Ohh come now, it's not that hard. I mean, between dry docks, covered docks, land-locked docks, etc etc it's not hard to hide a single or a few ships. There is a difference between making things easy to find and keeping it hidden, though.
2. Means that artificially stimulating demand (eg by breaking windows) can result in a larger net positive gain for the economy (by keeping a skilled window-maker in business so that he can make many windows in the time it would otherwise have taken him to retrain as a tailor and make one shirt).
I bet you can't show me one peer-reviewed economics study that indicates that there is a net long-term positive gain from this type of economic activity.
There is a world of idea regarding short-term gains - ie - "economic stimulus" - but every single credible peer-reviewed article I've ever read or heard mentioned or even whispered about suggests that artifical, short-term stimulus does not result in a larger net positive gain.
There are some rules even to economics. A good start of one is that you can't get something for nothing.
"Any environmental impact that I can use against the manufacturer to force him/her to stop selling these products? Any rare bird, rare plant, rare protected type of anything that is damaged? Does this increase the likelihood that migratory birds will fail to migrate or that hibernating bears will cease to hibernate? Is there any rational or irrational basis for me, an environmentalist, to hate, despise, villify, or otherwise malign this product? "
it didn't turn out to be nearly as spectacular a loss of freedom as I had been told,
No shit on that - I read it too.
On the balance it is a really solid law, I'd wager. There is a lot of good. Before the act for goodness sakes the left hand (FBI) of the government didnt and couldnt legally know what the right hand (CIA) was doing or knew. What a joke! If the CIA *knew* for a fact every detail of the 9/11 strike they'd been hard pressed to find a way to share it.
About the bad parts, they are clearly there. But is not a huge deal. Not huge a gigantic cessation of rights and freedom. Very incremental, very "reasonable".
The best part is that the good will stay around and the bad is being changed in court.
Also, about US Citizens arrested in the USA - I don't believe it's "several" or that they are held at Guantanamo.
As far as I can tell, there is only one US citizen being held as an illegal combatant - and he is being held in MD or another stateside US military prison.
(The fundamental question - whether a US Citizen acting in concert with a foreign government or terrorist organization cedes his/her right to civilian trial is a valid and real civil rights question.)
Browsing through the docs at Apple is like visiting a good friend's reading room.. things are how you expect them, already picked over, and some pages already dog eared. There are a few dozen or maybe a hundred volumes, all on topics that interest you.
Visting MSDN is like visiting the Library of Congress. It's all there, it's just a matter of finding it all.
Point being, metaphor aside, that MS is responsible for a LOT more software than Apple is, and even when you figure in hardware, it is a large deal bigger job to manage all that info for MS. And it's not just volume, they have to keep mounds of info for products that haven't been sold commerically in over a decade.
It's a big job for Microsoft. Maybe Apple does a better job, but if you multiply the amount of info Apple needed to carry by about 50 or 100 times you'd quickly see that MSDN is not too shabby. It's pretty close to on par with offerings from competitors like Sun and/or IBM.
That's an excellent point. A lot of people are thinking instruction = 1 cycle. The real world is that it's not unusual for an instruction to take 2, 4, 10, or even 100 cycles. The reality of the matter is that instructions can be anything from a single two bit sum to a floating point division.
I see this mistake a lot... bravo for applying what you read against the supposition of a simplification.
You have taken a massively complicated question, and reduced it beyond the pale to being so simple as to be useless.
"Tort reform" is a serious problem, that deserves a lot of considered thought.
On the one hand, as you mention, it is the last refuge of the people under the law. It is clearly a shield.
On the other hand, it is a sword that can be wielded unjustly against the large and the small. It is subject to emotion and popularity and the "tryanny of the majority". It is clearly a weapon.
A lot of things are like this. I'll give you an example. The CBS news a few nights ago was a piece about an 18-yr old highschool student who was charged with rape for having sex with a 16-yr old classmate. He was taken to court, and was found not guilty of rape. He was however convicted on a lesser charge, Injury to a Minor, and sentenced to 10 years in prison. The crux of the story was that he was wronged by his 10-year sentence on this "technicality". The claim was that the minor was injured because her virginity was taken from her by the older, confident, charming 18-yr old. The story was essentially "look at this unjust case, where a person was given a 10-yr sentence for having some sex with 16-yr old".
On NBC a few weeks back, in December I believe, they had a similiarly toned article about a 16-yr old girl who slept with an older man (in his late 30's/40's I believe). She felt she was abused, and he ought to be held accountable in court and go to prison. She was "controlled" by him and "disgraced" by the older, charming, confident man. However, he was not given a sentence and was let off the hook with no rape conviction and no prison time.
