And once you're through that phase, make sure you keep some Cover Your Ass files to prove that you did indeed recommend X solution when a problem comes up that could have been avoided.
Also, just figured out what RPI is. And I say, EW. Maybe it's just because Rensselaer sent me more glossy junk mail than every other university combined, or because I know that the schools that do that are trying to get more people to apply so they can turn more of them down, thereby looking more "selective" to the ranking agencies.
My advice based on some partial regrets: Don't just hang out at a "state school" (assuming that means University of ); take a couple of years at a community college. Assuming they exist in NY...I come from California where after two years in a CC you are guaranteed admission to a UC school depending on your grades (including UC Berkeley or UCLA). Not only that but IIRC you have an Associate's Degree which can come in handy in the interim if you're looking to get any short term academic work.
The primary reason for this, however, is that community colleges have small class sizes and the professors aren't there to do research. The last place you want to be in your Calculus, Physics, Discrete Logic, whatever classes is a huge lecture hall with a hot shot researcher who can't teach and has a thick, almost indecipherable accent. The #1 problem with most larger schools is that because their funding is mostly research-based, most of the faculty are there to do research and therefore are completely unaccountable for their teaching performance. At my school many departments prohibit the registrar from publishing the instructor when students are signing up for classes because the advisors would tell students to stay out of Y professor's class so they'll actually learn something.
All that said, from what I've heard MIT (also Stanford) is a little special. If you can get into the program (which you should try if you think you have any chance) it's probably worth it to skip the CC. Be thinking about how you'll pay for it though, because that's two extra years of high tuition compared to nearly no tuition for CC (might again be my California background). You should probably have some small-time job for some period of time to help pay and to put on your resumé, but even more fun, forward-looking, and worthwhile would be to be in some student group devoted to engineering in your field. What kinds of groups are available could be part of your college decision; this is an area where I've heard MIT and Stanford excel.
Good thing I'm gonna get a win8 machine with secure boot. Fuck these assholes.
That's what I was thinking. Then I thought, "Gee, this wasn't a big issue before but now that Windows 8 is going to have a feature to kill it, only then does major malware do this?" I hate to sound like a conspiracy nut, but this suggests that some arm of Microsoft might be involved in this. Knowing how Microsoft departments work (see "mexican standoff") it's not too far fetched to think that IF this were going on, 90% of the company wouldn't know.
On a more salient technical question...exactly how does malware plan on installing a hidden boot partition? Did malware writers figure out how to shrink a live, mounted partition of the hard drive to make space for another one? Or are they just going to take over the "recovery" partition most vendors ship on their computers? Given that the first option is extremely unlikely, this seems like a good reason to suggest that vendors supply an OS install DVD (or read-only USB stick, or embedded read-only flash storage) instead of a recovery partition. Not that it's ever going to happen. Hardware vendors like being able to save on manufacturing (or even licensing) costs for the extra discs, at the expense of space for user data (which doesn't need to be disclosed in advertising). Microsoft is too focused on their secure boot crusade anyway.
Combining the seeming nuttery with the technical question...what would Microsoft's goal be to create or help the development of this malware? To push secure boot? Why secure boot? To kill Linux? To kill Windows piracy? To help their partners ship unremovable crapware? To turn Windows into an iOS-style walled garden?
Um, no. There are two ways to change the constitution:
1. Both houses of congress pass the amendment with 67% (or 60%? not clear majority though). Then every state ratifies the amendment (unanimously? or 70% or something?).
2. Every state agrees to a constitutional convention, where anything and everything can be changed by simple majority of the delegates (last time this happened was in 1786, I think, the time when they wrote the modern constitution that changed us from a loose federation to our current local-federal tiered system).
I'm not exactly clear on the details because this is just from memory. If you really want to know then check the constitution. Did you really think it would be as easy to change the constitution as it is to pass any other law? How exactly does that make sense?
Why not get a Wii? There's no good reason why your emulation station has to be a "normal" computer. Besides, you won't have to worry about Dolphin emulation on a Wii, you can just use the built-in hardware. And please don't complain that "emulation" is code for "pirating" and so this solution won't work. Another benefit is that your Wii and the SD card you're going to need can't be more than $200; can you say that for your Mac Mini?
Go to Wiibrew.org to find out how to install Homebrew Channel with Hackmii. There are plenty of methods, the best currently being Bannerbomb or Letterbomb (depending on your Wii version). Preinstall Homebrew Browser on the SD card and use it to get some nice stuff like SNEX9xGX and Wii64. If you never want to take the SD card out again you can install ftpii to use Filezilla as long as the Wii is connected to your home network. You can even play DVDs with WiiMC if the Wii is old enough (newer ones have DVD video instructions purposefully removed from the hardware).
