I will respond to the carrot. Don't say "subscribe or bad things will happen". Say "subscribe and good things will happen".
That's what it looks like they're doing, at least from my point of view.
Don't subscribe: things stay as they are, pretty much, with some minor changes in ad location. Yes, minor. The ratio of ad-to-page is probably still pretty comparable. You get a lot of page for a single ad at slashdot.
Subscribe: you don't have to worry about a technical solution to ads.
It's not a bad proposition, I think. Nothing we had before is taken away. All previous services are still available for free. We have the option to buy ad-free pages, or use a technical solution to block ads, or view the ads.
All that happened is that the site added another choice. What's the big deal?
Perhaps. So now some perl-savvy Slashdotter should write a script to mirror the site into a database, and post the resulting URL. Shouldn't be more than an hour or two of work for someone who has the skills...
This lets you look up any comment by name, or comment ID (if you know it).
I also threw in the ability to let you look up comments by minimum number of pages.... this lets you look at "substantive" comments quickly.
The code that I used to do all this is located in the directory. Feel free to take and mirror... just credit me and link to my site, OK?
(Alas... I lost my mods for this thread when I decided to post this... my apologies to the parent poster and the sibling poster who made the comment about database programmers sleeping in -- at first you both amused me, and then you inspired me...)
It has been shown that several smaller acre farms will outproduce a single larger industrial farm (in terms of production per acre).
Hmmm. Can you cite? This would be an interesting figure....
And it sortof contradicts what you say below... if it's not the quantity that matters any more, why does it matter that several smaller farms can outproduce.
Is there a better distribution effect from several smaller farms?
Here's what's worse: even when the executive officers of a company take their responsibilities to those who work for it seriously, and the company is turning a *profit*, shareholders and analysts sometimes still put pressure on them to lay people off, so that (short-term), profits will be higher.
Kay Whitmore, I'm told, was the CEO of Kodak
through the early 1990s. The company was profitable, doing research, employing thousands. However, there was a good deal of pressure to do some head chopping, and Whitmore was reluctant to do it, especially since the company was actually making a profit. But apparently not enough. Analysts and shareholders decided that a greater profit could be realized by cutting more jobs, and they started with firing Whitmore so they could find someone with more of a stomach and less of a conscience.
(This is taken from James Lucas' and Warner Woodworth's "Working Toward Zion"... "Zion" being meant here in a general sense, not the Jewish state sense. The authors are Mormons...)
I saw a post a while back with an idea that I loved: have the infrastructure be built publically, but let ISPs compete to administer and provide services over the network. Not as in "bid and we'll create a contract and let you be the only business to do this and pay you" but as in "Hey, wanna provide services to people in our area? We'll rent you rights to provide it over our broadband network".
This could work with other utilities, too... it'd be cool if we had a public power grid but could choose from several electric companies. Or if none of the telcos actually owned the phone network, but all had to vie within the same public network to provide the best services. We'd have truer competition, and presumably better service..... (maybe).
Re:The views of a Muslim in NY
on
More WTC News
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· Score: 2
But... things like "the invisible hand" are supposed to require proof. People wrote books to convince others, others wrote books to counter those arguments.
The thing here is that there's rational discourse. Of course, some people buy one side, some buy the other.
With religion, there's ONE SIDE, you read *THE* bible. People with other opinions are called heretics.
What I think is interesting is how discourse in
the "rational world" is not all that different.
I continually try to make the point with people
that while the theory behind market effeciency
is probably sound within some domains, we really
don't know in which areas markets are truly effective. I'm usually branded a heretic and ignored.
By its very nature, religion is based around controlling people's thoughts.
What evidence do you have that this is the motive
of all those who are proponents of religion? I'm
one of them, and I'm not interested in controlling other people's thoughts. I am interested in influencing them -- but then again, so are you, which is why you're writing these things.:)
Religion DOES ask people to control their thoughts, actions, and feelings, most of the time -- that's what I meant by a spiritual practice. There is usually a discipline you are asked to submit to, and in return, you are promised a spirituality -- just like a school, or training center, where you are asked to study and go through exercises in order to acquire knowledge or skills.
Whether or not they deliver the goods is something you have to watch for, and is ultimately a personal decision. But to confuse the offering of such a discipline with an attempt to seize control or power over another human being is to
say that undertaking any discipline is akin to enslavement.