In essence, what we have here is a problem with crafting laws to apply properly in all imaginable cases. That's why not laws of all types are massively complex. There are a million what-if's, maybe's, conditions, modifiers, loop-holes, etc. We see the same thing in tax law. On the one hand we have Congresspeople wanting to exemptions to "promote" this or that. The thing they want to promote is, of course, good. On the other hand we have Congresspeople railing against "loop-holes" and "giveaways" in pratically the same breath. Essentially, what we have is today's inducements, stimulus, and reforms become tomorrows loops-holes, giveaways, and bilkings.
The same meme is true with tort laws and civil lawsuits. On the one hand, there is a major problem with doctors leaving the business of healthcare. In my area there have been numerous cases where perfectly good doctors have decided to just retire rather than attempt to continue as a going concern. On the other hand, doctors make grave mistakes or are sloppy, and deserve to be sued to be made accountable for these mistakes. People suffer, and they should be made whole to the extent possible.
So then, the question is, where do we draw the line? How much is too much? When a person dies, how much is that life worth in real terms, and in terms of damages?
Justice in these matters is not black and white. For every case you can find of a person getting screwed you can find a case where someone on the receiving end of the suit got screwed, or an unusually large verdict, or some other such abuse of justice.
The bottom line being, tort reform, like all lawmaking, is vastly complex.
Re:The real future of NASA (as I see it)
on
The Future of NASA
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The original poster is living in a fantasy world of fake science.,br>
Changing the mission of the shuttle to dock with ISS mid-stream was not an option. If he read the report by the committee investigating the accident he'd know this -- they clearly address it.
Not only that, but frankly, there wasn't a large belief in NASA that something bad would happen. They had clues, and there was debate, but at the end of the day it was not something that was a huge crisis inside NASA.
The fact of the matter remains that things happened at lift-off, and once set in motion, the shuttle was more or less doomed.
Why would it matter? If an unknown scary looking person is in my house taking my stuff, why should it matter if I shoot him in the face or in the back?
He's in my house, with my stuff in his hands. I'll give him a fair chance to surrender. If he moves towards me, or does anything but exactly what I tell him ("hands on your head, kneel down slowly, maintain eye contact") then he should hope to only have a flesh wound or two.
Personally, I think all burgulars should have the expectation of getting a clip of 9mm shells in the head. You'd have either (a) a lot more burgulars making damn sure no one was home before commencing and (b) a lot more jittery afraid to try would-be criminals rather than occasional-get-away-with-it criminals.
And I thought the main selling point of Windows was that it was easy enough that any baboon could install/user/administer it.
It is massively easy to admin a large number of similiar Windows machines.
As a part time thing, for charity, I admin a largish network for a non-profit in New England. Something like ~150 desktop PCs - running Win2k and WinXP and 3 Win2k Servers.
I do it all remotely, in about ~45 minutes or so weekly. When they need a new PC they get it straight from Dell, plug it in, and after a very simple operation (which, granted, required me writing out detailed instructions with pictures and lots of hand-holding), the PC is in the network. After a quick reboot, all the software is configured, printers configured, network access configured, and any of the 175 users can log in and experience the same consistent environment.
Patching machines is virtually painless, virus/trojans/spyware never gets through, e-mail is rock-solid, machines don't crash unless it's a hardware failure (quite common with Dell sadly..), the machines are locked down and unable to be user-f'd, and things are generally smooth.
They used to have a full-time fully-clueless IT guy. He went to a different career, and I took over a few years ago. After a single weekend of re-engineering I can say that the network operates without any trouble. The users are happy, things are reliable, all major maintenance is automated and scripted, and things *just work*.
Honestly, it all depends on the person. I've known networks with really bad UNIX-ish admins where nothing working, machines, crashed non-stop, etc etc. Same with Windows.
Don't mean to be immodest, but really, it just takes someone with a good grasp of IT and some Windows skills. My one power user on-site handles some of the hands-on stuff (unjamming printers, unpacking new PCs, changing backup tapes, etc).
Anyways... in this case, Linux would work except for about ~6 or so critical apps that are Windows-only. Bummer.
If you can't come up with a more useful, misfeature-for-misfeature, more secure alternative, then you prove my point. Too many young people have been brainwashed into thinking Microsoft is the only solution. Enjoy your delusion. There was life before Microsoft, young one. There will be (a better) life after Microsoft (for most of us). Many of us don't see the value in enabling and promoting the distribution of malware.
Listen... I am all for NOT using MS software. But seriously.. what did 1000 people organizations use for global co-ordination, communication, and messaging before MS? Ohh.. that's right, they didn't. Global organizations before IT weren't very common, and weren't very effective. Branches operated largely disconnected as seperate but financially related entities.