If you followed these instructions, then congratulations! You've got yourself a cheap, silent machine that can play Wii/Gamecube games natively and with their original controllers, as well as any emulated system like SNES or Nintendo 64 with any Wii supported controllers. Much better experience overall than trying to get a "normal" computer to run such a setup.
Of course you need math to progress in Physics, but that's not at issue here. The question is whether you need math to catch up. Is it necessary to understand the math in order to understand what Einstein claimed? Maybe, maybe not. I don't actually know. All you've proven, however, is that math is necessary to test whether Einstein's claims are true and verifiable, and from there understand what the implies. If I want to go get a PhD in Physics and move the field forward I'll need to do that, but if I just want to understand what the hell everyone's talking about I don't.
Isn't this one of those countries that's supposedly afraid of foreign agents infiltrating their country and attacking their citizens? At least, that's the excuse totalitarian regimes always use for imprisoning and torturing their own citizens. I'd say this is a call for some actual foreign assailants to launch an attack on Pakistan. All internet traffic is unencrypted. Let's steal some government accounts and passwords. Let's read the government's emails. Let's hack into their public utilities and make 'em explode. There's all kinds of havoc that can be done.
Pakistan is evidently more concerned about its own law-abiding citizens than Chinese hackers, Russian mafia, and the American CIA combined.
You, sir, appear to be the only person to have read TFA. I'd congratulate you, but I don't think that'll help you recover your lost brain cells from having tried to understand the nonsense. There's some marginally interesting discussion here on Slashdot about microtransactions, but it lacks focus (because there's no well-written article to focus on) and is mainly interesting from a sociological perspective (as in: what do ordinary people think about the situation?). Not having engaged with microtransactions myself, I was hoping the article would teach me about how they are used wrongly and how they could be used better. Instead, it says a whole lot of nothing; the only coherent point I can come up with is "Video game marketers bad! Take freedom away from developers and ruin game!"
A quick google shows Reuters picked it up, Popular Science, and the BBC.
@unassimilatable: This. Also, I don't remember saying anything about Fox viewers; I was talking about Fox reporters. I definitely got the impression from the article that the reporter didn't understand what the technology was actually doing, and felt that it was probably dangerous in an evil-Star-Trek-alien-technology sort of way.
Before you read what I would do, I want to state that openness, to me, does not just mean open source. Openness is a moral value. Openness in its best form is absolute honesty, with your users and your administrators, with your friends and family. Openness in its worst form is Wikileaks (which I don't think is a bad thing), or in another word, controversial. When software is open, it is open to change, it is open to criticism, it is open to becoming better than it is, and it is open to others' differences. When a person is open, that person has the same qualities.
The open source community is intelligent and idealistic. It is also fragmented and childish. A central domain like Open.org is the perfect place to bring people together in such a way as to establish openness as a strong moral value with a strong cultural backing. If I were to do something with Open.org, and I were a large organization that could pull this off, here's what I would do:
Start with an open source website framework, like Rails, or a powerful CMS, like Drupal. The idea is to get something that's stable and can do anything and expand easily, so no Wordpress etc. Be careful that the software isn't going to cause bickering later on; it should perform so excellently that nobody can reasonably take issue with it.
Make a gorgeous Web 3.0 - looking website template to be the face of the openness movement.
Start out as a Digg/StackOverflow style content rating system. Rate lots of stuff, like news related to openness or open source software packages.
Let users build up their credit. Users could have very visible blogs that can be rated and pushed to the front page.
Build the community over time. Extend tendrils across the internet, with links everywhere a la Facebook.
Create sub-communities of the larger community, like small villages that come together to form a province. Large communities are impersonal, and often showcase the worst of the internet, while smaller communities can be genuine fun to be a part of.
Collaborate on a group culture, a la Wikipedia rules (early Wikipedia, not the elitist stuff I'm to understand they do lately)
Extend this culture into the world. Get people to be open in their daily lives, and to show others what openness means. Show others why it's important to be open.
I just hope that this comment isn't lost under 200 other comments on Slashdot. I am a web developer and I would be willing to help make this a reality.