There's a reason people take kids to Sunday school, etc, because the only way to teach the kids this is to brainwash them. I don't know ANYONE who was raised without religion, yet picked it up later.
Everybody brainwashes their kids. It's called
culture. Some people learn to eventually question
their assumptions and see outside what they've
been told their whole lives, but you probably never really totally escape it. I'll give you that.
But I've met people who were raised by atheist families who went religious. And vice versa. I've met Jews/Muslims gone Christian, Christians gone Buddist or Animist, and all sorts of things.
Fortunately, we live in a society where the prevailing view is that people are free to investigate/beleive what they like. And beleive it or not, while they may teach what they like within a religion, and make efforts to persuade people to join/stay, many religious organizations still let people come and go as they please. As long as you're free to join or leave any religious community as you please, without threat to life, health, or property, any talk of control seems rather overstated (perhaps even blindly ridiculous or paranoid) to me.
Yet, America's blind and unconditional support for Israeli atrocities and crimes against the Palestinian people
And the funny thing is, sooner or later, it might have sunk in and we would have stopped. I've been telling people -- even occasionally writing a Congress Critter -- that Israel is just as much or more of an offender in the Middle East as any of their neighbors. That they inflicted attrocities on the indigenous people of the region not all that disimilar to the ones they had suffered elsewhere, and develop nuclear weapons out of accord with international treaty, and so on.
Before Tuesday, I advocated dropping US aid to
Israel until they started to comply with certain
standards of behavior. And you know, the people
around me are beginning to agree.
But now, we can't back out. Capitulation in that
sense would show that terrorism works, and encourage it in the future.
So congratulations to the terrorists and hawks, and to all those who favor fighting and deadly conflict and fear as their prefered methods of "negotiation". You've made all the diplomatic efforts and all the appeals to conscience and reason of a decade irrelevant.
Re:The views of a Muslim in NY
on
More WTC News
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· Score: 2
people really need to start seeing religion for what it is, a method of brainwashing
Whew. If THAT statement isn't flamebait, I don't know what is. But rather than modding you down, I think I'll reply.
Religion per se isn't the problem here. Do you want to include Elias Chacour in these discussions of crazy religious people who are part of the problem? How about Martin Luther King Jr? Gandhi? All people who, motivated in one degree or another by religious beliefs, brought positive changes about in the world. The spiritual/daily practice demands of most religions are positive, and, when followed, enhance individual lives, teaches them respect for other life, gives them "peak experiences," and leads them to resolve conflict with those who are different from themselves.
Our Muslim friend -- the author of your parent post pointed out that he could find NO BASIS in Islam for the kinds of actions that the terrorists have performed.
Now I KNOW that there are "religions" set up
out there that are designed to bilk people of their money and delude them into serving false ends -- and perhaps even into performing selfish acts or hurting other people. So what? There are businesses, political parties, books, cultural ideals, and websites all doing the same thing. Not to mention the number of absolutely naturalistic/humanistic ideaologies that do the same thing. Some people, for example, beleive in the Invisible Hand as unfailingly as devout Muslims beleive in Allah, and use that as an excuse for all sorts of slights against other individuals. There was also a variant of communism advocated by Lenin that was distinctly atheological that led to significant evils in the world. The offender is not religion, but a nastiness that seems to be inherent in human nature. The solution is not the elimination of religion, but to be on your guard and probe things carefully yourself.
The assumption that religion is mere delusion is shallow. Confusing all religions with any ol' arbitrary mythology is equally shallow. Holding religion responsible for these tradgedies is ridiculous. Islam didn't make the terrorists what they were.
Bullshit. Have the Jews created concentration camps, herded millions of Palestinians into them, and tortured them to death?
I don't have statistics/specifics, but yes, they have created camps for palestinians, restricted them to/from geographical areas, and tortured them to death. How much of a report you get of that depends on the news media you read, or what you
look for.
A very good book on the subject is Blood Brothers by Elias Chacour. It's good because not only does it give insight into the Palestinian perspective, but doesn't have a tone of hatred towards the Israelis, and Chacour would rather fight the status quo with Gandhi-esque tactics and by building schools and churches than by blowing things up. You can find some of the specifics from there.
Are the Palestinians on the brink of extinction? Hell no.
Were the Jews? No.... it was threatened, and was in the process of horribly being carried out, but fortunately, there were those in Germany who were either barely complicit or resisting somewhat.
Not all that different in Israel, except the balance of power within the state shifts more frequently and Israel has never been as relatively powerful as WWII Germany.