Many of us don't see the value in enabling and promoting the distribution of malware.
Like I said, show me an alternative. SOmething that allows group collobration, e-mail, IM, group-calendars, document sharing/revisioning, and usuable robust remote access. Show me it and I'll be happy.
Otherwise, you exisit in some type of "everything MS puts out is crapware" never-never land.
Now, although the product still sucks, there are all these clueless people who claim it's the best enterprise-class software. This has to be the best example of marketing triumphing over truth and sanity ever.
Give me a superior feature-for-feature alternative to Win2k Server + Exchange 2000 + Oulook 2000 for about 1000 people and I'll listen. The fact is, I've looked and looked and looked and looked, the closet I can see is Lotus Notes (which in some cases I have to use).
Not only that, but uhh, Exchange + Outlook is most often cheaper than Notes.
In most circumstances, the big players have "peering" arrangements. Its the same for long distance, VoIP, Internet, etc.
Essentially there are only a few players that own significant bandwidth on the Internet and closed-switching systems. They build physical locations where the networks tie together and the big fat pipes interconnect (hence, the InterNetworking of the Internet). Here is where accounting of packets/data transferred takes place. In most cases the big players trade packets 1-for-1, meaning, if Spring and MCI send each other an equal amount of data no money changes hand (well, perhaps it does on paper to prop up "gross income" or whatever, but an equal amount is paid out).
Money is only gained by one provider or another when there is an imbalance.
The same principle will generally apply to phone carriers: Company A will trade minute for minute long-distance calls for Company B of a similiar nature. Only when there is an imbalance of A->B or B->A calls is significant charging taking place. This means that in real terms the largest portion of the cost is maintaining the internal networks and support of the infrastructure. External connectivity reaches a point of critical mass where the demand to communicate with an organizations customers generates fees that offset its own outgoing costs.
Hopefully the same thing will happen with big and small Wireless ISP's. User A from ISP A will use 40MB of ISP B's bandwidth but no money will have to change hands since User B from ISP B will end up using 40MB of ISP A's bandwidth. Some of the smaller WiSP's - say in rural areas or less traveled areas - will end up having to pay for an imbalance in, say, metropolitian Florida or New York or California, but in general, in many cases, the amount needed to expend to make this work financially isn't a huge barrier.
Over time the system is likely to become very smooth and automatic. Today calling long-distance triggers dozens of systems across a myraid of billing systems, but magically, somehow, the bills are *generally* accurate, the plans complex but manageable, and service universal reliable - even though there are nearly a half-dozen big long-distance companies out there.
I have one of those drives I can spin up for you if you want.. an old 8088 and a copy of a MS-DOS with defrag should do it... heh..
Seriously, I know you what you mean. That's the computer noise. Also, on the same line, every time any movie shows a satellite communicating or wants to indicate interstellar communication they play a clip of a Sputnik-era radio communications. It's really funny - for reference see Enemy of the State, Clear and Present Danger, etc.
Wal-Mart is not out to protect kids. They're out to protect themselves and their bottom line. That's all they care about. And part of that is removing any criticism of themselves from American culture.
And my point remains... SO WHAT.. That's what people want... people TRUST Wal-Mart. People *choose* to buy Wal-Mart products.
That's the whole point of this whole economic system. Cheryll Crow can sell her wares anywhere she wants. In fact, she can refuse Wal-Mart permission to sell her album and not make a Wal-Mart version. That'll just be lost sales for Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart has set down standards for what they sell. Just like any retailer has standards about product content and quality. I wouldn't start a company called "Fuck General Motors" and then be pissed when no GM dealers would carry the "Saturns are Shitty L100" or the "Chevy Sucks Ass F250".
Nope, I am talking about the hair style. It is commonoly used to insuate lower-brow southern-American "white trash" hood on people. It is commonoly referred to in context of "beer-drinking", or "nascar-watching", "bible thumping", etc.
On top of that, pop-culture has taken a hold of it recently in a mocking way, to demean white southerners. Exhibit A: See "Joe Dirt".
Exhibit B: The Makings of Mullet - notice the southern accent, the references to bad body odor, references to heavy drug and alcholol use, "farmers tan", "scowl", "truck ralley", and the alleged propensity towards violence.
Calling a rural white Americans "Joe Mullet"'s is like calling inner city blacks "Randall Nappy-Hair".
AFAIK, Devils Lake, ND has no music dealers (using qwestdex.com searching for category:music). They do have a Wally World. That example was also very easy to find, I typed a random ZIP code into walmart.com and looked up the city that came up. I have no doubt that I could find others.