Why are we getting ours news from Fox? For every concrete nit-picky criticism I can make about the article (improper use of the word "doppelganger", the strangely "compressed" quotation at the end) there are some serious conceptual issues with the article as well. I'm not convinced the author understands half of what's going on. I've gotten the distant impression from the interviews that this is a device that takes in a laser light and dissipates the light into heat, but the article seems to be implying any number of things from an EMP-like device that cancels out lasers to a laser shield. There was no adequate explanation of how the device could be used for cancer treatment. Finally, and the one thing that gives the article that special Fox News touch, is the subtle but definitely present underlying tone of "This technology will be the death of us all, because science is really complicated, I don't understand it, and I don't like things I don't understand."
This was my immediate reaction. Gosh, if terrorists can get useful planning and training information from a video game, why can't the Russian government? Assuming for a moment that there were even passing similarities with reality (which there weren't), the Russians should have been able to look at the game and analyze where their security practices were failing to prevent such an attack. If anyone were actually taking the "No Russian" scenario seriously, it would have been treated like a zero-day vulnerability to critical software and fixed ASAP.
The key difference between this story and most stories about violent games causing problems is that while most stories suggest that the violence in the games caused aggressive behavior, this story claims that the aggressive behavior was already there and the game was used as training material (unless someone wants to suggest that video games turn people into terrorists). This argument is much more ludicrous than the normal one. I suppose the terrorists also train with James Bond movies to figure out how to sneak into places? Why not burn all copies of Sun Tzu's Art of War just to make sure the terrorists can't train with it?
This scares me. I am already thoroughly disturbed by gender-specific advertisements on cable TV, and here they'll have a 100% male audience. What will they try to sell me? Aftershave? Condoms? Or even worse, will it loudly proclaim "ENZYTE: NATURAL MALE ENHANCEMENT! GET SOME!" What if my "performance" in the game is available to advertisers? I can never use public restrooms again!
Which reminds me of a Red vs. Blue that went something like: "I never use public restrooms." "What? We've been out here for years!" "Yeah, it's going to be an eventful homecoming."
And even after RTFA I still don't feel like I know what the lawsuit was about. Something about SAP automating downloads and stealing customers. The facts are buried in the article, as if we all know what the trial was about because all copyright infringement is the same. Business-to-business copyright infringement for the purpose of stealing profits is MUCH DIFFERENT on a structural and ethical level than individual infringement for the purpose of getting some bits for free.
It really bugs me that there seem to be these stories, mostly about copyright-related lawsuits, where the OP assumes that everyone on Slashdot knows what the lawsuit was about. Well, I don't know what Oracle sued SAP for, and if I did I forgot. Who can keep these acronyms and company names straight anyway? If it were just once I wouldn't be bothered to RTFA but I shouldn't have to RTFA just to understand the summary of a story that normally I wouldn't care that much about. These things seem to come up once every couple of days though.
Sir, you are everything wrong with the IT industry. Too many techs have taken the "Build first, ask questions later" approach and we end up with legacy systems that need to be completely replaced. I'm sure this is the approach the last guy did, and that's why the whole thing needs to be done from scratch.
At least, that's what I would say if I couldn't recognize sarcasm, like the clods who marked that "Insightful." And why can't we have <del> OR <strike> tags?
Which version to really use?
on
Drupal 7
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· Score: 2, Informative
I'm planning a new Drupal installation, and will be using Drupal 6. Even if 7 was released today, I'd still go with 6. The fact is that as a Framework, Drupal's strength is in its contributed modules. While many of the most popular contributed modules pledge to have a Drupal 7 version on release day, I expect that roughly half of the modules I want will not have a Drupal 7 release for up to a year. Not to mention the inevitable headaches from version *.0 of any software. So while it's nice to think about how awesome and shiny Drupal 7 is, it's just not realistic to be considering it for real websites at this time.
Now, if I was just setting up a blog about my cat, there's probably plenty of functionality for that out of the box. But then, wouldn't it be easier to use a more targeted system for that, like Wordpress?
Grumble...and I thought/. knew something I didn't about the actual release, not some stupid book. Who reads software books anymore anyway?
I run an online community and I fully support Google in going after these assholes. They've been spamming our forums for the Google hits (the website has a surprisingly good Google presence despite its relatively small size) and there hasn't been much I can do about it. I'm planning a massive upgrade to new software, which has been long overdue, and I hope it will fix the problem. I'll bet it's the same guys that have been trying to circumvent Google. I'll bet there's some way to use the DMCA anti-circumvention rules for good instead of evil.
The key difference between Colbert and Beck, according to parent, is that when Colbert is over you chuckle and turn off the TV, but when Beck is over you go out and vote. Colbert is arguably more transparent about being a manipulative attention whore, because to get people to laugh they have to get the joke.