Bottom line: suffering attrocities as an ethnicity doesn't give you a green card to do whatever you like to the world, and even if it did, Israel redeemed it a long time ago. The only way for anyone to win at this point in the middle east is to work for everyone to win.
> >For the US to respond in force in less than 12 > >hours would practically imply that someone
> >giving orders knew about the trade center
> >attacks before they happened.
> Funny you should mention this. When I was
> driving to work this morning, I was listening to
> the radio here in LA (KYSR, Jamie and
> Danny) and someone had called in saying that
> they were in the Army Reserve, and was told LAST
> NIGHT to go on standby!
Mod this up. This is important. If there's ANY indication the government knew something was up, then we need to know about it.
I fully agree with you that Nuclear Retaliation
is thoroughly unjustified right now. ANY large
scale attack that kills innocent civilians is
unjustified.
However, Hiroshima and Nagasaki may very well have
been the right thing to do in their times. It's
easy to forget that without such a display of
devastating force, Japan would likely not have
surrendered, and we would have spent thousands upon thousands of lives -- Japanese as well as American -- fighting to take them by conventional methods.
It's absolutely awful what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I don't deny that. However, faced with equally awful alternatives, the US made a choice, and it may have even been the better choice.
The problem with the "Never Again" defense is that no sooner had they suffered their own attrocities then they started INFLICTING THE SAME ATTROCITIES in the land they unilaterally decided was theirs and theirs alone.
Israel COULD have had credibility as an idea if they'd tried to create a Switzerland of sorts, a promised land flowing with milk and honey where people were free to worship as they pleased and proudly declare their heritage without fear of persecution.
But instead, they decided to found the nation on principles of xenophobia and entitlement and death and suffering to anyone who opposed them. That's the main reason why the arabs detest them.
It's sad, because I am sure that not all Israelis are like the guy who killed Yitzak Rabin, or Ariel Sharon. They are most likely human beings who would like to live out their lives as best they can and let their neighbors do the same. Most palestinians are probably like that, too.
Frankly, I don't think any power in that region is capable of fairly governing it.
A better way of putting that -- without being quite so down on the GPL -- is to say that the requirements/restrictions of the GPL are not good for everything. They're not the best in every situation. Even RMS has tacitly admitted this in his endorsement of the ogg vorbis audio libraries being released under BSD/LGPL style licenses.
The solution to the troublesome idea that ALL software should be GPL (and anything else is morally wrong) is NOT to bash the GPL and FSF. The GPL is good for some things. The solution
is to promote the balanced and reasonable idea
that BSD licenses are good for some things, and other licenses and conditions may be good for other things, and that while we should encourage people to write Free Software, we shouldn't force them.
There's a quote attributed to Linus: "He who writes the code chooses the license, and anyone else is a whiner." I can live with that (at least, as long as no one takes away freedom to code).
Of course, basically, anything you do is bad for at some level, so I guess it's choosing
your poisons.
Well.... maybe a cost-benefit analysis is a better way of looking at it. Is coffee REALLY that important to you? Great, take it and take the health impacts. For most people, though, it just might be worth it to quit.
And there are lots of enjoyable things that don't do you much harm. Find one, make that your habit. I'm currently enjoying being hydrated.:)
Of course, I still consume enough cheese that if I didn't exercise, I would become the Kraft Blimp
I got that feeling at first, too. Then I thought about it, and decided that the entire article had
"give me a grant" written all over it. When you're doing grant writing, you want to make something sound as important or cool as you possibly can. Even if it means you have to play up the problem you're solving a bit.
Of course, that's PR in general these days... I feel sortof dirty after I write things like that.
Don't you think it's at all interesting that
apache even fell 1.5%? In spite of everything it
DOES have going for it (more secure, cheaper per
installation, open source...)?
And keep in mind that with the number of web servers running out there, 1.5% is a pretty large
change....
There are lots of possible explanations for this... it could just be a hiccup. But the explanation our friend who authored the column
provided is equally plausible.
He's also right on in that java/enterprise/beancomponentthingies are the only real non-vapor non-MS-controlled alternative to.NET, and if the open source community ignores that, it's insane. We're chasing tailights either way, but far better to be chasing Sun's tailights than MS's.
If you really feel as strongly about Jon Katz' writing as to tell him to "go kill himself" -- even as an expression of speech rather than a literal directive -- one assumes that you really wouldn't lose sleep over the good stories you MIGHT be missing by checking his author box.
