, I tend to think that evidence like this of organic compounds in meteorites is looked at more as proof that they are formed (and distributed) routinely throughout the universe, rather than trying to say that this was the mechanism by which they arose on Earth. This has pretty serious implications for things like the Drake Equation, or at least the likelihood of planets with habitable climates having access to the materials necessary for life to come about.
So you're confused on how to deal with people who commit crimes in other countries? Why is the assumption that we somehow have to deal with them here in our legal system? If someone tries to kill me in Ecuador, they get tried in Ecuador, not spirited away to some limbo by the US where they have an entirely new judicial system invented for them. Though if you're determined to try them in the US, there's nothing that prohibits us from making actions illegal outside our borders -- there are numerous US laws designed specifically to apply to sex predators who travel overseas to abuse children.
If someone is making death threats, that's a crime. Charge them with that and send them to prison. If some innocent person we kidnapped (since presumably we're not letting the guilty ones go free) is being refused entry to their home country, then do what we normally do in that situation, which is keeping them in immigration detention until an acceptable third country is willing to take them, or release them in the US. Maybe we shouldn't be flying people halfway around the world before we even know if they've done anything wrong, then we wouldn't be faced with the problem of how to repatriate them.
You're not saying anything that the law isn't already capable of dealing with, you're just complaining that problems we created ourselves through our own actions are now inconvenient and we'd like to sweep them under the rug rather than deal with them according to the rule of law.
As I said before, Congress has no responsibility to do anything in this situation, the laws on the books are already capable of handling them, it is only complicated because the administration wants it to be. Most critics, including those in Congress, believe that these prisoners are perfectly capable of being dealt with the the criminal justice system, or through courts martial. We already know how to do both of those things, no new laws from Congress are necessary. If you want to invent a third form of judicial process, the onus is on you to make it work, not on your critics to do it for you.
The Supreme Court doesn't seem to think it's that simple, either.
No, they've never been asked to address the issue, because that isn't the sort of question they address. They've been continually asked "is this completely new court system and set of rules acceptable?" and every time they say no, because Bush isn't content to just let the people be tried as criminals or treated as soldiers. It's essentially a game of the administration trying every way they can to specifically avoid treating the prisoners in a way the law expects. That the earlier republican Congresses passed useless sets of laws to fig-leaf the "separate but unequal" judicial redefinition does not in any way place a moral or ethical burden on later Congresses to make the bad idea workable. The burden is on the administration to comply with the laws, not on the Congress to write laws allowing the administration to do whatever it wants.
You also seem to be confused how laws are made in this country. Just because the Democrats have a slim majority in Congress doesn't mean they get to make the laws -- the times they have tried to stop the Administration (in precisely the way you claim they haven't), they've either had the bill killed by Republicans in Congress, be vetoed by Bush, or have the bill die under threat of veto. And even the bills that HAVE been passed by Congress, the President simply adds a signing statement claiming that as Commander in Chief he is free to ignore any restrictions the law places on him. The FISA acts were not ambiguous in any way, yet the administration felt perfectly comfortable ignoring them completely until their actions became public, at which point Congress offered a retroactive fig leaf. I fail to see any evidence that indicates the administration is remotely concerned with following any laws set down by congress, do you?
with someone from, say, Yemen, who is in Afghanistan using Iran-supplied weapons to attack and kill British soldiers, and who is captured by US troops with the help of Pakistani intelligence. How would you describe someone like that?
I don't know how you can be so confused, honestly. Either they're murderers (of the British soldiers they killed) or they're soldiers just doing their job. What difference does it make where the weapons they got or the intelligence we got came from (other than to its evidentiary value)? The law isn't vague on any of this, the only problem is that Bush has decided he doesn't like what the law says about either option so he just unilaterally decided it doesn't apply to these people for some reason.
I love how you manage to blame it all on the Democratic congress not wanting to "look bad", though. I guess the Republican congress that was making the laws for the first six years of this issue thought it made them look good?
Only if the value is different can a color-blind person tell that the colors are different. If you tell them that the red is darker than the green, they can then tell you which one is darker than the other if they're next to each other, but if all they have is blue, brown, and yellow to choose from, they have no idea if that brown is the red or the green.