2. Two radio stations (locally, in that one town). 103.5 FM and 97.6 FM.
3. K MART, located 701 5th Ave S-Devils Lake, ND
and of course:
4. The Internet: iTunes, Napster, P2P, Amazon.com - Devils Lake has two dial up ISPs, plus Earthlink local access and DSL in some areas. Fully served by USPS and UPS.
haha. Yeah. Please tell me what I am. You obviously know better than I do
I know based on your own words. You've said it. But fine, I accept your retraction. It does however demonstrate your contempt for Wal-Mart customers.
Why do you automatically assume that because something is censored that it is gangsta rap about these very subject matters?
That was actually supposed to rape, not rap. A typo. The majority of what Wal-Mart censors is not rap at all.
Lots of other things get censored for almost no reason (say "fuck" once, have a sinister looking artwork).
That's not no reason. If I had an eleven year old, I would not want him or her exposed to music which uses obscene references to sexual references. Wal-Mart and I share those values. I choose to support their choice of values. So do millions and millions of Americans.
I have no problem with you purchasing what you want, but I have problem with big corporation censoring the work of artists
Well they are mutually exclusively. Wal-Mart is acting on my behalf in this regard, as well as MILLIONS of others. Just because someone calls themselves an artist DOES NOT REQUIRE WAL-MART TO sell their wares. Wal-Mart has set down standards, and if you want to do business with Wal-Mart, you must adhere to those standards.
To me it's the equivalent of having the biggest and cheapest ISP around censoring the content of the net (content that they didn't produce). Sure you can go find other ISPs, but does it make what they do right? We are not living in a free market. It exists only in theory.
AOL does exactly that. And you can go choose from THOUSANDS of other ISPs, as have MILLIONS of people. That 20 million people allow AOL to censor content on their behalf is their personal choice.
We ARE living in a free market. Period. There isn't a single place in the ENTIRE country with just ONE ISP as a choice. There isn't a single place in the ENTIRE country with a single music outlet that is Wal-Mart.
And no, it doesn't have to be the government -- the gov doesn't have a monopoly on having power over people. Others have a lot of it too...
Except only the government has guns and men in black outfits to enforce their power. Wal-Mart does not. Wal-Mart derives power from the consent of thier customers. It's the ultimate democracy.
When someone starts to choose for someone else what that person should and shouldn't think instead of having it in the open to dicsuss and understand it, it starts to get ugly.
I agree. But that IS NOT HAPPENING WITH WAL-MART.
Wal-Mart censors music to fit the taste and values of it's customers. They represent MILLIONS of individuals who agree with their judgement and trust and share common values. Any random individual is neither compelled nor required to join that pool of commonality. As I have said before, I *defy* you to provide me with the name of a location in the United States which people can ONLY get Wal-Mart approved music. A place does not exist. I've lived in VERY small towns in VERY rural Maine and had numerous choices for music.
So either backup your paranoid assertion by providing a specific example, or admit, you just don't like Wal-Mart, and don't approve of their taste (and by extension, you have distate for their customers).
Finally, based on your own writings, I believe your distate is based in racism and elitism. Let me back this up with some analysis of your argument so far.
Rural America is well over 98% white. It is also very strictly Christian. Your calling them "Joe Mullet" represents a degredagation, equating them with a lower-class of person and insuates a lower-stratum of thinking and critical discourse.
Essentially I think it comes down to the fact that you think people who buy censored media are too stupid to handle the "real deal". I estimate that in your view people who buy this media are
but don't assume that a commercial enterprise will maintain the same values that you do.
They are in fact, however, a lot closer than the typical values propogated by mass media producers, which is essentially, none whatsoever except enough to sell lots of records.
Lots of people trust Wal-Mart. I don't, but they are a very trusted source for millions and millions of Americans.
. The point is that in a lot of small towns, Walmart is the ONLY VENUE for purchasing music.
That is a false-hood, and I challenge you to provide me with a single location in the US that has ONLY Wal-Mart that offers music for sale.
Why should your "right" to shut yourself off from the world force your neighbors to do the same?
It's not a "right". It is a RIGHT. I can purchase what I want. You seem to call that a "right". It's not a RIGHT, it's a "right". The inverse then implies that Wal-Mart should be REQUIRED to sell things that they and their customers find repulsive.
Slashdot Mirror
Ohh come now, it's not that hard. I mean, between dry docks, covered docks, land-locked docks, etc etc it's not hard to hide a single or a few ships. There is a difference between making things easy to find and keeping it hidden, though.
2. Means that artificially stimulating demand (eg by breaking windows) can result in a larger net positive gain for the economy (by keeping a skilled window-maker in business so that he can make many windows in the time it would otherwise have taken him to retrain as a tailor and make one shirt).
