The problem is that the line between willfully ignoring all evidence that contradicted their beliefs (and there was plenty) in the "clear and present danger" of Iraq's WMD, while believing any and all evidence, however flaky, that supported their view when making statements/dossiers etc, and outright lying seems almost academic to me.
The defence that the government took us to war because it was incompetent/gullible doesn't make things an awful lot better, especially when they continually refuse to apologise or admit any personal culpability for their actions.
Isn't the simple answer to replace the mouse then? I use an old M$ mouse on my Mac and it works fine. There's the odd annoyance (the scroll wheel seems to go into overdrive rather easily, and I can't figure out how to get it to use the middle button to open a new tab in Firefox), but right mouse button context menus work fine.
Resizing windows on OS X is a real pain, because you can only do it by adjusting the lower-right corner.
Now I do agree with this - I've lost track of the amount of times that I double click on a title bar, expecting it maximise, only for it to disappear into the tray at the bottom, but that's possibly just because I've been used to Windows' way of working for so long.
The question that leaps to my mind is - were you consciously including yourself in your Self-Important Moron category by being highly opinionated about one particular subject area or do you feel that your random meanderings on the subject are justified by your profound and unique insight into it?
I should stop reading/. It makes me feel old. When I got my first home computer, the top of the range storage option was a 128K tape drive.
And I still remember the day at work when I got upgraded to the PC with the high density floppy drive that could store over 1MB, and I would no longer have to swap between the disk with the os/editor and the one with the compiler on.
I've had many electronic organisers for over 10 years now, from stand alone thing with single line displays, through various Psions/Palms/iPaqs, upgrading every 18-36 months as a new shinier/fancier device came out, and I pretty much can't live without them.
However, there's been nothing in the past few years in the PDA world that's offered any features (except size) that my second iPaq didn't have (or at least any that I would use). Instead, my last 2 organisers have both been phones (the Nokia 3650, and now the Orange Smartphone). This last one does everything that I need from an organiser (calendar, contacts, sync with Outlook at work, and at home etc), all in a v. small mobile phone.
This is the problem that stand alone PDAs have - most of their market has been eaten up by Smartphones.
The problem I have is that in theory, I'm in favour of (or maybe don't understand) software patents.
Consider this - you are a small software house and you've thrown large amounts of your (and the bank's) money into designing a smart new algorithm for e.g., the travelling salesman problem. The problem is, as soon as you launch your product, M$ (or someone similar) will reverse engineer your code, rip off your algorithm, stick it in their routing software and run you out of the market. This in theory is, as I understand it, what the patent system is there to protect.
The problem I have is that in practice, what actually gets patented seems to me to be the idea of doing something, rather than the specific details of how they will actually do it, leading to very vague and broad brush (or blatantly obvious/already invented) patents, and would be more along the lines of "An algorithm to work out the best distance between multiple locations", at which point any algorithm that did this would be covered.
For example, in this case, as far as I can tell from the patent text, it seems to be patenting the idea of displaying geographical locations for firewall intrusions rather than a clever new way of determining what is an intrusion or how to work out its location. If it were the latter, I'd probably support it.
I'm always interested by this idea that terrorism is largely stateless. There is nothing in either the meaning of, or the history of, terrorism that I've seen to back this up.
For instance, I would class a fair amount of the US's activities in Vietnam (and much of both Israel's and Palestine's current behaviour) as terrorism, as its much of its purpose was/is to instil terror into the population.
Also, I'm puzzled by your statement that the attacks you included were all "with the intent of targeting specifically civilians", yet you include the attacks on the USS Cole, and the Lebenon Marine Baracks.
I'll admit that the civilians killed in Iraq were (at least to my knowledge) not deliberately targetted in an attempt to induce fear (and therefore wouldn't be classed as terrorism), but in my view still counts as murder as a) I believe the invasion was neither legal nor justified, and b) little seemed to be done to limit (or even worry about) civilian casualties, and this indifference to the deaths of so many Iraqis has almost certainly been one of the contributing factors to the levels of resistance being seen there at the moment.
