Part of what gets me is that from what I can make out, there's no apparent evidence that anyone being sued actually downloaded the movie, just that it was possible to download it, and that the movie didn't make any money at the box office.
Reading 1984 and Animal Farm can be misleading if you don't understand that Orwell was, himself, a socialist. Read, for instance, Homage to Catalonia, Orwell's account of his time as a volunteer in a revolutionary socialist militia in Spain, and the way that they were attacked by the Communist Party.
My impression is that the job market is actually pretty good right now, so let that limit the scope of my complaint. I get contacted by recruiters looking to fill jobs for which I'm clearly not qualified, but I find roughly one job a day for which I'm qualified, so it's not so bad.
Not long ago, I was in a session on job hunting strategies, but in general, not particular to IT. The trainer said that most job descriptions, especially those in California, exaggerated the qualifications required, and recruiters only expected applicants to meet two-thirds of the qualifications.
Apparently, that's not the case in IT -- the impression I get is that HR expects applicants to meet all the qualifications.
Generally, when I've actually talked to tech people who are recruiting, we can quickly work out that I know what I claim on my resume to know.
I've been getting tired of seeing ads for junior system administrators that require five to ten years of experience. Entry level positions aren't supposed to require experience.
Given that, as others have pointed out, the overall unemployment rate is higher, we should conclude that the job market in the tech sector is pretty good.
No reason why users and distributions cannot use firefox (most do) and thunderbird (most don't) as default applications.
That's exactly the question, though. Every Linux distribution I've tried, with a GNOME interface, installs Firefox as the default. Why is Thunderbird treated as an afterthought?
The integration I had most in mind, were two features. First, there's no link to Thunderbird in Indicator Applet, after setting Thunderbird as the default email client -- Indicator Applet still launches Evolution. I've seen instructions on how to change that, involving creating a.desktop file and so on, so it's fixable. Second, the panel clock applet, when clicked upon, displays a calendar summary, drawn from Evolution.
In both cases, these are trivial conveniences, and not worth foregoing Thunderbird, in my opinion. It'd be nice to have these fixed, though.
I can understand the frustration with a user interface change, even a trivial one that's easy to change back. But it bugs me that most reviews I read of new Ubuntu releases focus exclusively on trivial user interface changes, and ignore changes to the internals.
The summary mentions that Evolution will be faster. Can any beta-testers report on whether it is much of an improvement?
I'd been increasingly unhappy with Evolution. It's very, very slow; it usually fails to display HTML email, which is increasingly common, and it often freezes for thirty seconds or so when I try to do it. I use Gmail and Google Calendar, but prefer to use a local client; Evolution offers integration with Google services, but that integration is clumsy. For instance, to "archive" email in my inbox, I have to click the "delete" button.
So, I finally got around to installing Thunderbird. In order to get the functionality I wanted, that I'd had in Evolution, I had to install several addons: Enigmail, Lightning, and Provider for Google Calendar. Importing contacts was a bit messy, and I haven't worked out yet how to sync Thunderbird's address book with Google Contacts. There's less thorough integration of Thunderbird into the GNOME interface.
Yet despite those difficulties, Thunderbird is much, much better at the core functions for which I'd been using Evolution: email and calendaring. It is faster, displays messages more cleanly, and integrates better with Google services.
I've been seeing complaints from Ubuntu users for years that they'd rather have Thunderbird as the default client, and that it works better than Evolution, save for the less thorough integration into GNOME. Having made the switch, I'm really at a loss why Ubuntu and GNOME are sticking with Evolution, and not at least treating Thunderbird as a peer.
How about choosing one of the several desktop themes, installed by default, that have the buttons on the right side? My eight-year-old figured out how to do that within a minute.
First, they have long term support (LTS) distributions every two years -- 10.04 is the current distribution, and also an LTS distribution. Second, they already have desktop distributions and server distributions.
Applications and their dependencies are offered in the repositories as a coherent set.
Canonical's emphasis has been on producing a Linux distribution that appeals to desktop users. Many of the applications that desktop users most use -- Web browsers, most especially -- have significant updates frequently.
So, you can stick with the long term support (LTS) version of the distribution, if you prefer to avoid the frequent upgrades and are satisfied with older versions of the more volatile applications. If you want to keep up with the volatile applications, but still want to stick to supported respositories, go with the latest distribution.
It's almost a month and a half before the release version of the 10.10 distribution, and many Ubuntu users will prefer to wait a few weeks after that to upgrade anyway, so it's not like there's a fire under your feet.
It's an amusing idea, but of course Beck has the full weight of Fox behind him.