I bet you can't show me one peer-reviewed economics study that indicates that there is a net long-term positive gain from this type of economic activity.
There is a world of idea regarding short-term gains - ie - "economic stimulus" - but every single credible peer-reviewed article I've ever read or heard mentioned or even whispered about suggests that artifical, short-term stimulus does not result in a larger net positive gain.
There are some rules even to economics. A good start of one is that you can't get something for nothing.
What he meant to ask was:
"Any environmental impact that I can use against the manufacturer to force him/her to stop selling these products? Any rare bird, rare plant, rare protected type of anything that is damaged? Does this increase the likelihood that migratory birds will fail to migrate or that hibernating bears will cease to hibernate? Is there any rational or irrational basis for me, an environmentalist, to hate, despise, villify, or otherwise malign this product? "
Read between the lines sometimes.
(oh, sorry, I missed it.. I'll be more attentive in the future!)
Broken Window Fallacy
Read it, learn it, love it, spread it.
it didn't turn out to be nearly as spectacular a loss of freedom as I had been told,
No shit on that - I read it too.
On the balance it is a really solid law, I'd wager. There is a lot of good. Before the act for goodness sakes the left hand (FBI) of the government didnt and couldnt legally know what the right hand (CIA) was doing or knew. What a joke! If the CIA *knew* for a fact every detail of the 9/11 strike they'd been hard pressed to find a way to share it.
About the bad parts, they are clearly there. But is not a huge deal. Not huge a gigantic cessation of rights and freedom. Very incremental, very "reasonable".
The best part is that the good will stay around and the bad is being changed in court.
Also, about US Citizens arrested in the USA - I don't believe it's "several" or that they are held at Guantanamo.
As far as I can tell, there is only one US citizen being held as an illegal combatant - and he is being held in MD or another stateside US military prison.
(The fundamental question - whether a US Citizen acting in concert with a foreign government or terrorist organization cedes his/her right to civilian trial is a valid and real civil rights question.)
In all fairness to Apple and MSDN/MS....
Browsing through the docs at Apple is like visiting a good friend's reading room.. things are how you expect them, already picked over, and some pages already dog eared. There are a few dozen or maybe a hundred volumes, all on topics that interest you.
Visting MSDN is like visiting the Library of Congress. It's all there, it's just a matter of finding it all.
Point being, metaphor aside, that MS is responsible for a LOT more software than Apple is, and even when you figure in hardware, it is a large deal bigger job to manage all that info for MS. And it's not just volume, they have to keep mounds of info for products that haven't been sold commerically in over a decade.
It's a big job for Microsoft. Maybe Apple does a better job, but if you multiply the amount of info Apple needed to carry by about 50 or 100 times you'd quickly see that MSDN is not too shabby. It's pretty close to on par with offerings from competitors like Sun and/or IBM.
That's an excellent point. A lot of people are thinking instruction = 1 cycle. The real world is that it's not unusual for an instruction to take 2, 4, 10, or even 100 cycles. The reality of the matter is that instructions can be anything from a single two bit sum to a floating point division. I see this mistake a lot... bravo for applying what you read against the supposition of a simplification.
No, it runs vxWorks.
It says so right in the overview of the article...
You doin' okay?
Well.. in this case, the mail client doesn't matter as far as I can see.
The premise of this worm is that a person gets an e-mail, downloads and attachment, opens and execute it, right?
Or this one of those magic worms that runs all by itself when you view the message?
Am I missing something or what?
You have taken a massively complicated question, and reduced it beyond the pale to being so simple as to be useless.
"Tort reform" is a serious problem, that deserves a lot of considered thought.
On the one hand, as you mention, it is the last refuge of the people under the law. It is clearly a shield.
On the other hand, it is a sword that can be wielded unjustly against the large and the small. It is subject to emotion and popularity and the "tryanny of the majority". It is clearly a weapon.
A lot of things are like this. I'll give you an example. The CBS news a few nights ago was a piece about an 18-yr old highschool student who was charged with rape for having sex with a 16-yr old classmate. He was taken to court, and was found not guilty of rape. He was however convicted on a lesser charge, Injury to a Minor, and sentenced to 10 years in prison. The crux of the story was that he was wronged by his 10-year sentence on this "technicality". The claim was that the minor was injured because her virginity was taken from her by the older, confident, charming 18-yr old. The story was essentially "look at this unjust case, where a person was given a 10-yr sentence for having some sex with 16-yr old".
On NBC a few weeks back, in December I believe, they had a similiarly toned article about a 16-yr old girl who slept with an older man (in his late 30's/40's I believe). She felt she was abused, and he ought to be held accountable in court and go to prison. She was "controlled" by him and "disgraced" by the older, charming, confident man. However, he was not given a sentence and was let off the hook with no rape conviction and no prison time.
