that sends your SSN across the net *every time* (they use it for your login id). Yes, it's encrypted. No, I don't even trust 128-bit with a number any schmoe can dig up when that number is used ostensibly to protect my vital checking data. Credit card, fine, max loss, fifty bucks. Guaranteed. Multiply, in some cases. (If I use my Citibank Visa, it's triply so... the merchants I choose to use, Citibank, and fedgov. The former two even go so far as to say I get my fifty bucks back.)
But anyway, I thought that needed to be pointed out before anyone got goo-goo eyed at Wells Fargo and signed up where they wouldn't be comforable at some point down the road.
(What's so bad about sending SSN across the net? Get on Google and type "SSN FAQ" and pretend you feel lucky, even if you don't. Warning, you may get a bad taste in your mouth about Big Business before you're done reading. IMHO, You Should.)
Where, oh, where does the philosophy come from that an inanimate, nonsentient object, or the mere posession of same, is a crime? If I want to posess a Thompson submachine gun, and use it to waste a bunch of.45 ACP on coke bottles in somebody's back yard, or even just to drool over, I should be allowed to. If I want to, in the privacy and comfort of my own home, get all toked up on whatever happens to be the drug du jour, and fry my brains, that's my perogative. If I want to hide a camera in my smoke detector, and transmit it to a TV screen in the back of my car so I can see if the Feds are lying in wait for me, that's nobody's business but mine.
Don't get me wrong, if I take the Tommy and go shoot up the local high school, I should die like a dog in the dirt, t'hell with the trial, shoot on sight. If I get wasted and blindside some little old lady coming off a street corner, I should rot in some dungeon. If I stick that camera in the ladies' room of my workplace, I should get the bejeezus sued out of me. But the idea that I should get sent to San Quentin for merely HAVING these articles.... is severely fscked.
I'll tell you where the idea that an inanimate, or posession thereof, comes from. It comes from the same sick, twisted mindset that says "I'm not responsible for my actions; I have to have someone or something else on which to blame my state of being." And so guns commit crimes, houses commit crimes, little minicams go out and psychologically rape innocent women without any intervention whatesoever from homo induhvidualis.
What a crock.
-- "We cannot legislate against every stupid thing people will do." -- Jesse "The Mind" Ventura
somebody moderate that post up, Linux Device Drivers was invaluable in walking me thru my first, for real, production device driver with no more knowledge than C and an idea of how memory mapping works.... the book kicks some serious booty.
Then again, so does that bucking bronco on the front... not to mention the operating system it's written about. It's pretty fscking cool when you can write your first driver on your everyday werk box, making liberal use of insmod and rmmod, and only really freak it out three or four times over the course of six weeks' work.
Good luck on the device driver....
(lucky bastard... wish I had time to hack some more of those...)
If you browse with your threshold at 3 or 4, Slashdot only approaches the quality of a middlebrow professional magazine like Salon or Newsweek.
Exsqueeze me?
Newsweak only has circulation because so many PHB's are not members of the New Intelligensia, and thus such left-wing pablum appeals to them. Salon is even worse of a shill, basically the organ of the current administration, with a few loyal opposition articles thrown in to appease the watchdog groups. You want a good middlebrow magazine, pick up US News & World Report, or Playboy for Seldon's sake. (There really are some good articles in there... seriously.)
Yeah, yeah, flame me, shoot my karma to hell, it's way off in the weeds wrt the original topic.... but jeez-o-pete, Newsweek? Sorry, I just couldn't let that one get away.
Besides, (ObOnTopic) Slashdot is WAY better than Newsweek.
Ever see The Matrix? "They" (I won't spoil it for you) discovered that we wouldn't accept a utopia for a hallucination, that we had to have something more "real"... so, yeah, you would hallucinate being at work on Monday morning. Because it's what you expect.
Humans have a very strong sense of what to expect in this world. That's what makes comedy so easy, and yet so hard.... and what makes magick so much more difficult.
-- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -- Arthur C. Clarke
Jesse is the ultimate geek candidate, IMHO. He's hands-off, minimalistic, arrow-straight honest, and will get the government the hell out of where it doesn't belong. He's already hinted that if there were enough support, he would run. Not only that, he's the only man out there with enough grass-roots name recognition AND a decent platform.
As far as shaping the outcome of the 20th century, I have to say that not Marshall himself, but the fellow who gave him his marching orders (to begin with), FDR, was in large part responsible for where we are now.