One of the most insightful bits on The Daily Show was one in which Stewart pointed out that Gretchen Carlson, who poses as an "ordinary," unsophisticated and uneducated person, was a Stanford honors graduate and did work at Oxford:
Fox consistently broadcasts falsehoods, absurdities, and stupidity. It isn't because Fox is staffed by idiots. They are consciously and cynically manipulating people towards political ends that benefit the owners of Fox and News Corp, not the people they are manipulating. Fox holds its audience in contempt.
When the US was bombing Serbia, I know a lot of US students were talking to Serbian students via IRC, chatrooms, etc. That contributed to the fervor of large anti-war demonstrations, which the US media dutifully reported didn't happen. (Which was really quite infuriating. One Bay Area TV station had a reporter broadcasting live from Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley on how there was no sign of any opposition to the war. There was a demonstration with tens of thousands the next day.)
So, yes, the Internet could facilitate international communication, increasing the popular resistance to war -- as it has already done. That isn't enough, in itself, to stop war.
It's worth remembering that many in Europe in the early 20th century believed that direct war between European powers was no longer possible, for a number of reasons, including the dramatic increase in communication and travel within Europe. And in fact, early in World War I, there were a number of incidents where French and German soldiers would refuse to fire on each other, out of a sense of collective opposition to the war.
One thing I learned from being an English literature major: if knowing the ending ruins the story, it's not a story. Stories are about how people change over time. Frequently, stories will let you know how they end right away, so that you go in wondering how the person at the beginning of the story becomes the person at the end. With a decent story, even if there is a "surprise" ending, when you reread the story, all sorts of details leap out at you that you didn't notice on the first reading, that set up for that ending.
With Christie, the characters are caricatures, and the whole thing is a riddle, which is completely uninteresting if you already know the answer to the riddle. The game is that Christie gives some strange clue early on, which you'll inevitably miss, and you get to feel how much smarter Christie is than you are, because the entire book is about distracting you from what the answer to the riddle is. In fact, since most of the writing is distraction, you end with the feeling that 198 out of 200 pages were irrelevant, and you wasted your time reading them. If somehow you actually figure out the riddle before the end, there's nothing to do but skip to the end and check your answer; there's no pleasure in reading the intervening material.
I have to nitpick: Frodo doesn't have the strength of will to do it. While he's turning back from the edge, he's attacked by Gollum, who bites off his finger, then falls into the lava. The point was that, on the one hand, the seduction of the One Ring would eventually corrupt anyone, but on the other, its treacherous lead to its own destruction.
And, yes, pilot privacy is a concern because certain well-known air crashes have involved the airline and/or even government falsifying data to put the blame on the pilots (cue fingers wagged at France).
In which case a mismatch between the data transmitted during flight and the data recorded in the black box could be cited as evidence.
Seriously. I'd have expected Wikileaks to be on a shoestring budget -- and even if its budget is generous, I'd be expecting them to be very prudent about their use of resources. Why would they be using this over-the-top interior decoration?
How did Marx feel about anarchists such as Proudhon?
From what I recall, Marx and Engels were pretty critical of Proudhon, generally portraying his economic views as simplistic and romantic. To be fair, I don't really know Proudhon's side of the argument.
What does the word 'vanguard' mean in Marxist philosophy? Did he use it, or was that a latter invention?
Marx and Engels used it occasionally, to mean the best-organized and most politicized of the working class. My sense is that it was used interchangeably with "the revolutionary party," which didn't have as concrete and specific a meaning as it did in Leninism.
My sense is that it was specifically Leninism which went on about the vanguard being the means to overcome the paradox presented in that passage from Theses on Feuerbach, and made the vanguard needly equivalent to a specific, concrete political organization.
I should back up a bit here, and say that I'm trying to work out my views on Marxism. My current thinking is that Marx was generally on the right track, but he was excessively influenced by the French Revolution. That led to subtle biases that were amplified, disastrously, in Leninism -- and that this matter of the vanguard was exactly the problem.
That is, I think that Marx's fuzzy notion of a vanguard had the potential to contradict the point he was making, and that this contradiction was amplified in Leninism, where it was argued that the party resolved the paradox. But it doesn't -- that's just reasserting Feuerbach's idea, positing a revolutionary elite, which Marx criticized to begin with.
My sense is that a democratic socialism can only happen when most people want it to happen, and that's a long, gradual process that, ironically, the Russian Revolution set back.
Slashdot Mirror
Part of what gets me is that from what I can make out, there's no apparent evidence that anyone being sued actually downloaded the movie, just that it was possible to download it, and that the movie didn't make any money at the box office.
Reading 1984 and Animal Farm can be misleading if you don't understand that Orwell was, himself, a socialist. Read, for instance, Homage to Catalonia, Orwell's account of his time as a volunteer in a revolutionary socialist militia in Spain, and the way that they were attacked by the Communist Party.