In essence, what we have here is a problem with crafting laws to apply properly in all imaginable cases. That's why not laws of all types are massively complex. There are a million what-if's, maybe's, conditions, modifiers, loop-holes, etc. We see the same thing in tax law. On the one hand we have Congresspeople wanting to exemptions to "promote" this or that. The thing they want to promote is, of course, good. On the other hand we have Congresspeople railing against "loop-holes" and "giveaways" in pratically the same breath. Essentially, what we have is today's inducements, stimulus, and reforms become tomorrows loops-holes, giveaways, and bilkings.
The same meme is true with tort laws and civil lawsuits. On the one hand, there is a major problem with doctors leaving the business of healthcare. In my area there have been numerous cases where perfectly good doctors have decided to just retire rather than attempt to continue as a going concern. On the other hand, doctors make grave mistakes or are sloppy, and deserve to be sued to be made accountable for these mistakes. People suffer, and they should be made whole to the extent possible.
So then, the question is, where do we draw the line? How much is too much? When a person dies, how much is that life worth in real terms, and in terms of damages?
$1 million, $1 billion, $100 billion? $1 trillion?
Justice in these matters is not black and white. For every case you can find of a person getting screwed you can find a case where someone on the receiving end of the suit got screwed, or an unusually large verdict, or some other such abuse of justice.
The bottom line being, tort reform, like all lawmaking, is vastly complex.
The original poster is living in a fantasy world of fake science. ,br>
Changing the mission of the shuttle to dock with ISS mid-stream was not an option. If he read the report by the committee investigating the accident he'd know this -- they clearly address it.
Not only that, but frankly, there wasn't a large belief in NASA that something bad would happen. They had clues, and there was debate, but at the end of the day it was not something that was a huge crisis inside NASA.
The fact of the matter remains that things happened at lift-off, and once set in motion, the shuttle was more or less doomed.
Ahh, true, spam getting through is reduced..
...but likewise false positives along the way are increased.
It's a double edge sword. Each layer adds protection, but more room for failure.
Why would it matter? If an unknown scary looking person is in my house taking my stuff, why should it matter if I shoot him in the face or in the back?
He's in my house, with my stuff in his hands. I'll give him a fair chance to surrender. If he moves towards me, or does anything but exactly what I tell him ("hands on your head, kneel down slowly, maintain eye contact") then he should hope to only have a flesh wound or two.
Personally, I think all burgulars should have the expectation of getting a clip of 9mm shells in the head. You'd have either (a) a lot more burgulars making damn sure no one was home before commencing and (b) a lot more jittery afraid to try would-be criminals rather than occasional-get-away-with-it criminals.
And I thought the main selling point of Windows was that it was easy enough that any baboon could install/user/administer it.
It is massively easy to admin a large number of similiar Windows machines.
As a part time thing, for charity, I admin a largish network for a non-profit in New England. Something like ~150 desktop PCs - running Win2k and WinXP and 3 Win2k Servers.
I do it all remotely, in about ~45 minutes or so weekly. When they need a new PC they get it straight from Dell, plug it in, and after a very simple operation (which, granted, required me writing out detailed instructions with pictures and lots of hand-holding), the PC is in the network. After a quick reboot, all the software is configured, printers configured, network access configured, and any of the 175 users can log in and experience the same consistent environment.
Patching machines is virtually painless, virus/trojans/spyware never gets through, e-mail is rock-solid, machines don't crash unless it's a hardware failure (quite common with Dell sadly..), the machines are locked down and unable to be user-f'd, and things are generally smooth.
They used to have a full-time fully-clueless IT guy. He went to a different career, and I took over a few years ago. After a single weekend of re-engineering I can say that the network operates without any trouble. The users are happy, things are reliable, all major maintenance is automated and scripted, and things *just work*.
Honestly, it all depends on the person. I've known networks with really bad UNIX-ish admins where nothing working, machines, crashed non-stop, etc etc. Same with Windows.
Don't mean to be immodest, but really, it just takes someone with a good grasp of IT and some Windows skills. My one power user on-site handles some of the hands-on stuff (unjamming printers, unpacking new PCs, changing backup tapes, etc).
Anyways... in this case, Linux would work except for about ~6 or so critical apps that are Windows-only. Bummer.
If you can't come up with a more useful, misfeature-for-misfeature, more secure alternative, then you prove my point. Too many young people have been brainwashed into thinking Microsoft is the only solution. Enjoy your delusion. There was life before Microsoft, young one. There will be (a better) life after Microsoft (for most of us). Many of us don't see the value in enabling and promoting the distribution of malware.