I hear you. My grandfather was an old-style Republican politician, back in the day when that meant something. The whole party started going downhill after Goldwater lost and the same extremist element of society decided a new direction for the Republican party. It really came to a head with Roe v. Wade, after which the old Republican party got kicked out of office, including dear old gramps.
Which makes me think...what would happen if abortion was brought up at a tea party rally? Would the religious extremists (who want the government to step in and enforce their morality) fight with the libertarians (who want the government to leave us all alone)?
Then there's also the liberals who watch Beck to laugh at him or find out what the other side thinks......then backs away slowly and weeps for the state of our country.
Slashdot Mirror
And once you're through that phase, make sure you keep some Cover Your Ass files to prove that you did indeed recommend X solution when a problem comes up that could have been avoided.
Also, just figured out what RPI is. And I say, EW. Maybe it's just because Rensselaer sent me more glossy junk mail than every other university combined, or because I know that the schools that do that are trying to get more people to apply so they can turn more of them down, thereby looking more "selective" to the ranking agencies.
My advice based on some partial regrets: Don't just hang out at a "state school" (assuming that means University of ); take a couple of years at a community college. Assuming they exist in NY...I come from California where after two years in a CC you are guaranteed admission to a UC school depending on your grades (including UC Berkeley or UCLA). Not only that but IIRC you have an Associate's Degree which can come in handy in the interim if you're looking to get any short term academic work.
The primary reason for this, however, is that community colleges have small class sizes and the professors aren't there to do research. The last place you want to be in your Calculus, Physics, Discrete Logic, whatever classes is a huge lecture hall with a hot shot researcher who can't teach and has a thick, almost indecipherable accent. The #1 problem with most larger schools is that because their funding is mostly research-based, most of the faculty are there to do research and therefore are completely unaccountable for their teaching performance. At my school many departments prohibit the registrar from publishing the instructor when students are signing up for classes because the advisors would tell students to stay out of Y professor's class so they'll actually learn something.
All that said, from what I've heard MIT (also Stanford) is a little special. If you can get into the program (which you should try if you think you have any chance) it's probably worth it to skip the CC. Be thinking about how you'll pay for it though, because that's two extra years of high tuition compared to nearly no tuition for CC (might again be my California background). You should probably have some small-time job for some period of time to help pay and to put on your resumé, but even more fun, forward-looking, and worthwhile would be to be in some student group devoted to engineering in your field. What kinds of groups are available could be part of your college decision; this is an area where I've heard MIT and Stanford excel.
Good thing I'm gonna get a win8 machine with secure boot. Fuck these assholes.
That's what I was thinking. Then I thought, "Gee, this wasn't a big issue before but now that Windows 8 is going to have a feature to kill it, only then does major malware do this?" I hate to sound like a conspiracy nut, but this suggests that some arm of Microsoft might be involved in this. Knowing how Microsoft departments work (see "mexican standoff") it's not too far fetched to think that IF this were going on, 90% of the company wouldn't know.
On a more salient technical question...exactly how does malware plan on installing a hidden boot partition? Did malware writers figure out how to shrink a live, mounted partition of the hard drive to make space for another one? Or are they just going to take over the "recovery" partition most vendors ship on their computers? Given that the first option is extremely unlikely, this seems like a good reason to suggest that vendors supply an OS install DVD (or read-only USB stick, or embedded read-only flash storage) instead of a recovery partition. Not that it's ever going to happen. Hardware vendors like being able to save on manufacturing (or even licensing) costs for the extra discs, at the expense of space for user data (which doesn't need to be disclosed in advertising). Microsoft is too focused on their secure boot crusade anyway.
Combining the seeming nuttery with the technical question...what would Microsoft's goal be to create or help the development of this malware? To push secure boot? Why secure boot? To kill Linux? To kill Windows piracy? To help their partners ship unremovable crapware? To turn Windows into an iOS-style walled garden?
Um, no. There are two ways to change the constitution:
I'm not exactly clear on the details because this is just from memory. If you really want to know then check the constitution. Did you really think it would be as easy to change the constitution as it is to pass any other law? How exactly does that make sense?
(and why don't <ol> lists have numbers?)
I for one welcome our new cybernetic rat overlords!
Why not get a Wii? There's no good reason why your emulation station has to be a "normal" computer. Besides, you won't have to worry about Dolphin emulation on a Wii, you can just use the built-in hardware. And please don't complain that "emulation" is code for "pirating" and so this solution won't work. Another benefit is that your Wii and the SD card you're going to need can't be more than $200; can you say that for your Mac Mini?