If you really feel that better anime news is found elsewhere, then the same thing applies.
As for Michael and Microsoft and other topics/authors you find vary in quality and relevance to you: no one is forcing you to read any of them. I myself have a special filtering system in place... I simply scan the headlines and those I don't find interesting I don't pay any attention to. For those I think might be interesting, I read the paragraph of and then decide.
It sounds like you're almost complaining you might have to resort to this actual sorting of information on your own.
I agree that the article was good, but you don't
know slashdot very well if your complaints are honest....
I can't stand most of the crap here:
What bothers me most is most of the "Dear God how
did this website become so sucky" compaints. Too
bad I can't just mark a box in the (*cough*,*cough*) preferences that would somehow filter those comments out.
What's that, you say? You don't know what the
preferences are? That's right, it's a way to filter
out most of the topics that you don't like! Let's
see if there's a way to exclude the stories that you can't stand!
I know you guys hate Bill Gates, I don't need to hear about IIS bugs and.Net every fscking day! It's funny, this place is like a Microsoft news
site now.
Look! There is a topics category for this! You
could exclude all microsoft news from your reading!
Save your anime reviews for AnimeFu, Rob.
Is there a checkbox for this category? Why yes,
there is!
What is the sound of one checkbox clicking, otaku?
Jon Katz, please kill yourself! You're no more entertaining as "Mr Movie Review" than you were as "Mr Columbine." You ripped off the Slashdot community
OK, Mr. High and Mighty AC: some phrases are funny,
but "please kill yourself" just ain't. Thank goodness we aren't letting a person who can't figure out slashdot's preference system decide who lives and dies in this world.
Oh, wait, did I mention that Jon Katz has an AUTHOR
box you can use to exclude his stories?
Michael, you fucking NAZI, I don't know how you ever got on Slashdot in the first place. Go on, mod down this post now, before anyone sees it!
Michael may seem a little overzealous at times, but in a world where most people never hear about half the gradual erosions of their freedoms, care more about the latest Wal-Mart sale than the elections, and don't know the WTO from the WWF, I can hardly blame him for trying hard.
Bonus question: Does Michael have an Author box?
I prefer Slashdot's old style: Lots of Linux, UNIX, and Mac stuff...Very few Microsoft stories...Insane, bizarre hacks -- often related...
You've been around long enough to remember an older, better slashdot, but you haven't learned to use the preferences system? Get an account and learn to use it to transform this site into what you like -- all without having to change it for everybody else or inflict diatribes like yours (or mine) on everyone..
People might just not care: In a poll to US citizens a couple of decades ago, it was found that
most people did not care about the rights they were given by the Bill of Rights, which lead to a number of laws to be passed in the US that eliminated most of the rights people had.
Does anyone have any idea what he's referring to?
(More so about the polling than the actual erosion of rights)
You're exactly right. Microsoft's been trying to
have it both ways the whole time.
I wrote an article on this a while back... it seemed to me Microsoft's arguments were a lot like having a car mechanic say he coldn't remove
your car stereo because that would entail removing the battery too and then the car wouldn't work.
An application? Or integral part of the OS? Which way is it, Redmond?
I suppose I could go on the "move to open software" cursade, but even the most Linux-friendly professor I can think of taught his class about
how the Linux kernel works using PowerPoint. He offered his notes for download off his webpage... which means I'd need PowerPoint to view
them. (Actually, since other people in that class read Slashdot, I'll admit that he was cool enough to have copied the slides into PDF format, but
still... the point stands that if he hadn't done that, I'd need to grab a Windows machine to view the class notes.)
A worthwhile point.
Something I think about sometimes is why people continue to use PowerPoint instead of something like Flash. Flash is cheap, more capable, and the SWF format is reasonably open...
I think I've had to work with a few of these.
Why is Red Hat trying to make something like
THIS? POS terminals are frustration, and nothing
but peices of.... of.... something.... wait
a sec, it'll come to me....
Slashdot Mirror
I will respond to the carrot. Don't say "subscribe or bad things will happen". Say "subscribe and good things will happen".
That's what it looks like they're doing, at least from my point of view.
Don't subscribe: things stay as they are, pretty much, with some minor changes in ad location. Yes, minor. The ratio of ad-to-page is probably still pretty comparable. You get a lot of page for a single ad at slashdot.