Listen... I am all for NOT using MS software. But seriously.. what did 1000 people organizations use for global co-ordination, communication, and messaging before MS? Ohh.. that's right, they didn't. Global organizations before IT weren't very common, and weren't very effective. Branches operated largely disconnected as seperate but financially related entities.
Many of us don't see the value in enabling and promoting the distribution of malware.
Like I said, show me an alternative. SOmething that allows group collobration, e-mail, IM, group-calendars, document sharing/revisioning, and usuable robust remote access. Show me it and I'll be happy.
Otherwise, you exisit in some type of "everything MS puts out is crapware" never-never land.
I tell you what:
Now, although the product still sucks, there are all these clueless people who claim it's the best enterprise-class software. This has to be the best example of marketing triumphing over truth and sanity ever.
Give me a superior feature-for-feature alternative to Win2k Server + Exchange 2000 + Oulook 2000 for about 1000 people and I'll listen. The fact is, I've looked and looked and looked and looked, the closet I can see is Lotus Notes (which in some cases I have to use).
Not only that, but uhh, Exchange + Outlook is most often cheaper than Notes.
Its more refined than that even,
In most circumstances, the big players have "peering" arrangements. Its the same for long distance, VoIP, Internet, etc.
Essentially there are only a few players that own significant bandwidth on the Internet and closed-switching systems. They build physical locations where the networks tie together and the big fat pipes interconnect (hence, the InterNetworking of the Internet). Here is where accounting of packets/data transferred takes place. In most cases the big players trade packets 1-for-1, meaning, if Spring and MCI send each other an equal amount of data no money changes hand (well, perhaps it does on paper to prop up "gross income" or whatever, but an equal amount is paid out).
Money is only gained by one provider or another when there is an imbalance.
The same principle will generally apply to phone carriers: Company A will trade minute for minute long-distance calls for Company B of a similiar nature. Only when there is an imbalance of A->B or B->A calls is significant charging taking place. This means that in real terms the largest portion of the cost is maintaining the internal networks and support of the infrastructure. External connectivity reaches a point of critical mass where the demand to communicate with an organizations customers generates fees that offset its own outgoing costs.
Hopefully the same thing will happen with big and small Wireless ISP's. User A from ISP A will use 40MB of ISP B's bandwidth but no money will have to change hands since User B from ISP B will end up using 40MB of ISP A's bandwidth. Some of the smaller WiSP's - say in rural areas or less traveled areas - will end up having to pay for an imbalance in, say, metropolitian Florida or New York or California, but in general, in many cases, the amount needed to expend to make this work financially isn't a huge barrier.
Over time the system is likely to become very smooth and automatic. Today calling long-distance triggers dozens of systems across a myraid of billing systems, but magically, somehow, the bills are *generally* accurate, the plans complex but manageable, and service universal reliable - even though there are nearly a half-dozen big long-distance companies out there.
I have one of those drives I can spin up for you if you want.. an old 8088 and a copy of a MS-DOS with defrag should do it... heh..
Seriously, I know you what you mean. That's the computer noise. Also, on the same line, every time any movie shows a satellite communicating or wants to indicate interstellar communication they play a clip of a Sputnik-era radio communications. It's really funny - for reference see Enemy of the State, Clear and Present Danger, etc.
Wal-Mart is not out to protect kids. They're out to protect themselves and their bottom line. That's all they care about. And part of that is removing any criticism of themselves from American culture.
And my point remains... SO WHAT.. That's what people want... people TRUST Wal-Mart. People *choose* to buy Wal-Mart products.
That's the whole point of this whole economic system. Cheryll Crow can sell her wares anywhere she wants. In fact, she can refuse Wal-Mart permission to sell her album and not make a Wal-Mart version. That'll just be lost sales for Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart has set down standards for what they sell. Just like any retailer has standards about product content and quality. I wouldn't start a company called "Fuck General Motors" and then be pissed when no GM dealers would carry the "Saturns are Shitty L100" or the "Chevy Sucks Ass F250".
Nope, I am talking about the hair style. It is commonoly used to insuate lower-brow southern-American "white trash" hood on people. It is commonoly referred to in context of "beer-drinking", or "nascar-watching", "bible thumping", etc.
On top of that, pop-culture has taken a hold of it recently in a mocking way, to demean white southerners. Exhibit A: See "Joe Dirt".
Exhibit B: The Makings of Mullet - notice the southern accent, the references to bad body odor, references to heavy drug and alcholol use, "farmers tan", "scowl", "truck ralley", and the alleged propensity towards violence.
Calling a rural white Americans "Joe Mullet"'s is like calling inner city blacks "Randall Nappy-Hair".