Roosevelt was in the Oval Office for an unprecedented twelve-plus years. Under his leadership, the American military was transformed from something not quite second-rate but really no better than the Europeans or Asians, quietly transformed, into a lean, mean fighting machine capable of kicking Axis booty on three continents and two oceans at once... and that remained so, more or less, until the advent of Bill Clinton. Social Security, the income tax, and the alphabet agencies have transformed our intellectual landscape.... and in some cases (TVA) our physical landscape too. All of these things came about under the careful watching of the dude in the chair with the big cigarette holder. He also had the final say-so on the development of The Bomb (although you have to give credit to Harry for having the guts to use it) and for setting the overall strategy of the war (Germany First) that saved Britain's ass (yes, at the loss of her colonies, but she wouldn't have been able to take care of them anyway, and she did eventually return as a naval superpower, q.v. the Falklands) for us to use as a base from which to squash Hitler.... he was also responsible for not giving Patton his gasoline and allowing the Russians to occupy the Balkans.... oh, how THAT changed things.
And the whole liberal political role model....
Ad infinitum, nauseumque...
For better or for worse, the one man who has had the most far-reaching influence in the years 1900-1999:
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President of the United States of America 1932-April, 1944.
I think Bob Young has to go at the top of my list. Having watched the CEO of a former employer go thru the IPO process, I learned it's one of the hardest things you can do to yourself.... without having to dodge Mindcraft, Caldera's Lizard, hordes of "yet another Microsoft" detractors, and getting away with putting the GPL into his initial SEC filing... all of which he did and still emerged with flying colors.... and worth how many zillion bucks? With which he promptly buys Cygnus, one of the more brilliant moves I've seen in the market at large. One gcc to compile them all, and in the darkness bind them.:)
Second would be ESR, for this reason: The man is now worth more than most of us will gross in a lifetime, and he hasn't (so far) let it get to him. I kowtow to his superior Zen.
Then there's Linus, of course. The man is unflappable, affable, utterly straight-shooting, and besides taking us from 2.2.pre to 2.4.pre in the space of a year and somewhat of an orderly fashion, there's Crusoe, whatever that is, but if he's hacking on it it's going to be ubercool (and may make him Man of the Year next year).
I got one more dude that's probably going to get cheers on one side and jeers on the other... but for the mainstream, this guy has caused more waves, IMHO in a positive direction, than any other single person, at least from my Americentric viewpoint.
Jesse "the Governor" Ventura.
So there it is. Flame away.
"We cannot legislate against all of the stupid things people will do." -- The Governor
As for beset by problems: okay, the focus thing when it first went up was unortunate and expensive, but since then, its problems were those of any satellite with a shitload of different technologies aboard. Its original aim -- to spot extra solor planets -- has never been achieved, but it's been a stunning success in every other regard.
True.... most of which the general public never sees. The primary purpose of that big 'scope was to do research in the infared and ultraviolet and radio frequency realms, things which don't need that big mirror with its "contact lens" to work right. Hubble started sending good science within a couple of weeks of finishing outgassing, before they even planned a mission to "fix" it. The visual-spectrum lens system is just there to send back pretty pictures and make the public go "ooh" and "ahhh" and "vote for this, mister congressman." It serves little scientific value.
Is it really worth it? Hafta ask somebody else, I was just the sysadm for a sister project when the thing went up. Didn't stick around for the results.
Glenn Stone former Data Validation system administrator NASA UARS (Georgia Tech) now under contract to another fine airplane company in the Seattle area
When Jeff went to expand into electronics and all that other stuff, some of us here on./ wondered if he wasn't getting Bill Gates-itis. Here in the last few weeks those same people have been proven right with the Barnes and Noble fiasco.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, Time Warner is an organization which is about the kind of power that Bill Gates wields, only more subtly and more pervasively.... the same kind of power that Jeff Bezos aspires to. Time Warner, if you remember, was the one who, seeing Ted Turner as a threat to their empire, simply bought him out.... and turned CNN from the best damn news outfit on the planet into just yet another media shill for Big Brother.
And now they promote Jeff Bezos, a man who turned out to be one of their own. No, I don't think he's on a par with Hitler; neither is Bill Gates, for that matter. I do think, however, that both men engage in some extremely slimy business practices, beyond illegal and into the just plain ethically wrong, and that both men's empires deserve to be brought low, if not by the courts, then by the power of the people voting with their feet.
There are alternatives, folks. Use'em.
Taco, put your money where your mouth is. Get rid of the Amazon box. (does the damn thing REALLY generate that much revenue?) And tell Jeff why. This madness has got to stop, here, now, and by our hands. If not now, when? If not us, who?
Now that they own StarOffice, is this move an indication of things to come. IE. will future versions of StarOffice only run on SUN's Java VM?
Bingo. Not that this idea is anything new; we Slashdotters predicted Sun would yank StarOffice as a regular binary as soon as the Java version hit beta.