Subscribe: you don't have to worry about a technical solution to ads.
It's not a bad proposition, I think. Nothing we had before is taken away. All previous services are still available for free. We have the option to buy ad-free pages, or use a technical solution to block ads, or view the ads.
All that happened is that the site added another choice. What's the big deal?
Or is it suddenly wrong to expand OS libraries?
Not wrong to install libraries. Just wrong to confuse those libraries with applications that call them.
Which is what Microsoft, by claiming that they can't remove IE, is doing.
Perhaps. So now some perl-savvy Slashdotter should write a script to mirror the site into a database, and post the resulting URL. Shouldn't be more than an hour or two of work for someone who has the skills...
... just credit me and link to my site, OK?
http://weston.canncentral.org/msdoj/lookup.php
This lets you look up any comment by name, or comment ID (if you know it).
I also threw in the ability to let you look up comments by minimum number of pages.... this lets you look at "substantive" comments quickly.
The code that I used to do all this is located in the directory. Feel free to take and mirror
(Alas... I lost my mods for this thread when I decided to post this... my apologies to the parent poster and the sibling poster who made the comment about database programmers sleeping in -- at first you both amused me, and then you inspired me...)
It has been shown that several smaller acre farms will outproduce a single larger industrial farm (in terms of production per acre).
Hmmm. Can you cite? This would be an interesting figure....
And it sortof contradicts what you say below... if it's not the quantity that matters any more, why does it matter that several smaller farms can outproduce.
Is there a better distribution effect from several smaller farms?
And how DO you solve the problem of distribution?
Here's what's worse: even when the executive officers of a company take their responsibilities to those who work for it seriously, and the company is turning a *profit*, shareholders and analysts sometimes still put pressure on them to lay people off, so that (short-term), profits will be higher.
Kay Whitmore, I'm told, was the CEO of Kodak
through the early 1990s. The company was profitable, doing research, employing thousands. However, there was a good deal of pressure to do some head chopping, and Whitmore was reluctant to do it, especially since the company was actually making a profit. But apparently not enough. Analysts and shareholders decided that a greater profit could be realized by cutting more jobs, and they started with firing Whitmore so they could find someone with more of a stomach and less of a conscience.
(This is taken from James Lucas' and Warner Woodworth's "Working Toward Zion"... "Zion" being meant here in a general sense, not the Jewish state sense. The authors are Mormons...)
I saw a post a while back with an idea that I loved: have the infrastructure be built publically, but let ISPs compete to administer and provide services over the network. Not as in "bid and we'll create a contract and let you be the only business to do this and pay you" but as in "Hey, wanna provide services to people in our area? We'll rent you rights to provide it over our broadband network".
This could work with other utilities, too... it'd be cool if we had a public power grid but could choose from several electric companies. Or if none of the telcos actually owned the phone network, but all had to vie within the same public network to provide the best services. We'd have truer competition, and presumably better service..... (maybe).
But... things like "the invisible hand" are supposed to require proof. People wrote books to convince others, others wrote books to counter those arguments.
:)
The thing here is that there's rational discourse. Of course, some people buy one side, some buy the other.
With religion, there's ONE SIDE, you read *THE* bible. People with other opinions are called heretics.
What I think is interesting is how discourse in
the "rational world" is not all that different.
I continually try to make the point with people
that while the theory behind market effeciency
is probably sound within some domains, we really
don't know in which areas markets are truly effective. I'm usually branded a heretic and ignored.
By its very nature, religion is based around controlling people's thoughts.
What evidence do you have that this is the motive
of all those who are proponents of religion? I'm
one of them, and I'm not interested in controlling other people's thoughts. I am interested in influencing them -- but then again, so are you, which is why you're writing these things.
Religion DOES ask people to control their thoughts, actions, and feelings, most of the time -- that's what I meant by a spiritual practice. There is usually a discipline you are asked to submit to, and in return, you are promised a spirituality -- just like a school, or training center, where you are asked to study and go through exercises in order to acquire knowledge or skills.
Whether or not they deliver the goods is something you have to watch for, and is ultimately a personal decision. But to confuse the offering of such a discipline with an attempt to seize control or power over another human being is to
say that undertaking any discipline is akin to enslavement.
There's a reason people take kids to Sunday school, etc, because the only way to teach the kids this is to brainwash them. I don't know ANYONE who was raised without religion, yet picked it up later.