Neo-conservatives tend to be guided by the views of Leo Strauss, a right wing philosopher from the 50's - 60's, who believed that much of America's ills were a result of the increase in individual freedoms during this time, and the resulting lack of a shared set of morals and beliefs in society. His view was that it was OK to promote "white lies" in order to create these shared beliefs, such as creating a false enemy, the hatred/fear of whom could be used to introduce the legislation required to hold society together.
Interestingly, this is very close to the teachings of an Islamic sect (who's name escapes me at the moment) around the 9th Century, who believed that the Koran was not actually true (and even that Allah did not really exist), but its teachings were a very good way to run a society, and if belief in Allah was the best way to get the uneducated to follow these teachings then it was perfectly just to promote this belief.
Am I missing something (the article didn't really explain it well enough for me), or is this not simply a case of pattern recognition?
Presumably, at the early stages of its learning, it has to be told who won which game, or at least be given some way of knowing who the winner was.
Given that, is it not simply a case of 'computer sees image of hand A with 2 fingers up and hand B in the shape of a fist, and having previously been told that this image means a win for B, can deduce the same thing again.
Whenever (and wherever) I've been in the US, most people seem convinced that I'm either from Australia or New Zealand (which I'm not - I'm from the UK - East Midlands, and outside the US have never had my accent mistaken for an Aussie).
I get the feeling that most Americans seems to be able to distinguish between US and non-US accents, and that's about it.
But then, most Brits I know couldn't tell the difference between an Aussie or a Kiwi accent.
Depends on what type of system you're after, really.
It's fine for word processing systems (and I'd like to think that not too many companies think that building their own word processor is a sensible option, so that leaves buy v FLOSS), but there's not (for example) many FLOSS credit card management systems available out there.
Probably the only sort of area that I've come across where there's a realistic choice of any of the three options (buy v build v FLOSS) is content management tools.
Few parents would pay so much for their kids to go to a school that didn't improve their [college] admissions prospects. Prep schools openly say this is one of their aims. But what that means, if you stop to think about it, is that they can hack the admissions process: that they can take the very same kid and make him seem a more appealing candidate than he would if he went to the local public school.
Surely this applies to any school.
By sending your kid to any school rather than sitting them in front of junk TV you are improving their chances of getting into college. That doesn't prove that the system can be 'hacked', unless you class giving your child some form of education is 'hacking the system'.
The problem is that "wasted time" is too vague a statement.
If I were the kind of person to regret things, I'd look at the fact that I didn't take the chance at 18 to go round the world, which I'd find a lot more difficult now I'm in the rat race. I see this as time I wasted working, whereas some people might see a year going round the world as time wasted from "pursuing your ambition".
And I don't see an evening slobbing out in front of the TV as "wasted", if that's what I feel like doing.
To me, wasted time is any time that, looking back, you wish you'd spent in a different way to the way that you did spend it, and therefore it's almost tautological that you regret "wasted time", but it's almost impossible at the time to identify that you are wasting it.
Whereas one of the reasons that I bought a Sony camera last time was the fact that I had owned a Sony camera previously (which I managed to lose on the way to the airport) and therefore already had a collection of Memory Sticks (which I didn't lose). When I got to the airport, I had a choice of buying a Sony camera, or a non Sony camera and replacement Non-Memory stick cards.
I know the software folks here on/. always want to make excuses about 'its hard' and 'its to complicated', but, it's actually not hard, and not to complicated
It's not that it's too complex, it's that it's too costly for most applications. In a system where 1 bug can kill hundreds of people, it's OK to spend huge sums of money on processes, tools, people and time to deliver perfect software, but most people would not be prepared to spend vast amounts more for a version of Word (or whatever) that never crashed.