Slashdot Mirror
true dat lol
It was Andrea Dworkin in the 80s who really pushed the idea in academia that any penetrative sex was inherently violent (though I don't recall if she ever directly addressed the question of male-male penetration). there were a number of second-wave feminists who sort of rallied around that concept, elaborating that because women were disadvantaged economically and socially that it was difficult if not impossible for a woman to truly give consent to sex.
This ultimately led to the false idea that Dworkin and McKinnon or others had claimed all sex was rape, which they hadn't, although they certainly seemed to think a large majority of heterosexual sex was nonconsensual and violent, so depending on your point of view it may simply be splitting hairs either way.
This all set up the stage for the third-wave "sex positive" feminists, who were largely in reaction to the earlier group, and it's a pretty deep philosophical schism that continues to be debated in almost any large group of women today. That's how you can have some feminists arguing that all pornography is inherently advocating violence against women, while at the same time the Suicide Girls consider themselves to be striking a blow for feminism.
I can't remember where I first heard it, but it was a pretty insightful and generally accurate statement: Women are the gatekeepers for sex, while men are the gatekeepers for relationships.
For the majority of males under, say, 25 years old, yeah, "nice guys" are just as full of shit as "bad boys". Nice Guys generally think they're earning some sort of karma points that entitle them to get affection from women. That's just as manipulative and deceitful as anything those guys bitch about others (both men and women) doing.
Of course, both men and women generally mature, and eventually come to realize that there's a difference between being a genuinely good man and just being a Nice Guy. Nearly every sane woman over 25 wants a good man, not a bad boy or a nice guy. But of course from 18-25, it certainly makes sense to be the bad boy since that's where all the action is.
I literally have no idea what your comment is supposed to mean. There's never been any question that the taps were requested by the Justice Department on authority of the AG, the issue has been whether or not they violated the Constitution (which the AG has no authority to override) or the FISA laws passed by Congress (which again, the AG has no authority to override).
Then you continue to fail epically at this conversation, since the entire purpose of this bill is to hand off the immunity choice to the AG. All he has to do is send a letter and the telco is given immunity by Congress. Sure, a court might overrule that provision, but we're discussing the legislation right now and that's what the bill just passed by the House says.
The it sounds like you aren't comparing Apple users with Linux users, you're comparing computer users to computer programmers. Anyone with the ability to fix a security problem of course isn't going to take security for granted, the same way an OB/GYN doesn't take successful delivery of a baby for granted. But most users of any OS simply take it for granted that their system will function the way it is supposed to.
I don't know many Linux programmers who worry about prepress technology, but I talk about prepress all the time with Apple users -- does that mean Linux programmers never print anything? Does it mean Linux doesn't support printing at all?
Whether customers prefer something has no inherent relation to the financial success of the company making a product or its success in the market. Whether the other factors that prevent a product from becoming a success are "fair" or "unfair" is a conversation that has to touch on economics, psychology, politics, etc. But there's no logical or economic basis by which you can claim the success of a product is proof of its market quality (or that a failure of a product is proof that customers didn't/wouldn't prefer it, or that it wasn't superior).
The most famous example was probably Tucker Motors, which was ahead of all competitors in virtually every area but was destroyed precisely because it was such a significant competitive threat to a massively influential industry.
Gates is certainly correct that what MS brought to the personal computer industry was an unprecedented level of business acumen -- understanding how the use of exclusive contracts, marketing alliances, and technical measures could cut off avenues of distribution and exposure for other products in a market, even ones many customers would have preferred to use at a price premium.
Nobody else is making those claims, either. If you want to be disingenuous in your responses, have fun, but don't delude yourself into thinking anyone is either fooled or entertained. As soon as you want to participate in the adult conversation by responding to what people say rather than your deliberate mischaracterizations, you'll probably get more responses, and may even learn something about either the history of the computer market or basic social skills.
There are already canals, we've seen pictures of them!
Indeed, we've known this for several presidential administrations:
If there is water, that means there is oxygen.
If oxygen, that means we can breathe.