Now, the next thing to come down the pike will be that the latest-greatest-snazziest JVM will only run on Sparc hardware.... and Scott's conversion to the Dark Side of the Force will be complete. Only problem is, unlike Bill, Scott's platform actually runs on 64-bit architecture... this boy is going to be our scourge well into the 21st century. *sigh*
ABIWord is looking better and better.
...or at this point even Word Perfect, not to mention Applixware.... I would rather pay good money (and with these two apps, not a whole hell of a lot) for a proprietary product I knew was going to be supported in five years, than download a freebie knowing that Idiot down there in Mountain View was going to pull the rug out from under me just as soon as he thought he could get away with it....
Ah, well. Vote with your feet.
So it's off topic, a little. If you got the points, use'em. If you don't, well, that's just too bad, isn't it?
No, no, no. It's not flamebait because it's unpopular. It's flamebait because it's not true. Sanity said the reason Linux viri don't exist is goodwill towards the OS. I'm surprised some wag didn't give the post a "funny". Go read at -1 and see how many Windows junkies there really are... they HATE Linux with a passion. (I think they're damned fools, but that's not the point. They exist.) No. Read Tom's article. Penguinheads are by and large way too clued to let a rogue Perl script get very far. (Hell, yes, I read'em...) Besides, Open Source has this peer review thang going on, which doesn't exist in closed OS communities. The first time some idiot tried to slip such a thing in on us, he may as well have a one-way ticket to Bulgaria, because we're liable to chase him there... or at least make sure he never got anything other than an AOL account ever again.
But anyway, the whole point is anyone with half a clue about Linux knows that goodwill doesn't prevent viruses. He's either stupid... or he's trolling. Either way, -1 for him. And kid(s)... get the damn OS for yourself before you carp on it... it's OTTMCO you haven't a clue about the way things work.
This should, and usually does, come from the home, but in today's America that is far from assured. Is it the place of public schools to provide that support? Outside institutions?
Well, the public schools surely aren't going to do it; I think we've established that. So it's going to have to be us, i.e. outside institutions. And despite us geeks being made of sterner stuff, there are limits to our patience.... so said outside institution needs to provide some recourse to getting out of an intolerable situation, and not just moral support. No, I haven't figured out precisely what, yet.
Nevermind the fact that the real root cause is that Mommy has to work to pay the taxes and has neither time nor energy to give the love that should be there.... that's not going to change anytime soon. Though part of our effort should be in support of stay-at-home parenthood, to help prevent future problems, we're going to have to support the poor blighters that are out there now first and foremost...
Hmmmm. Maybe if we privatized the schools.... after all, it does say Provide for the Common Defense and Promote the General Welfare, not the other way 'round....
Bottom line is that I have no problem with this "profiling" you whine about Jon. But I wish they would concentrate more on what to do with the kids once they find them. It comes down to love. And no one in our society is ready to make that kind of commitment.
Love is a strong word there, to require of a social contract. But I have to agree with the previous poster... it's not that these kids need locking up. They don't. They need to be shown that somebody who can do something gives a damn.
Hmmm. Perhaps it is that those that should really be profiled are the bullies themselves? But the bright ones that get ostracised are going to need help too, in a totally different manner... lest they get bored, and their minds wander to other things...
OTOH, I'm not going to trust any kid of mine to any government school anytime soon.... so there.
-- Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. -- Susan Ivanova
I'm a consultant. I get a base salary with bennies pretty much as if I were working for the company I'm working with, probably actually a little better in some respects (training, etc.). If I work OT, I have an option: I can get it as comp time, bonus pay (at my nominal hourly rate) or 50/50. If I end up in the lurch between assignments, I'm still covered. If I want to relocate across the country, I can do that. If I want to make a career change, I can do that, all managed by the consulting company.
No, I'm not the fscking recruiter. I'm just real damn happy with my situation... yes, you can email me and ask.
There's a very simple reason why NT is poised to Die The Real Death: 64-bit chips. NT does NOT run real well on them, if at all. Linux already runs (well!) on Sparc-64, Itanium, and 64-bit Alpha. NT *might* run like molasses on Itanium sometime this century.
NT/Win2k may linger quite a number of years on the desktop, as long as they still make 32-bit chips and feature bloat doesn't make things totally unusable. But as the XFree desktop(s) mature and Linux and NetBSD are ported to more and more chipsets, the boys from Redmond will either have a major paradigm shift, or cease to exist. Neither of these can happen very fast... but one or the other will happen, and NT as we know it will cease to exist before it's all over.
You heard it here first.
taliesin at speakeasy.org (I gotta change that...)