Everybody brainwashes their kids. It's called
culture. Some people learn to eventually question
their assumptions and see outside what they've
been told their whole lives, but you probably never really totally escape it. I'll give you that.
But I've met people who were raised by atheist families who went religious. And vice versa. I've met Jews/Muslims gone Christian, Christians gone Buddist or Animist, and all sorts of things.
Fortunately, we live in a society where the prevailing view is that people are free to investigate/beleive what they like. And beleive it or not, while they may teach what they like within a religion, and make efforts to persuade people to join/stay, many religious organizations still let people come and go as they please. As long as you're free to join or leave any religious community as you please, without threat to life, health, or property, any talk of control seems rather overstated (perhaps even blindly ridiculous or paranoid) to me.
Yet, America's blind and unconditional support for Israeli atrocities and crimes against the Palestinian people
And the funny thing is, sooner or later, it might have sunk in and we would have stopped. I've been telling people -- even occasionally writing a Congress Critter -- that Israel is just as much or more of an offender in the Middle East as any of their neighbors. That they inflicted attrocities on the indigenous people of the region not all that disimilar to the ones they had suffered elsewhere, and develop nuclear weapons out of accord with international treaty, and so on.
Before Tuesday, I advocated dropping US aid to
Israel until they started to comply with certain
standards of behavior. And you know, the people
around me are beginning to agree.
But now, we can't back out. Capitulation in that
sense would show that terrorism works, and encourage it in the future.
So congratulations to the terrorists and hawks, and to all those who favor fighting and deadly conflict and fear as their prefered methods of "negotiation". You've made all the diplomatic efforts and all the appeals to conscience and reason of a decade irrelevant.
people really need to start seeing religion for what it is, a method of brainwashing
Whew. If THAT statement isn't flamebait, I don't know what is. But rather than modding you down, I think I'll reply.
Religion per se isn't the problem here. Do you want to include Elias Chacour in these discussions of crazy religious people who are part of the problem? How about Martin Luther King Jr? Gandhi? All people who, motivated in one degree or another by religious beliefs, brought positive changes about in the world. The spiritual/daily practice demands of most religions are positive, and, when followed, enhance individual lives, teaches them respect for other life, gives them "peak experiences," and leads them to resolve conflict with those who are different from themselves.
Our Muslim friend -- the author of your parent post pointed out that he could find NO BASIS in Islam for the kinds of actions that the terrorists have performed.
Now I KNOW that there are "religions" set up
out there that are designed to bilk people of their money and delude them into serving false ends -- and perhaps even into performing selfish acts or hurting other people. So what? There are businesses, political parties, books, cultural ideals, and websites all doing the same thing. Not to mention the number of absolutely naturalistic/humanistic ideaologies that do the same thing. Some people, for example, beleive in the Invisible Hand as unfailingly as devout Muslims beleive in Allah, and use that as an excuse for all sorts of slights against other individuals. There was also a variant of communism advocated by Lenin that was distinctly atheological that led to significant evils in the world. The offender is not religion, but a nastiness that seems to be inherent in human nature. The solution is not the elimination of religion, but to be on your guard and probe things carefully yourself.
The assumption that religion is mere delusion is shallow. Confusing all religions with any ol' arbitrary mythology is equally shallow. Holding religion responsible for these tradgedies is ridiculous. Islam didn't make the terrorists what they were.
Bullshit. Have the Jews created concentration camps, herded millions of Palestinians into them, and tortured them to death?
I don't have statistics/specifics, but yes, they have created camps for palestinians, restricted them to/from geographical areas, and tortured them to death. How much of a report you get of that depends on the news media you read, or what you
look for.
A very good book on the subject is Blood Brothers by Elias Chacour. It's good because not only does it give insight into the Palestinian perspective, but doesn't have a tone of hatred towards the Israelis, and Chacour would rather fight the status quo with Gandhi-esque tactics and by building schools and churches than by blowing things up. You can find some of the specifics from there.
Are the Palestinians on the brink of extinction? Hell no.
Were the Jews? No.... it was threatened, and was in the process of horribly being carried out, but fortunately, there were those in Germany who were either barely complicit or resisting somewhat.
Not all that different in Israel, except the balance of power within the state shifts more frequently and Israel has never been as relatively powerful as WWII Germany.
Bottom line: suffering attrocities as an ethnicity doesn't give you a green card to do whatever you like to the world, and even if it did, Israel redeemed it a long time ago. The only way for anyone to win at this point in the middle east is to work for everyone to win.