Indeed, just as the Kuwaitis were happy to see us when we helped them reverse an invasion of their land. Getting help from an ally is usually a pretty good thing.
Remind me, which foreign army did we push out of Iraq? Oh, wait, WE ARE the foreign army in Iraq.
I can't imagine the average Iraqi is any happier about their Vichy government than the average Frenchman was.
Indeed, the thing that pisses me off more than anything is that we went into Iraq when we hadn't finished the mission in Afghanistan. There's still a mass-murderer near there, who killed over 3,000 people on American soil, and the President decided to just pull most of the most highly-trained people pursuing him off the case and send them elsewhere. If we hadn't blown our international credibility on Iraq, nobody anywhere would have criticized us for anything we did to pursue bin Laden.
Um, most people do expect that there will be layoffs and cutbacks when a company is losing money. It's certainly not uncommon. Getting let go with 10 minutes notice is a pretty steep pay cut by any standard.
I'm glad you're not my boss, though. Not only do you seem to be completely clueless about the value of experience and qualifications (no, interns or Indians really can't replace most skilled labor, no matter what your consultants try to sell you for $600/hour), you seem to be downright contemptuous of anyone who isn't sufficiently grateful that they aren't homeless and starving.
Of course, given your words here, I suspect all your qualified people have already quit, so hiring a bunch of Indians probably WOULD be just as good as whomever has such lack of career options as to stick around and take your attitude.
It makes me think of all the ads I see on craigslist where companies want to pay $10/hour for someone to do some technical job, inevitably they get several replies telling them what cheapskates they are and that nobody qualified would apply. The beauty is, they'll get all sorts of unqualified people applying, and then when the project fails, they'll pat themselves on the back for being so smart as not to pay more than $10/hour, because after all, if the cheap ones couldn't do the job, the more expensive ones would have just wasted even more money!
Where has anyone given the impression that Apple engineers are lazy and incompetent? I think maybe you're projecting from your own sense of not being recognized or something here. If anyone at Apple thought they didn't have great engineers, they wouldn't bother to push them to make great products. Nobody I know at Apple (even in traditionally clueless divisions like marketing) thinks the engineers and programmers are anything but the lifeblood and foundation of the company.
But yes, much of what Apple was originally and is again now, is due to Jobs' marketing savvy and seemingly magical ability to know when a device is ready (as opposed to needing another 3 months of work) and how people can be doing something in the future without worrying so much about the limitations the rest of us are aware of. There are lots of people who are great long-term visionaries, and lots of folks who are great engineers capable of building most anything you can imagine, but there are very few short-term visionaries capable of really knowing what needs to be built 12-24 months from now.
If you've never worked with a fantastically inspirational and inspired boss, it's hard to understand. Sure, over the long term it can be tiring, and after the twentieth time you go back to the drawing board because his inspiration just doesn't match up with the laws of physics, you want to set his house on fire. But when every talented engineer in the room says something is impossible, and the boss insists you do it anyway, and 6 months later you're all amazed because you managed to make it work -- that's a great feeling.
Most programmers, designers, and engineers I know complain that projects get rushed out the door before they're done, that they never get a chance to really use iterative design techniques to create a better widget, because once it is "good enough", they have to put it in a box and move on to the next project. Being able to work at a company where "good enough" is NOT good enough, is what many people dream about -- knowing that you can create the whole project, then throw it out and do it RIGHT, is a blessing. Yeah, if you just want a job with direct deposit where you don't have to do much other than punch the clock, it isn't the best company to work for. But if you want to create products people will use every day -- and LOVE USING -- while keeping enough time for family and a normal life, it's a pretty great company.
Are you Scott McClellan?
Yeah, I think this is just a new variation on the honor system virus.
One thing other folks haven't mentioned is the lower atmospheric pressure. I know when we've used laptops in high altitude situations, the LCD displays would sometimes crap out because they are essentially laminates, and separated when the environmental expectation for ambient pressure were not met.
Of course that specific problem won't affect a switch, but there may be some other unexpected way in which atmospheric pressure is involved. It isn't necessarily easily tested in a high-altitude chamber, since (as with many things) the effect can be cumulative and depend on other factors like being jostled during use.