Go to Wiibrew.org to find out how to install Homebrew Channel with Hackmii. There are plenty of methods, the best currently being Bannerbomb or Letterbomb (depending on your Wii version). Preinstall Homebrew Browser on the SD card and use it to get some nice stuff like SNEX9xGX and Wii64. If you never want to take the SD card out again you can install ftpii to use Filezilla as long as the Wii is connected to your home network. You can even play DVDs with WiiMC if the Wii is old enough (newer ones have DVD video instructions purposefully removed from the hardware).
If you followed these instructions, then congratulations! You've got yourself a cheap, silent machine that can play Wii/Gamecube games natively and with their original controllers, as well as any emulated system like SNES or Nintendo 64 with any Wii supported controllers. Much better experience overall than trying to get a "normal" computer to run such a setup.
Of course you need math to progress in Physics, but that's not at issue here. The question is whether you need math to catch up. Is it necessary to understand the math in order to understand what Einstein claimed? Maybe, maybe not. I don't actually know. All you've proven, however, is that math is necessary to test whether Einstein's claims are true and verifiable, and from there understand what the implies. If I want to go get a PhD in Physics and move the field forward I'll need to do that, but if I just want to understand what the hell everyone's talking about I don't.
Isn't this one of those countries that's supposedly afraid of foreign agents infiltrating their country and attacking their citizens? At least, that's the excuse totalitarian regimes always use for imprisoning and torturing their own citizens. I'd say this is a call for some actual foreign assailants to launch an attack on Pakistan. All internet traffic is unencrypted. Let's steal some government accounts and passwords. Let's read the government's emails. Let's hack into their public utilities and make 'em explode. There's all kinds of havoc that can be done.
Pakistan is evidently more concerned about its own law-abiding citizens than Chinese hackers, Russian mafia, and the American CIA combined.
You, sir, appear to be the only person to have read TFA. I'd congratulate you, but I don't think that'll help you recover your lost brain cells from having tried to understand the nonsense. There's some marginally interesting discussion here on Slashdot about microtransactions, but it lacks focus (because there's no well-written article to focus on) and is mainly interesting from a sociological perspective (as in: what do ordinary people think about the situation?). Not having engaged with microtransactions myself, I was hoping the article would teach me about how they are used wrongly and how they could be used better. Instead, it says a whole lot of nothing; the only coherent point I can come up with is "Video game marketers bad! Take freedom away from developers and ruin game!"
World of Warcraft has infrequent players? I thought it was more like a job; wouldn't they get fired?
@unassimilatable: This. Also, I don't remember saying anything about Fox viewers; I was talking about Fox reporters. I definitely got the impression from the article that the reporter didn't understand what the technology was actually doing, and felt that it was probably dangerous in an evil-Star-Trek-alien-technology sort of way.
Before you read what I would do, I want to state that openness, to me, does not just mean open source. Openness is a moral value. Openness in its best form is absolute honesty, with your users and your administrators, with your friends and family. Openness in its worst form is Wikileaks (which I don't think is a bad thing), or in another word, controversial. When software is open, it is open to change, it is open to criticism, it is open to becoming better than it is, and it is open to others' differences. When a person is open, that person has the same qualities.
The open source community is intelligent and idealistic. It is also fragmented and childish. A central domain like Open.org is the perfect place to bring people together in such a way as to establish openness as a strong moral value with a strong cultural backing. If I were to do something with Open.org, and I were a large organization that could pull this off, here's what I would do:
I just hope that this comment isn't lost under 200 other comments on Slashdot. I am a web developer and I would be willing to help make this a reality.
Why are we getting ours news from Fox? For every concrete nit-picky criticism I can make about the article (improper use of the word "doppelganger", the strangely "compressed" quotation at the end) there are some serious conceptual issues with the article as well. I'm not convinced the author understands half of what's going on. I've gotten the distant impression from the interviews that this is a device that takes in a laser light and dissipates the light into heat, but the article seems to be implying any number of things from an EMP-like device that cancels out lasers to a laser shield. There was no adequate explanation of how the device could be used for cancer treatment. Finally, and the one thing that gives the article that special Fox News touch, is the subtle but definitely present underlying tone of "This technology will be the death of us all, because science is really complicated, I don't understand it, and I don't like things I don't understand."