Re:Hey world! George Lucas uses advertising! Get '
on
Dear Mr. Lucas
·
· Score: 1
.... and furthermore [Brin] has the cojones to say that Steven Spielberg *does* have the right to preach at us... HA! Lest we forget, the Man in the Red Baseball Cap is the same gent who guaranteed Bill Clinton a cushy SoCal estate come Jan 20, 2001. Neither induhvidual has any right to even pronounce the word "moral" and expect us to pay attention.
Lucas, however, is the one using his own money, sticking to principles, and telling both Hollyweird and the politicians to put it where the sun don't shine. Preachy? Perhaps. These days the sheeple could use a little preachy, IMNSHO, and I can think of about two people who have the talent to do it right.
The other dude's name is Straczinsky.... but that's a whole 'nother can of worms.
We are Grey. We stand between the Candle, and the Star.
A long time ago I ran across the ancient Zen koan, If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him. It took me a long time to figure out what that means. It is this:
Whenever you see someone advertising the One True Way of living your life, and There Are No Others, kill him! Or at least run like hell, because the inDUHvidual is a damned liar. The real Buddha will take you some digging to find, and can usually be identified by a catchphrase something along the lines of "think for yourself, schmuck!"
Or, as another ancient Oriental religion puts it, the Tao that can be explained, is not the true Tao.
It is left as an exercise to the reader as to why Co$ fits this paradigm, and wherein.
taliesin (at speakeasy.org, the above email is obselete) "All paths are sacred." -- Lord Serphant
Interesting, I hadn't heard that the bet applied to both gentlemen. I would not be surprised if it were true.... IMHO Heinlein did a much better job of it; the curious should poke around in better and more interesting bookstores for a magazine called Green Egg....
Better use it carefully, or it could change your life....
That those victimized lash out and create victims anew is probably the most tragic flaw in human nature the world has ever known. It's awful to see innocent children die; it's more awful to see innocent children losing their innocence by culling their herds in an act of retribution. That intolerance and unjustified hate was both denounced and practiced by the same mob scares me more than the acts of two deluded students.
Spot on, sir.
The very people who are being victimized, ignored, and abused by the idiots(*) that run the Imperial Federal School System are about to be victimized again, cast out of society altogether, by those same idiots running a computer. Garbage in, Garbage out.
Let's take this a step further, and ask, Why?
Why would fedgov and its minions want to ostracise the Smart People, remove them from society and cast them into some vast Down Below?
(1) to make it easier to indoctrinate the sheeple that are left?
(2) to remove the geeks' easy access to the Net, which is their source of power, their way to be heard?
And no, I think the assumption that computer profiling is a Bad Thing in general is a safe one; just try to go buy an airline ticket with cash sometime. Particularly if your name is Rodriguez or Al-Shabaar.
(*) As for my assertion that the school system is run by idiots, the latest stats out of Princeton, the folks who give the SAT and the GRE, indicated that folks who indicated they were going into Education scored at the bottom of the heap among majors, even below General Studies. (Engineers were at the top, followed by us CS geeks.) Maybe it doesn't fit the technical definition, but I gua-ron-tee your average Slashdotter could run logical circles around your run of the mill high school teacher...
I'm sorry, for all the fun and profit we get from these silicon hearted beasts, it is a bad idea to let them be the judge of us, just on principle. Don't care how good it is, not only will somebody eventually fall thru the cracks, but it will lull parents into a false sense of security and make their abandonment of parental responsibility nearly complete. And those are the things that WILL happen even if not one single solitary soul gets mis-labelled by this thing.
The Jews have a saying that was formed in the hell that was the Holocaust: Never Again. I suggest we join them in the spirit of that saying, and study up on our early 20th century history, lest we repeat it Real Soon Now. Like in about two months.
And before you flame me as alarmist, anal retentive, or just plain out in left field, go study the material, and know whereof you speak. The truth will set you free.
ObConstructiveIdea: Get your kids OUT of the public indoctrination facilities. Move to a place where you can afford to either teach them yourself or have them schooled privately. See to it that they have the best education you can get them... it's too late for us, our generation, to fix what ails the current American society. The best we can do is fight a holding action and allow the Old Guard to die off, and our children to carry the torch forward. Instill in them a love for Truth, Justice, and the old-fashioned American Way as Jefferson et al originally envisioned it, accepting those who are Different Than Us, and the importance of passing that heritage on, and eventually, gods willing, this country will survive.
If we don't, I wouldn't give a fig for our future in fifty years.
o/~ we won't wait any longer / we are stronger than before o/~
[in SCSL]...
5. you aren't allowed to try to do "embrace and extinguish," changing APIs and trying to hijack the stuff away from the community. this requires you to keep new "platform" APIs open to the community. note that linux, etc. don't have this provision, so are more "hijackable" by you-know-who extending stuff to be proprietary.