Yeah, I tend to think that evidence like this of organic compounds in meteorites is looked at more as proof that they are formed (and distributed) routinely throughout the universe, rather than trying to say that this was the mechanism by which they arose on Earth. This has pretty serious implications for things like the Drake Equation, or at least the likelihood of planets with habitable climates having access to the materials necessary for life to come about.
Apparently you're not familiar with the Space Shuttle's glide ratio...
So you're confused on how to deal with people who commit crimes in other countries? Why is the assumption that we somehow have to deal with them here in our legal system? If someone tries to kill me in Ecuador, they get tried in Ecuador, not spirited away to some limbo by the US where they have an entirely new judicial system invented for them. Though if you're determined to try them in the US, there's nothing that prohibits us from making actions illegal outside our borders -- there are numerous US laws designed specifically to apply to sex predators who travel overseas to abuse children.
If someone is making death threats, that's a crime. Charge them with that and send them to prison. If some innocent person we kidnapped (since presumably we're not letting the guilty ones go free) is being refused entry to their home country, then do what we normally do in that situation, which is keeping them in immigration detention until an acceptable third country is willing to take them, or release them in the US. Maybe we shouldn't be flying people halfway around the world before we even know if they've done anything wrong, then we wouldn't be faced with the problem of how to repatriate them.
You're not saying anything that the law isn't already capable of dealing with, you're just complaining that problems we created ourselves through our own actions are now inconvenient and we'd like to sweep them under the rug rather than deal with them according to the rule of law.
As I said before, Congress has no responsibility to do anything in this situation, the laws on the books are already capable of handling them, it is only complicated because the administration wants it to be. Most critics, including those in Congress, believe that these prisoners are perfectly capable of being dealt with the the criminal justice system, or through courts martial. We already know how to do both of those things, no new laws from Congress are necessary. If you want to invent a third form of judicial process, the onus is on you to make it work, not on your critics to do it for you.
No, they've never been asked to address the issue, because that isn't the sort of question they address. They've been continually asked "is this completely new court system and set of rules acceptable?" and every time they say no, because Bush isn't content to just let the people be tried as criminals or treated as soldiers. It's essentially a game of the administration trying every way they can to specifically avoid treating the prisoners in a way the law expects. That the earlier republican Congresses passed useless sets of laws to fig-leaf the "separate but unequal" judicial redefinition does not in any way place a moral or ethical burden on later Congresses to make the bad idea workable. The burden is on the administration to comply with the laws, not on the Congress to write laws allowing the administration to do whatever it wants.
You also seem to be confused how laws are made in this country. Just because the Democrats have a slim majority in Congress doesn't mean they get to make the laws -- the times they have tried to stop the Administration (in precisely the way you claim they haven't), they've either had the bill killed by Republicans in Congress, be vetoed by Bush, or have the bill die under threat of veto. And even the bills that HAVE been passed by Congress, the President simply adds a signing statement claiming that as Commander in Chief he is free to ignore any restrictions the law places on him. The FISA acts were not ambiguous in any way, yet the administration felt perfectly comfortable ignoring them completely until their actions became public, at which point Congress offered a retroactive fig leaf. I fail to see any evidence that indicates the administration is remotely concerned with following any laws set down by congress, do you?
We always will be as long as Apple doesn't provide a built-in way to stop dropping dot-file turds all over shared resources.
I don't know how you can be so confused, honestly. Either they're murderers (of the British soldiers they killed) or they're soldiers just doing their job. What difference does it make where the weapons they got or the intelligence we got came from (other than to its evidentiary value)? The law isn't vague on any of this, the only problem is that Bush has decided he doesn't like what the law says about either option so he just unilaterally decided it doesn't apply to these people for some reason.
I love how you manage to blame it all on the Democratic congress not wanting to "look bad", though. I guess the Republican congress that was making the laws for the first six years of this issue thought it made them look good?
Only if the value is different can a color-blind person tell that the colors are different. If you tell them that the red is darker than the green, they can then tell you which one is darker than the other if they're next to each other, but if all they have is blue, brown, and yellow to choose from, they have no idea if that brown is the red or the green.