This was my immediate reaction. Gosh, if terrorists can get useful planning and training information from a video game, why can't the Russian government? Assuming for a moment that there were even passing similarities with reality (which there weren't), the Russians should have been able to look at the game and analyze where their security practices were failing to prevent such an attack. If anyone were actually taking the "No Russian" scenario seriously, it would have been treated like a zero-day vulnerability to critical software and fixed ASAP.
The key difference between this story and most stories about violent games causing problems is that while most stories suggest that the violence in the games caused aggressive behavior, this story claims that the aggressive behavior was already there and the game was used as training material (unless someone wants to suggest that video games turn people into terrorists). This argument is much more ludicrous than the normal one. I suppose the terrorists also train with James Bond movies to figure out how to sneak into places? Why not burn all copies of Sun Tzu's Art of War just to make sure the terrorists can't train with it?
This scares me. I am already thoroughly disturbed by gender-specific advertisements on cable TV, and here they'll have a 100% male audience. What will they try to sell me? Aftershave? Condoms? Or even worse, will it loudly proclaim "ENZYTE: NATURAL MALE ENHANCEMENT! GET SOME!" What if my "performance" in the game is available to advertisers? I can never use public restrooms again!
Which reminds me of a Red vs. Blue that went something like: "I never use public restrooms." "What? We've been out here for years!" "Yeah, it's going to be an eventful homecoming."
And even after RTFA I still don't feel like I know what the lawsuit was about. Something about SAP automating downloads and stealing customers. The facts are buried in the article, as if we all know what the trial was about because all copyright infringement is the same. Business-to-business copyright infringement for the purpose of stealing profits is MUCH DIFFERENT on a structural and ethical level than individual infringement for the purpose of getting some bits for free.
It really bugs me that there seem to be these stories, mostly about copyright-related lawsuits, where the OP assumes that everyone on Slashdot knows what the lawsuit was about. Well, I don't know what Oracle sued SAP for, and if I did I forgot. Who can keep these acronyms and company names straight anyway? If it were just once I wouldn't be bothered to RTFA but I shouldn't have to RTFA just to understand the summary of a story that normally I wouldn't care that much about. These things seem to come up once every couple of days though.
http://xkcd.com/793/
Sir, you are everything wrong with the IT industry. Too many techs have taken the "Build first, ask questions later" approach and we end up with legacy systems that need to be completely replaced. I'm sure this is the approach the last guy did, and that's why the whole thing needs to be done from scratch.
At least, that's what I would say if I couldn't recognize sarcasm, like the clods who marked that "Insightful." And why can't we have <del> OR <strike> tags?
I'm planning a new Drupal installation, and will be using Drupal 6. Even if 7 was released today, I'd still go with 6. The fact is that as a Framework, Drupal's strength is in its contributed modules. While many of the most popular contributed modules pledge to have a Drupal 7 version on release day, I expect that roughly half of the modules I want will not have a Drupal 7 release for up to a year. Not to mention the inevitable headaches from version *.0 of any software. So while it's nice to think about how awesome and shiny Drupal 7 is, it's just not realistic to be considering it for real websites at this time.
Now, if I was just setting up a blog about my cat, there's probably plenty of functionality for that out of the box. But then, wouldn't it be easier to use a more targeted system for that, like Wordpress?
Grumble...and I thought /. knew something I didn't about the actual release, not some stupid book. Who reads software books anymore anyway?
I run an online community and I fully support Google in going after these assholes. They've been spamming our forums for the Google hits (the website has a surprisingly good Google presence despite its relatively small size) and there hasn't been much I can do about it. I'm planning a massive upgrade to new software, which has been long overdue, and I hope it will fix the problem. I'll bet it's the same guys that have been trying to circumvent Google. I'll bet there's some way to use the DMCA anti-circumvention rules for good instead of evil.
The key difference between Colbert and Beck, according to parent, is that when Colbert is over you chuckle and turn off the TV, but when Beck is over you go out and vote. Colbert is arguably more transparent about being a manipulative attention whore, because to get people to laugh they have to get the joke.
I hear you. My grandfather was an old-style Republican politician, back in the day when that meant something. The whole party started going downhill after Goldwater lost and the same extremist element of society decided a new direction for the Republican party. It really came to a head with Roe v. Wade, after which the old Republican party got kicked out of office, including dear old gramps.
Which makes me think...what would happen if abortion was brought up at a tea party rally? Would the religious extremists (who want the government to step in and enforce their morality) fight with the libertarians (who want the government to leave us all alone)?
Then there's also the liberals who watch Beck to laugh at him or find out what the other side thinks... ...then backs away slowly and weeps for the state of our country.