EXSQUEEZE ME?! The GPL does so require that any code mods be returned to the community; it's the "virus" quality that we all know and love. M$ could no more "hijack" Linux or anything Gnu than I could hijack Coke by adding vanilla syrup to it and selling it at a roadside stand. I can't protect my new concoction because Coke owns the rights to its cola drink; more than that, if it was Gnu Coke, I'd have to give out the ingredients in my vanilla syrup! (Unless, of course, Gnu Coke was LGPL'ed, but we won't go down that road.)
I have to wonder if the poor man has even read the GPL all the way thru.
Sun makes two mistakes here. 1) Using legalese rather than respect to command leadership of the project, and 2) using Microsoft marketing tactics on folks whose bovine scatology detectors are stabilized double front.
Neither works.
I'm with the above poster. Bill Joy (and Scott his boss) should be subjected to Barney, the Teletubbies, and Cartoon Cartoon until they kowtow to the Great Penguin and agrees to open up Solaris and all the goodies that go with it, particularly Veritas....they're either clueless or outright lying, and I'm not sure which is worse.
(do I really need to put the ballyhoo about Coke being a registered trademark of a certain Atlanta-based soda company? Y'all are smart, you already know that.)
My wife had tried everything *except* surgery and steroids, and was at the point of retiring at the ripe old age of 23, when I prodded her into going to see a well-known OMD here in Atlanta. The night before the appointment, she could barely hold a fork. When I got home the next day, she looked at me with a smile, demonstrated a full range of motion, and said "Look, they work!" This after about 40 needles worth of acupuncture and a prescription for what we jokingly called "nuclear swamp in a cup" (foul-tasting but effective Chinese herbs). The Chinese have been practicing holistic medicine for 6,000 years, they know what they're up to.
2) Cat's Paw The previous poster mentioned using a rubber band to create resistance in the opposite direction and thus create balancing exercise for your hands. There is a product designed for just that, it's called the Cat's Paw. It's this little piece of neoprene rubber with holes in it, and you stick your fingers in it and make a motion like a cat kneading its paws, only you're pushing out instead of in. I never could get into the bloody thing myself, but the dude that invented it has references from a plethora of Big Corporations (like Lockheed and Mariott) that swear by the thing. For fifteen bucks it's worth a try, lots cheaper than surgery. http://www.catspaw.com for details.
But yeah, please, leave the knife guys to stuff they really understand, like knees and appendices.
Yes, yes, yes, but then you have to keep the corporation up to date with Delaware, and have someone qualified to represent you there on retainer, and yadda yadda yadda.... it rather increases the complexity by an order of magnitude. It's not perfect, but then what is? It's a deterrent to the kiddies who think they can make easy money and not have to have a lawyer or CPA.
What? I'm denying access to the "little guy"? Hey, chump, you've got your one domain. Use it wisely.
-- Nothing truly worth having in life is ever easy.
Slashdot Mirror
But anyway, I thought that needed to be pointed out before anyone got goo-goo eyed at Wells Fargo and signed up where they wouldn't be comforable at some point down the road.
(What's so bad about sending SSN across the net? Get on Google and type "SSN FAQ" and pretend you feel lucky, even if you don't. Warning, you may get a bad taste in your mouth about Big Business before you're done reading. IMHO, You Should.)
Where, oh, where does the philosophy come from that an inanimate, nonsentient object, or the mere posession of same, is a crime? If I want to posess a Thompson submachine gun, and use it to waste a bunch of .45 ACP on coke bottles in somebody's back yard, or even just to drool over, I should be allowed to. If I want to, in the privacy and comfort of my own home, get all toked up on whatever happens to be the drug du jour, and fry my brains, that's my perogative. If I want to hide a camera in my smoke detector, and transmit it to a TV screen in the back of my car so I can see if the Feds are lying in wait for me, that's nobody's business but mine.
Don't get me wrong, if I take the Tommy and go shoot up the local high school, I should die like a dog in the dirt, t'hell with the trial, shoot on sight. If I get wasted and blindside some little old lady coming off a street corner, I should rot in some dungeon. If I stick that camera in the ladies' room of my workplace, I should get the bejeezus sued out of me. But the idea that I should get sent to San Quentin for merely HAVING these articles.... is severely fscked.
I'll tell you where the idea that an inanimate, or posession thereof, comes from. It comes from the same sick, twisted mindset that says "I'm not responsible for my actions; I have to have someone or something else on which to blame my state of being." And so guns commit crimes, houses commit crimes, little minicams go out and psychologically rape innocent women without any intervention whatesoever from homo induhvidualis.
What a crock.