My impression is that the job market is actually pretty good right now, so let that limit the scope of my complaint. I get contacted by recruiters looking to fill jobs for which I'm clearly not qualified, but I find roughly one job a day for which I'm qualified, so it's not so bad.
Not long ago, I was in a session on job hunting strategies, but in general, not particular to IT. The trainer said that most job descriptions, especially those in California, exaggerated the qualifications required, and recruiters only expected applicants to meet two-thirds of the qualifications.
Apparently, that's not the case in IT -- the impression I get is that HR expects applicants to meet all the qualifications.
Generally, when I've actually talked to tech people who are recruiting, we can quickly work out that I know what I claim on my resume to know.
I've been getting tired of seeing ads for junior system administrators that require five to ten years of experience. Entry level positions aren't supposed to require experience.
Given that, as others have pointed out, the overall unemployment rate is higher, we should conclude that the job market in the tech sector is pretty good.
No reason why users and distributions cannot use firefox (most do) and thunderbird (most don't) as default applications.
That's exactly the question, though. Every Linux distribution I've tried, with a GNOME interface, installs Firefox as the default. Why is Thunderbird treated as an afterthought?
The integration I had most in mind, were two features. First, there's no link to Thunderbird in Indicator Applet, after setting Thunderbird as the default email client -- Indicator Applet still launches Evolution. I've seen instructions on how to change that, involving creating a .desktop file and so on, so it's fixable. Second, the panel clock applet, when clicked upon, displays a calendar summary, drawn from Evolution.
In both cases, these are trivial conveniences, and not worth foregoing Thunderbird, in my opinion. It'd be nice to have these fixed, though.
My kids figured out how to change the default theme within seconds of their first use of GNOME.
I can understand the frustration with a user interface change, even a trivial one that's easy to change back. But it bugs me that most reviews I read of new Ubuntu releases focus exclusively on trivial user interface changes, and ignore changes to the internals.
The summary mentions that Evolution will be faster. Can any beta-testers report on whether it is much of an improvement?
I'd been increasingly unhappy with Evolution. It's very, very slow; it usually fails to display HTML email, which is increasingly common, and it often freezes for thirty seconds or so when I try to do it. I use Gmail and Google Calendar, but prefer to use a local client; Evolution offers integration with Google services, but that integration is clumsy. For instance, to "archive" email in my inbox, I have to click the "delete" button.
So, I finally got around to installing Thunderbird. In order to get the functionality I wanted, that I'd had in Evolution, I had to install several addons: Enigmail, Lightning, and Provider for Google Calendar. Importing contacts was a bit messy, and I haven't worked out yet how to sync Thunderbird's address book with Google Contacts. There's less thorough integration of Thunderbird into the GNOME interface.
Yet despite those difficulties, Thunderbird is much, much better at the core functions for which I'd been using Evolution: email and calendaring. It is faster, displays messages more cleanly, and integrates better with Google services.
I've been seeing complaints from Ubuntu users for years that they'd rather have Thunderbird as the default client, and that it works better than Evolution, save for the less thorough integration into GNOME. Having made the switch, I'm really at a loss why Ubuntu and GNOME are sticking with Evolution, and not at least treating Thunderbird as a peer.
Those lazy bastards should stop fixing bugs, and start fixing bugs instead!
How about choosing one of the several desktop themes, installed by default, that have the buttons on the right side? My eight-year-old figured out how to do that within a minute.
First, they have long term support (LTS) distributions every two years -- 10.04 is the current distribution, and also an LTS distribution. Second, they already have desktop distributions and server distributions.
Applications and their dependencies are offered in the repositories as a coherent set.
Canonical's emphasis has been on producing a Linux distribution that appeals to desktop users. Many of the applications that desktop users most use -- Web browsers, most especially -- have significant updates frequently.
So, you can stick with the long term support (LTS) version of the distribution, if you prefer to avoid the frequent upgrades and are satisfied with older versions of the more volatile applications. If you want to keep up with the volatile applications, but still want to stick to supported respositories, go with the latest distribution.
It's almost a month and a half before the release version of the 10.10 distribution, and many Ubuntu users will prefer to wait a few weeks after that to upgrade anyway, so it's not like there's a fire under your feet.
It's an amusing idea, but of course Beck has the full weight of Fox behind him.
One of the most insightful bits on The Daily Show was one in which Stewart pointed out that Gretchen Carlson, who poses as an "ordinary," unsophisticated and uneducated person, was a Stanford honors graduate and did work at Oxford:
Gretchen Carlson Dumbs Down
Fox consistently broadcasts falsehoods, absurdities, and stupidity. It isn't because Fox is staffed by idiots. They are consciously and cynically manipulating people towards political ends that benefit the owners of Fox and News Corp, not the people they are manipulating. Fox holds its audience in contempt.