> >For the US to respond in force in less than 12 > >hours would practically imply that someone
> >giving orders knew about the trade center
> >attacks before they happened.
> Funny you should mention this. When I was
> driving to work this morning, I was listening to
> the radio here in LA (KYSR, Jamie and
> Danny) and someone had called in saying that
> they were in the Army Reserve, and was told LAST
> NIGHT to go on standby!
Mod this up. This is important. If there's ANY indication the government knew something was up, then we need to know about it.
I fully agree with you that Nuclear Retaliation
is thoroughly unjustified right now. ANY large
scale attack that kills innocent civilians is
unjustified.
However, Hiroshima and Nagasaki may very well have
been the right thing to do in their times. It's
easy to forget that without such a display of
devastating force, Japan would likely not have
surrendered, and we would have spent thousands upon thousands of lives -- Japanese as well as American -- fighting to take them by conventional methods.
It's absolutely awful what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I don't deny that. However, faced with equally awful alternatives, the US made a choice, and it may have even been the better choice.
the backbone is, according to them, at about 80% utilization -- they've never seen it above 40% before. However, the
main portal sites such as Yahoo aren't having substantively higher than normal traffic.
I'd be willing to lay money on the fact that it's
email. People are talking to each other.
The problem with the "Never Again" defense is that no sooner had they suffered their own attrocities then they started INFLICTING THE SAME ATTROCITIES in the land they unilaterally decided was theirs and theirs alone.
Israel COULD have had credibility as an idea if they'd tried to create a Switzerland of sorts, a promised land flowing with milk and honey where people were free to worship as they pleased and proudly declare their heritage without fear of persecution.
But instead, they decided to found the nation on principles of xenophobia and entitlement and death and suffering to anyone who opposed them. That's the main reason why the arabs detest them.
It's sad, because I am sure that not all Israelis are like the guy who killed Yitzak Rabin, or Ariel Sharon. They are most likely human beings who would like to live out their lives as best they can and let their neighbors do the same. Most palestinians are probably like that, too.
Frankly, I don't think any power in that region is capable of fairly governing it.
not everything implied by the GPL is good.
A better way of putting that -- without being quite so down on the GPL -- is to say that the requirements/restrictions of the GPL are not good for everything. They're not the best in every situation. Even RMS has tacitly admitted this in his endorsement of the ogg vorbis audio libraries being released under BSD/LGPL style licenses.
The solution to the troublesome idea that ALL software should be GPL (and anything else is morally wrong) is NOT to bash the GPL and FSF. The GPL is good for some things. The solution
is to promote the balanced and reasonable idea
that BSD licenses are good for some things, and other licenses and conditions may be good for other things, and that while we should encourage people to write Free Software, we shouldn't force them.
There's a quote attributed to Linus: "He who writes the code chooses the license, and anyone else is a whiner." I can live with that (at least, as long as no one takes away freedom to code).
Of course, basically, anything you do is bad for at some level, so I guess it's choosing
:)
your poisons.
Well.... maybe a cost-benefit analysis is a better way of looking at it. Is coffee REALLY that important to you? Great, take it and take the health impacts. For most people, though, it just might be worth it to quit.
And there are lots of enjoyable things that don't do you much harm. Find one, make that your habit. I'm currently enjoying being hydrated.
Of course, I still consume enough cheese that if I didn't exercise, I would become the Kraft Blimp
I got that feeling at first, too. Then I thought about it, and decided that the entire article had
"give me a grant" written all over it. When you're doing grant writing, you want to make something sound as important or cool as you possibly can. Even if it means you have to play up the problem you're solving a bit.
Of course, that's PR in general these days... I feel sortof dirty after I write things like that.
Don't you think it's at all interesting that
.NET, and if the open source community ignores that, it's insane. We're chasing tailights either way, but far better to be chasing Sun's tailights than MS's.
apache even fell 1.5%? In spite of everything it
DOES have going for it (more secure, cheaper per
installation, open source...)?
And keep in mind that with the number of web servers running out there, 1.5% is a pretty large
change....
There are lots of possible explanations for this... it could just be a hiccup. But the explanation our friend who authored the column
provided is equally plausible.
He's also right on in that java/enterprise/beancomponentthingies are the only real non-vapor non-MS-controlled alternative to
If you really feel as strongly about Jon Katz' writing as to tell him to "go kill himself" -- even as an expression of speech rather than a literal directive -- one assumes that you really wouldn't lose sleep over the good stories you MIGHT be missing by checking his author box.