--
"We cannot legislate against every stupid thing people will do." -- Jesse "The Mind" Ventura
somebody moderate that post up, Linux Device Drivers was invaluable in walking me thru my first, for real, production device driver with no more knowledge than C and an idea of how memory mapping works.... the book kicks some serious booty.
Then again, so does that bucking bronco on the front... not to mention the operating system it's written about. It's pretty fscking cool when you can write your first driver on your everyday werk box, making liberal use of insmod and rmmod, and only really freak it out three or four times over the course of six weeks' work.
Good luck on the device driver....
(lucky bastard... wish I had time to hack some more of those...)
Newsweak only has circulation because so many PHB's are not members of the New Intelligensia, and thus such left-wing pablum appeals to them. Salon is even worse of a shill, basically the organ of the current administration, with a few loyal opposition articles thrown in to appease the watchdog groups. You want a good middlebrow magazine, pick up US News & World Report, or Playboy for Seldon's sake. (There really are some good articles in there... seriously.)
Yeah, yeah, flame me, shoot my karma to hell, it's way off in the weeds wrt the original topic.... but jeez-o-pete, Newsweek? Sorry, I just couldn't let that one get away.
Besides, (ObOnTopic) Slashdot is WAY better than Newsweek.
Ever see The Matrix? "They" (I won't spoil it for you) discovered that we wouldn't accept a utopia for a hallucination, that we had to have something more "real"... so, yeah, you would hallucinate being at work on Monday morning. Because it's what you expect.
Humans have a very strong sense of what to expect in this world. That's what makes comedy so easy, and yet so hard.... and what makes magick so much more difficult.
--
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -- Arthur C. Clarke
Jesse is the ultimate geek candidate, IMHO. He's hands-off, minimalistic, arrow-straight honest, and will get the government the hell out of where it doesn't belong. He's already hinted that if there were enough support, he would run. Not only that, he's the only man out there with enough grass-roots name recognition AND a decent platform.
IMHO.
As far as shaping the outcome of the 20th century, I have to say that not Marshall himself, but the fellow who gave him his marching orders (to begin with), FDR, was in large part responsible for where we are now.
Roosevelt was in the Oval Office for an unprecedented twelve-plus years. Under his leadership, the American military was transformed from something not quite second-rate but really no better than the Europeans or Asians, quietly transformed, into a lean, mean fighting machine capable of kicking Axis booty on three continents and two oceans at once... and that remained so, more or less, until the advent of Bill Clinton. Social Security, the income tax, and the alphabet agencies have transformed our intellectual landscape.... and in some cases (TVA) our physical landscape too. All of these things came about under the careful watching of the dude in the chair with the big cigarette holder. He also had the final say-so on the development of The Bomb (although you have to give credit to Harry for having the guts to use it) and for setting the overall strategy of the war (Germany First) that saved Britain's ass (yes, at the loss of her colonies, but she wouldn't have been able to take care of them anyway, and she did eventually return as a naval superpower, q.v. the Falklands) for us to use as a base from which to squash Hitler.... he was also responsible for not giving Patton his gasoline and allowing the Russians to occupy the Balkans.... oh, how THAT changed things.
And the whole liberal political role model....
Ad infinitum, nauseumque...
For better or for worse, the one man who has had the most far-reaching influence in the years 1900-1999:
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President of the United States of America 1932-April, 1944.
I think Bob Young has to go at the top of my list. Having watched the CEO of a former employer go thru the IPO process, I learned it's one of the hardest things you can do to yourself.... without having to dodge Mindcraft, Caldera's Lizard, hordes of "yet another Microsoft" detractors, and getting away with putting the GPL into his initial SEC filing... all of which he did and still emerged with flying colors.... and worth how many zillion bucks? With which he promptly buys Cygnus, one of the more brilliant moves I've seen in the market at large. One gcc to compile them all, and in the darkness bind them. :)
Second would be ESR, for this reason: The man is now worth more than most of us will gross in a lifetime, and he hasn't (so far) let it get to him. I kowtow to his superior Zen.
Then there's Linus, of course. The man is unflappable, affable, utterly straight-shooting, and besides taking us from 2.2.pre to 2.4.pre in the space of a year and somewhat of an orderly fashion, there's Crusoe, whatever that is, but if he's hacking on it it's going to be ubercool (and may make him Man of the Year next year).
I got one more dude that's probably going to get cheers on one side and jeers on the other... but for the mainstream, this guy has caused more waves, IMHO in a positive direction, than any other single person, at least from my Americentric viewpoint.
Jesse "the Governor" Ventura.
So there it is. Flame away.
"We cannot legislate against all of the stupid things people will do." -- The Governor
Is it really worth it? Hafta ask somebody else, I was just the sysadm for a sister project when the thing went up. Didn't stick around for the results.