When the US was bombing Serbia, I know a lot of US students were talking to Serbian students via IRC, chatrooms, etc. That contributed to the fervor of large anti-war demonstrations, which the US media dutifully reported didn't happen. (Which was really quite infuriating. One Bay Area TV station had a reporter broadcasting live from Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley on how there was no sign of any opposition to the war. There was a demonstration with tens of thousands the next day.)
So, yes, the Internet could facilitate international communication, increasing the popular resistance to war -- as it has already done. That isn't enough, in itself, to stop war.
It's worth remembering that many in Europe in the early 20th century believed that direct war between European powers was no longer possible, for a number of reasons, including the dramatic increase in communication and travel within Europe. And in fact, early in World War I, there were a number of incidents where French and German soldiers would refuse to fire on each other, out of a sense of collective opposition to the war.
Christie wrote riddles, not stories.
One thing I learned from being an English literature major: if knowing the ending ruins the story, it's not a story. Stories are about how people change over time. Frequently, stories will let you know how they end right away, so that you go in wondering how the person at the beginning of the story becomes the person at the end. With a decent story, even if there is a "surprise" ending, when you reread the story, all sorts of details leap out at you that you didn't notice on the first reading, that set up for that ending.
With Christie, the characters are caricatures, and the whole thing is a riddle, which is completely uninteresting if you already know the answer to the riddle. The game is that Christie gives some strange clue early on, which you'll inevitably miss, and you get to feel how much smarter Christie is than you are, because the entire book is about distracting you from what the answer to the riddle is. In fact, since most of the writing is distraction, you end with the feeling that 198 out of 200 pages were irrelevant, and you wasted your time reading them. If somehow you actually figure out the riddle before the end, there's nothing to do but skip to the end and check your answer; there's no pleasure in reading the intervening material.
Frodo throws the ring in the volcano.
I have to nitpick: Frodo doesn't have the strength of will to do it. While he's turning back from the edge, he's attacked by Gollum, who bites off his finger, then falls into the lava. The point was that, on the one hand, the seduction of the One Ring would eventually corrupt anyone, but on the other, its treacherous lead to its own destruction.
Also, you forgot that "Rosebud" was Kane's sled.
The difference between a fortress and a prison is whether the weapons point in or out.
Seriously. Ever notice how many prisons in Europe were converted fortresses?
We don't need pilots to fly planes normally. We need pilots to fly planes when something goes wrong.
Look at the programming language Ada, and its intended and actual use:
Ada is strongly typed and compilers are validated for reliability in mission-critical applications, such as avionics software.
And, yes, pilot privacy is a concern because certain well-known air crashes have involved the airline and/or even government falsifying data to put the blame on the pilots (cue fingers wagged at France).
In which case a mismatch between the data transmitted during flight and the data recorded in the black box could be cited as evidence.
If my job was such that typos at any time could kill hundreds of people in minutes, then yes.
I find it unsettling how obsolete technologies are left in place in rail and air transport.
Seriously. I'd have expected Wikileaks to be on a shoestring budget -- and even if its budget is generous, I'd be expecting them to be very prudent about their use of resources. Why would they be using this over-the-top interior decoration?
How did Marx feel about anarchists such as Proudhon?
From what I recall, Marx and Engels were pretty critical of Proudhon, generally portraying his economic views as simplistic and romantic. To be fair, I don't really know Proudhon's side of the argument.
What does the word 'vanguard' mean in Marxist philosophy? Did he use it, or was that a latter invention?
Marx and Engels used it occasionally, to mean the best-organized and most politicized of the working class. My sense is that it was used interchangeably with "the revolutionary party," which didn't have as concrete and specific a meaning as it did in Leninism.
My sense is that it was specifically Leninism which went on about the vanguard being the means to overcome the paradox presented in that passage from Theses on Feuerbach, and made the vanguard needly equivalent to a specific, concrete political organization.
I should back up a bit here, and say that I'm trying to work out my views on Marxism. My current thinking is that Marx was generally on the right track, but he was excessively influenced by the French Revolution. That led to subtle biases that were amplified, disastrously, in Leninism -- and that this matter of the vanguard was exactly the problem.
That is, I think that Marx's fuzzy notion of a vanguard had the potential to contradict the point he was making, and that this contradiction was amplified in Leninism, where it was argued that the party resolved the paradox. But it doesn't -- that's just reasserting Feuerbach's idea, positing a revolutionary elite, which Marx criticized to begin with.
My sense is that a democratic socialism can only happen when most people want it to happen, and that's a long, gradual process that, ironically, the Russian Revolution set back.