It is condescending and rascist.
AFAIK, Devils Lake, ND has no music dealers (using qwestdex.com searching for category:music). They do have a Wally World. That example was also very easy to find, I typed a random ZIP code into walmart.com and looked up the city that came up. I have no doubt that I could find others.
Thats your example? Okay, let's see..
1. Public Library - Free.
2. Two radio stations (locally, in that one town). 103.5 FM and 97.6 FM.
3. K MART, located 701 5th Ave S-Devils Lake, ND
and of course:
4. The Internet: iTunes, Napster, P2P, Amazon.com - Devils Lake has two dial up ISPs, plus Earthlink local access and DSL in some areas. Fully served by USPS and UPS.
Would you like to try again?
haha. Yeah. Please tell me what I am. You obviously know better than I do
I know based on your own words. You've said it. But fine, I accept your retraction. It does however demonstrate your contempt for Wal-Mart customers.
Why do you automatically assume that because something is censored that it is gangsta rap about these very subject matters?
That was actually supposed to rape, not rap. A typo. The majority of what Wal-Mart censors is not rap at all.
Lots of other things get censored for almost no reason (say "fuck" once, have a sinister looking artwork).
That's not no reason. If I had an eleven year old, I would not want him or her exposed to music which uses obscene references to sexual references. Wal-Mart and I share those values. I choose to support their choice of values. So do millions and millions of Americans.
I have no problem with you purchasing what you want, but I have problem with big corporation censoring the work of artists
Well they are mutually exclusively. Wal-Mart is acting on my behalf in this regard, as well as MILLIONS of others. Just because someone calls themselves an artist DOES NOT REQUIRE WAL-MART TO sell their wares. Wal-Mart has set down standards, and if you want to do business with Wal-Mart, you must adhere to those standards.
To me it's the equivalent of having the biggest and cheapest ISP around censoring the content of the net (content that they didn't produce). Sure you can go find other ISPs, but does it make what they do right? We are not living in a free market. It exists only in theory.
AOL does exactly that. And you can go choose from THOUSANDS of other ISPs, as have MILLIONS of people. That 20 million people allow AOL to censor content on their behalf is their personal choice.
We ARE living in a free market. Period. There isn't a single place in the ENTIRE country with just ONE ISP as a choice. There isn't a single place in the ENTIRE country with a single music outlet that is Wal-Mart.
And no, it doesn't have to be the government -- the gov doesn't have a monopoly on having power over people. Others have a lot of it too... Except only the government has guns and men in black outfits to enforce their power. Wal-Mart does not. Wal-Mart derives power from the consent of thier customers. It's the ultimate democracy.
When someone starts to choose for someone else what that person should and shouldn't think instead of having it in the open to dicsuss and understand it, it starts to get ugly.
I agree. But that IS NOT HAPPENING WITH WAL-MART.
Wal-Mart censors music to fit the taste and values of it's customers. They represent MILLIONS of individuals who agree with their judgement and trust and share common values. Any random individual is neither compelled nor required to join that pool of commonality. As I have said before, I *defy* you to provide me with the name of a location in the United States which people can ONLY get Wal-Mart approved music. A place does not exist. I've lived in VERY small towns in VERY rural Maine and had numerous choices for music.
So either backup your paranoid assertion by providing a specific example, or admit, you just don't like Wal-Mart, and don't approve of their taste (and by extension, you have distate for their customers).
Finally, based on your own writings, I believe your distate is based in racism and elitism. Let me back this up with some analysis of your argument so far.
Rural America is well over 98% white. It is also very strictly Christian. Your calling them "Joe Mullet" represents a degredagation, equating them with a lower-class of person and insuates a lower-stratum of thinking and critical discourse.
Essentially I think it comes down to the fact that you think people who buy censored media are too stupid to handle the "real deal". I estimate that in your view people who buy this media are
but don't assume that a commercial enterprise will maintain the same values that you do.
They are in fact, however, a lot closer than the typical values propogated by mass media producers, which is essentially, none whatsoever except enough to sell lots of records.
Lots of people trust Wal-Mart. I don't, but they are a very trusted source for millions and millions of Americans.
. The point is that in a lot of small towns, Walmart is the ONLY VENUE for purchasing music.
That is a false-hood, and I challenge you to provide me with a single location in the US that has ONLY Wal-Mart that offers music for sale.
Why should your "right" to shut yourself off from the world force your neighbors to do the same? It's not a "right". It is a RIGHT. I can purchase what I want. You seem to call that a "right". It's not a RIGHT, it's a "right". The inverse then implies that Wal-Mart should be REQUIRED to sell things that they and their customers find repulsive.