Sounds to me like an ideal candidate for a Firefox extension (if it doesn't exist already -couldn't be bothered to look), that indicates links with a NOFOLLOW tag differently (e.g., different colour, different cursor).
And the word "solutions" is certainly not just an IT thing. There's an occasional section in Private Eye (a UK satirical magazine) that features various "solutions". Last week there was one that went something along the lines of "Water Distribution Solutions", meaning hosepipes.
Indeed. Which is why I said "would not be" as opposed to "are/were".
There have been a fair amount of egalitarian systems in 'primative' societies, many of which have been reasonably successful until destroyed by more militaristic countries, but very little in the way of examples in the modern world.
The closest in recent history was probably Barcelona before the Fascist takeover.
This does not, however, change my view that communist ideals are positive and worth fighting for, and not a term of insult.
Real communist societies would not be controlled by 'an elite few. The idea of communism is that everything is owned by 'the community' for the common good.
People really do get fooled by branding. Just because the Soviet Union was run by something called the Communist Party did not mean that they were actually following communism theory, any more than the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) promoted Democracy.
If the state funded cab fare the same way it funds ego clubs...
Why the hell should the state (i.e., my tax) fund cab fares for someone else that want to drink?
How much will it cost the taxpayers just to process this guy for his DWI? Wouldn't it be cheaper for me to have offered, through the gov't, to pay his cab fare?
What a fatuous arguement.
For one thing, if you want to work it entirely on a cost basis, you'd have to factor in the total cost of paying for everyone that wants a taxi, not just the individual that's got caught. In my city alone, there are probably 10,000+ people out every Friday and Saturday drinking. Should we pay for the cost of getting each one a taxi (at your $100 estimate, that makes over $2,000,000 per week).
Secondly, does your arguement apply to theft? For people that steal stuff of a value less than the cost of the court case, would it not just have been cheaper to have offered them free money if they promised not to steal?
I'm no great lover of the legal establishment (much of the law is there to make sure that people who have power keep that power), but there are laws which are sensible, and drink-drive laws definitely fall into that category.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that the line between willfully ignoring all evidence that contradicted their beliefs (and there was plenty) in the "clear and present danger" of Iraq's WMD, while believing any and all evidence, however flaky, that supported their view when making statements/dossiers etc, and outright lying seems almost academic to me.
The defence that the government took us to war because it was incompetent/gullible doesn't make things an awful lot better, especially when they continually refuse to apologise or admit any personal culpability for their actions.
Isn't the simple answer to replace the mouse then? I use an old M$ mouse on my Mac and it works fine. There's the odd annoyance (the scroll wheel seems to go into overdrive rather easily, and I can't figure out how to get it to use the middle button to open a new tab in Firefox), but right mouse button context menus work fine.
Resizing windows on OS X is a real pain, because you can only do it by adjusting the lower-right corner.
Now I do agree with this - I've lost track of the amount of times that I double click on a title bar, expecting it maximise, only for it to disappear into the tray at the bottom, but that's possibly just because I've been used to Windows' way of working for so long.
The question that leaps to my mind is - were you consciously including yourself in your Self-Important Moron category by being highly opinionated about one particular subject area or do you feel that your random meanderings on the subject are justified by your profound and unique insight into it?
Just interested...
I should stop reading /. It makes me feel old. When I got my first home computer, the top of the range storage option was a 128K tape drive.
And I still remember the day at work when I got upgraded to the PC with the high density floppy drive that could store over 1MB, and I would no longer have to swap between the disk with the os/editor and the one with the compiler on.
I've had many electronic organisers for over 10 years now, from stand alone thing with single line displays, through various Psions/Palms/iPaqs, upgrading every 18-36 months as a new shinier/fancier device came out, and I pretty much can't live without them.
However, there's been nothing in the past few years in the PDA world that's offered any features (except size) that my second iPaq didn't have (or at least any that I would use). Instead, my last 2 organisers have both been phones (the Nokia 3650, and now the Orange Smartphone). This last one does everything that I need from an organiser (calendar, contacts, sync with Outlook at work, and at home etc), all in a v. small mobile phone.