If you really feel that better anime news is found elsewhere, then the same thing applies.
As for Michael and Microsoft and other topics/authors you find vary in quality and relevance to you: no one is forcing you to read any of them. I myself have a special filtering system in place... I simply scan the headlines and those I don't find interesting I don't pay any attention to. For those I think might be interesting, I read the paragraph of and then decide.
It sounds like you're almost complaining you might have to resort to this actual sorting of information on your own.
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I agree that the article was good, but you don't
.Net every fscking day! It's funny, this place is like a Microsoft news
...
know slashdot very well if your complaints are honest....
I can't stand most of the crap here:
What bothers me most is most of the "Dear God how
did this website become so sucky" compaints. Too
bad I can't just mark a box in the (*cough*,*cough*) preferences that would somehow filter those comments out.
What's that, you say? You don't know what the
preferences are? That's right, it's a way to filter
out most of the topics that you don't like! Let's
see if there's a way to exclude the stories that you can't stand!
I know you guys hate Bill Gates, I don't need to hear about IIS bugs and
site now.
Look! There is a topics category for this! You
could exclude all microsoft news from your reading!
Save your anime reviews for AnimeFu, Rob.
Is there a checkbox for this category? Why yes,
there is!
What is the sound of one checkbox clicking, otaku?
Jon Katz, please kill yourself! You're no more entertaining as "Mr Movie Review" than you were as "Mr Columbine." You ripped off the Slashdot community
OK, Mr. High and Mighty AC: some phrases are funny,
but "please kill yourself" just ain't. Thank goodness we aren't letting a person who can't figure out slashdot's preference system decide who lives and dies in this world.
Oh, wait, did I mention that Jon Katz has an AUTHOR
box you can use to exclude his stories?
Michael, you fucking NAZI, I don't know how you ever got on Slashdot in the first place. Go on, mod down this post now, before anyone sees it!
Michael may seem a little overzealous at times, but in a world where most people never hear about half the gradual erosions of their freedoms, care more about the latest Wal-Mart sale than the elections, and don't know the WTO from the WWF, I can hardly blame him for trying hard.
Bonus question: Does Michael have an Author box?
I prefer Slashdot's old style: Lots of Linux, UNIX, and Mac stuff...Very few Microsoft stories...Insane, bizarre hacks -- often related
You've been around long enough to remember an older, better slashdot, but you haven't learned to use the preferences system? Get an account and learn to use it to transform this site into what you like -- all without having to change it for everybody else or inflict diatribes like yours (or mine) on everyone..
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From Miguel's comments on Passport:
People might just not care: In a poll to US citizens a couple of decades ago, it was found that
most people did not care about the rights they were given by the Bill of Rights, which lead to a number of laws to be passed in the US that eliminated most of the rights people had.
Does anyone have any idea what he's referring to?
(More so about the polling than the actual erosion of rights)
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You're exactly right. Microsoft's been trying to
have it both ways the whole time.
I wrote an article on this a while back... it seemed to me Microsoft's arguments were a lot like having a car mechanic say he coldn't remove
your car stereo because that would entail removing the battery too and then the car wouldn't work.
An application? Or integral part of the OS? Which way is it, Redmond?
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I suppose I could go on the "move to open software" cursade, but even the most Linux-friendly professor I can think of taught his class about
how the Linux kernel works using PowerPoint. He offered his notes for download off his webpage... which means I'd need PowerPoint to view
them. (Actually, since other people in that class read Slashdot, I'll admit that he was cool enough to have copied the slides into PDF format, but
still... the point stands that if he hadn't done that, I'd need to grab a Windows machine to view the class notes.)
A worthwhile point.
Something I think about sometimes is why people continue to use PowerPoint instead of something like Flash. Flash is cheap, more capable, and the SWF format is reasonably open...
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Thought experiment:
Suppose I _DO_ go ahead and break Microsoft's
license. I create a web service based on Microsoft's toolkit and a combination of the GPL.
Are they going to sue me?
If so, what does that do to their public relations? The view of their license?
(Or does the license say I'm not allowed to talk about it?)
Ã
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I think I've had to work with a few of these. .... of.... something.... wait
Why is Red Hat trying to make something like
THIS? POS terminals are frustration, and nothing
but peices of
a sec, it'll come to me....
i
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