Glenn Stone
former Data Validation system administrator
NASA UARS (Georgia Tech)
now under contract to another fine airplane company in the Seattle area
When Jeff went to expand into electronics and all that other stuff, some of us here on ./ wondered if he wasn't getting Bill Gates-itis. Here in the last few weeks those same people have been proven right with the Barnes and Noble fiasco.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, Time Warner is an organization which is about the kind of power that Bill Gates wields, only more subtly and more pervasively.... the same kind of power that Jeff Bezos aspires to. Time Warner, if you remember, was the one who, seeing Ted Turner as a threat to their empire, simply bought him out.... and turned CNN from the best damn news outfit on the planet into just yet another media shill for Big Brother.
And now they promote Jeff Bezos, a man who turned out to be one of their own. No, I don't think he's on a par with Hitler; neither is Bill Gates, for that matter. I do think, however, that both men engage in some extremely slimy business practices, beyond illegal and into the just plain ethically wrong, and that both men's empires deserve to be brought low, if not by the courts, then by the power of the people voting with their feet.
There are alternatives, folks. Use'em.
Taco, put your money where your mouth is. Get rid of the Amazon box. (does the damn thing REALLY generate that much revenue?) And tell Jeff why. This madness has got to stop, here, now, and by our hands. If not now, when? If not us, who?
Delenda est Amazon.
Now, the next thing to come down the pike will be that the latest-greatest-snazziest JVM will only run on Sparc hardware.... and Scott's conversion to the Dark Side of the Force will be complete. Only problem is, unlike Bill, Scott's platform actually runs on 64-bit architecture... this boy is going to be our scourge well into the 21st century. *sigh*...or at this point even Word Perfect, not to mention Applixware.... I would rather pay good money (and with these two apps, not a whole hell of a lot) for a proprietary product I knew was going to be supported in five years, than download a freebie knowing that Idiot down there in Mountain View was going to pull the rug out from under me just as soon as he thought he could get away with it....
Ah, well. Vote with your feet.
So it's off topic, a little. If you got the points, use'em. If you don't, well, that's just too bad, isn't it?
No, no, no. It's not flamebait because it's unpopular. It's flamebait because it's not true. Sanity said the reason Linux viri don't exist is goodwill towards the OS. I'm surprised some wag didn't give the post a "funny". Go read at -1 and see how many Windows junkies there really are... they HATE Linux with a passion. (I think they're damned fools, but that's not the point. They exist.) No. Read Tom's article. Penguinheads are by and large way too clued to let a rogue Perl script get very far. (Hell, yes, I read'em...) Besides, Open Source has this peer review thang going on, which doesn't exist in closed OS communities. The first time some idiot tried to slip such a thing in on us, he may as well have a one-way ticket to Bulgaria, because we're liable to chase him there... or at least make sure he never got anything other than an AOL account ever again.
But anyway, the whole point is anyone with half a clue about Linux knows that goodwill doesn't prevent viruses. He's either stupid... or he's trolling. Either way, -1 for him. And kid(s)... get the damn OS for yourself before you carp on it... it's OTTMCO you haven't a clue about the way things work.
Ye Olde Curmudgeon
not-quite-"Old Fart"
Nevermind the fact that the real root cause is that Mommy has to work to pay the taxes and has neither time nor energy to give the love that should be there.... that's not going to change anytime soon. Though part of our effort should be in support of stay-at-home parenthood, to help prevent future problems, we're going to have to support the poor blighters that are out there now first and foremost...
Hmmmm. Maybe if we privatized the schools.... after all, it does say Provide for the Common Defense and Promote the General Welfare, not the other way 'round....
dare I open that can of worms?
Hmmm. Perhaps it is that those that should really be profiled are the bullies themselves? But the bright ones that get ostracised are going to need help too, in a totally different manner... lest they get bored, and their minds wander to other things...
OTOH, I'm not going to trust any kid of mine to any government school anytime soon.... so there.
--
Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. -- Susan Ivanova
There is a better way.
I'm a consultant. I get a base salary with bennies pretty much as if I were working for the company I'm working with, probably actually a little better in some respects (training, etc.). If I work OT, I have an option: I can get it as comp time, bonus pay (at my nominal hourly rate) or 50/50. If I end up in the lurch between assignments, I'm still covered. If I want to relocate across the country, I can do that. If I want to make a career change, I can do that, all managed by the consulting company.
No, I'm not the fscking recruiter. I'm just real damn happy with my situation... yes, you can email me and ask.
There's a very simple reason why NT is poised to Die The Real Death: 64-bit chips. NT does NOT run real well on them, if at all. Linux already runs (well!) on Sparc-64, Itanium, and 64-bit Alpha. NT *might* run like molasses on Itanium sometime this century.