This is the problem that stand alone PDAs have - most of their market has been eaten up by Smartphones.
The problem I have is that in theory, I'm in favour of (or maybe don't understand) software patents.
Consider this - you are a small software house and you've thrown large amounts of your (and the bank's) money into designing a smart new algorithm for e.g., the travelling salesman problem. The problem is, as soon as you launch your product, M$ (or someone similar) will reverse engineer your code, rip off your algorithm, stick it in their routing software and run you out of the market. This in theory is, as I understand it, what the patent system is there to protect.
The problem I have is that in practice, what actually gets patented seems to me to be the idea of doing something, rather than the specific details of how they will actually do it, leading to very vague and broad brush (or blatantly obvious/already invented) patents, and would be more along the lines of "An algorithm to work out the best distance between multiple locations", at which point any algorithm that did this would be covered.
For example, in this case, as far as I can tell from the patent text, it seems to be patenting the idea of displaying geographical locations for firewall intrusions rather than a clever new way of determining what is an intrusion or how to work out its location. If it were the latter, I'd probably support it.
I'm always interested by this idea that terrorism is largely stateless. There is nothing in either the meaning of, or the history of, terrorism that I've seen to back this up.
For instance, I would class a fair amount of the US's activities in Vietnam (and much of both Israel's and Palestine's current behaviour) as terrorism, as its much of its purpose was/is to instil terror into the population.
Also, I'm puzzled by your statement that the attacks you included were all "with the intent of targeting specifically civilians", yet you include the attacks on the USS Cole, and the Lebenon Marine Baracks.
I'll admit that the civilians killed in Iraq were (at least to my knowledge) not deliberately targetted in an attempt to induce fear (and therefore wouldn't be classed as terrorism), but in my view still counts as murder as a) I believe the invasion was neither legal nor justified, and b) little seemed to be done to limit (or even worry about) civilian casualties, and this indifference to the deaths of so many Iraqis has almost certainly been one of the contributing factors to the levels of resistance being seen there at the moment.
Neo-conservatives tend to be guided by the views of Leo Strauss, a right wing philosopher from the 50's - 60's, who believed that much of America's ills were a result of the increase in individual freedoms during this time, and the resulting lack of a shared set of morals and beliefs in society. His view was that it was OK to promote "white lies" in order to create these shared beliefs, such as creating a false enemy, the hatred/fear of whom could be used to introduce the legislation required to hold society together.
Interestingly, this is very close to the teachings of an Islamic sect (who's name escapes me at the moment) around the 9th Century, who believed that the Koran was not actually true (and even that Allah did not really exist), but its teachings were a very good way to run a society, and if belief in Allah was the best way to get the uneducated to follow these teachings then it was perfectly just to promote this belief.
Looks like the site's definitely spreading evil propaganda - there seems to be an ad for Windows XP at the top of the page :)
Do you want to include the 15,000+ civilians killed in Iraq as a result of the invasion?
Am I missing something (the article didn't really explain it well enough for me), or is this not simply a case of pattern recognition?
Presumably, at the early stages of its learning, it has to be told who won which game, or at least be given some way of knowing who the winner was.
Given that, is it not simply a case of 'computer sees image of hand A with 2 fingers up and hand B in the shape of a fist, and having previously been told that this image means a win for B, can deduce the same thing again.
Whenever (and wherever) I've been in the US, most people seem convinced that I'm either from Australia or New Zealand (which I'm not - I'm from the UK - East Midlands, and outside the US have never had my accent mistaken for an Aussie).
I get the feeling that most Americans seems to be able to distinguish between US and non-US accents, and that's about it.
But then, most Brits I know couldn't tell the difference between an Aussie or a Kiwi accent.
Depends on what type of system you're after, really.
It's fine for word processing systems (and I'd like to think that not too many companies think that building their own word processor is a sensible option, so that leaves buy v FLOSS), but there's not (for example) many FLOSS credit card management systems available out there.
Probably the only sort of area that I've come across where there's a realistic choice of any of the three options (buy v build v FLOSS) is content management tools.
At least I know what 'format' means :)
Surely this applies to any school.
By sending your kid to any school rather than sitting them in front of junk TV you are improving their chances of getting into college. That doesn't prove that the system can be 'hacked', unless you class giving your child some form of education is 'hacking the system'.
The problem is that "wasted time" is too vague a statement.
If I were the kind of person to regret things, I'd look at the fact that I didn't take the chance at 18 to go round the world, which I'd find a lot more difficult now I'm in the rat race. I see this as time I wasted working, whereas some people might see a year going round the world as time wasted from "pursuing your ambition".
And I don't see an evening slobbing out in front of the TV as "wasted", if that's what I feel like doing.
To me, wasted time is any time that, looking back, you wish you'd spent in a different way to the way that you did spend it, and therefore it's almost tautological that you regret "wasted time", but it's almost impossible at the time to identify that you are wasting it.
Whereas one of the reasons that I bought a Sony camera last time was the fact that I had owned a Sony camera previously (which I managed to lose on the way to the airport) and therefore already had a collection of Memory Sticks (which I didn't lose). When I got to the airport, I had a choice of buying a Sony camera, or a non Sony camera and replacement Non-Memory stick cards.
It's not that it's too complex, it's that it's too costly for most applications. In a system where 1 bug can kill hundreds of people, it's OK to spend huge sums of money on processes, tools, people and time to deliver perfect software, but most people would not be prepared to spend vast amounts more for a version of Word (or whatever) that never crashed.
Sounds to me like an ideal candidate for a Firefox extension (if it doesn't exist already -couldn't be bothered to look), that indicates links with a NOFOLLOW tag differently (e.g., different colour, different cursor).
Damn. I was hoping it was fibre made out of dark matter. That sounded much more interesting.
And the word "solutions" is certainly not just an IT thing. There's an occasional section in Private Eye (a UK satirical magazine) that features various "solutions". Last week there was one that went something along the lines of "Water Distribution Solutions", meaning hosepipes.
Indeed. Which is why I said "would not be" as opposed to "are/were".
There have been a fair amount of egalitarian systems in 'primative' societies, many of which have been reasonably successful until destroyed by more militaristic countries, but very little in the way of examples in the modern world.
The closest in recent history was probably Barcelona before the Fascist takeover.
This does not, however, change my view that communist ideals are positive and worth fighting for, and not a term of insult.
Real communist societies would not be controlled by 'an elite few. The idea of communism is that everything is owned by 'the community' for the common good.
People really do get fooled by branding. Just because the Soviet Union was run by something called the Communist Party did not mean that they were actually following communism theory, any more than the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) promoted Democracy.
Why the hell should the state (i.e., my tax) fund cab fares for someone else that want to drink?
How much will it cost the taxpayers just to process this guy for his DWI? Wouldn't it be cheaper for me to have offered, through the gov't, to pay his cab fare?
What a fatuous arguement.
For one thing, if you want to work it entirely on a cost basis, you'd have to factor in the total cost of paying for everyone that wants a taxi, not just the individual that's got caught. In my city alone, there are probably 10,000+ people out every Friday and Saturday drinking. Should we pay for the cost of getting each one a taxi (at your $100 estimate, that makes over $2,000,000 per week).
Secondly, does your arguement apply to theft? For people that steal stuff of a value less than the cost of the court case, would it not just have been cheaper to have offered them free money if they promised not to steal?
I'm no great lover of the legal establishment (much of the law is there to make sure that people who have power keep that power), but there are laws which are sensible, and drink-drive laws definitely fall into that category.
I've got to admit it did amuse me that it was down as Informative at one point yesterday (and, yes, it was meant to be funny).
Says something worrying about the moderation system...