NT/Win2k may linger quite a number of years on the desktop, as long as they still make 32-bit chips and feature bloat doesn't make things totally unusable. But as the XFree desktop(s) mature and Linux and NetBSD are ported to more and more chipsets, the boys from Redmond will either have a major paradigm shift, or cease to exist. Neither of these can happen very fast... but one or the other will happen, and NT as we know it will cease to exist before it's all over.
You heard it here first.
taliesin at speakeasy.org (I gotta change that...)
.... and furthermore [Brin] has the cojones to say that Steven Spielberg *does* have the right to preach at us... HA! Lest we forget, the Man in the Red Baseball Cap is the same gent who guaranteed Bill Clinton a cushy SoCal estate come Jan 20, 2001. Neither induhvidual has any right to even pronounce the word "moral" and expect us to pay attention.
Lucas, however, is the one using his own money, sticking to principles, and telling both Hollyweird and the politicians to put it where the sun don't shine. Preachy? Perhaps. These days the sheeple could use a little preachy, IMNSHO, and I can think of about two people who have the talent to do it right.
The other dude's name is Straczinsky.... but that's a whole 'nother can of worms.
We are Grey. We stand between the Candle, and the Star.
A long time ago I ran across the ancient Zen koan, If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him. It took me a long time to figure out what that means. It is this:
Whenever you see someone advertising the One True Way of living your life, and There Are No Others, kill him! Or at least run like hell, because the inDUHvidual is a damned liar. The real Buddha will take you some digging to find, and can usually be identified by a catchphrase something along the lines of "think for yourself, schmuck!"
Or, as another ancient Oriental religion puts it, the Tao that can be explained, is not the true Tao.
It is left as an exercise to the reader as to why Co$ fits this paradigm, and wherein.
taliesin (at speakeasy.org, the above email is obselete)
"All paths are sacred." -- Lord Serphant
Interesting, I hadn't heard that the bet applied to both gentlemen. I would not be surprised if it were true.... IMHO Heinlein did a much better job of it; the curious should poke around in better and more interesting bookstores for a magazine called Green Egg....
Better use it carefully, or it could change your life....
The very people who are being victimized, ignored, and abused by the idiots(*) that run the Imperial Federal School System are about to be victimized again, cast out of society altogether, by those same idiots running a computer. Garbage in, Garbage out.
Let's take this a step further, and ask, Why?
Why would fedgov and its minions want to ostracise the Smart People, remove them from society and cast them into some vast Down Below?
(1) to make it easier to indoctrinate the sheeple that are left?
(2) to remove the geeks' easy access to the Net, which is their source of power, their way to be heard?
And no, I think the assumption that computer profiling is a Bad Thing in general is a safe one; just try to go buy an airline ticket with cash sometime. Particularly if your name is Rodriguez or Al-Shabaar.
(*) As for my assertion that the school system is run by idiots, the latest stats out of Princeton, the folks who give the SAT and the GRE, indicated that folks who indicated they were going into Education scored at the bottom of the heap among majors, even below General Studies. (Engineers were at the top, followed by us CS geeks.) Maybe it doesn't fit the technical definition, but I gua-ron-tee your average Slashdotter could run logical circles around your run of the mill high school teacher...
I'm sorry, for all the fun and profit we get from these silicon hearted beasts, it is a bad idea to let them be the judge of us, just on principle. Don't care how good it is, not only will somebody eventually fall thru the cracks, but it will lull parents into a false sense of security and make their abandonment of parental responsibility nearly complete. And those are the things that WILL happen even if not one single solitary soul gets mis-labelled by this thing.
The Jews have a saying that was formed in the hell that was the Holocaust: Never Again. I suggest we join them in the spirit of that saying, and study up on our early 20th century history, lest we repeat it Real Soon Now. Like in about two months.
And before you flame me as alarmist, anal retentive, or just plain out in left field, go study the material, and know whereof you speak. The truth will set you free.
ObConstructiveIdea: Get your kids OUT of the public indoctrination facilities. Move to a place where you can afford to either teach them yourself or have them schooled privately. See to it that they have the best education you can get them... it's too late for us, our generation, to fix what ails the current American society. The best we can do is fight a holding action and allow the Old Guard to die off, and our children to carry the torch forward. Instill in them a love for Truth, Justice, and the old-fashioned American Way as Jefferson et al originally envisioned it, accepting those who are Different Than Us, and the importance of passing that heritage on, and eventually, gods willing, this country will survive.
If we don't, I wouldn't give a fig for our future in fifty years.
o/~ we won't wait any longer / we are stronger than before o/~
I have to wonder if the poor man has even read the GPL all the way thru.
Sun makes two mistakes here. 1) Using legalese rather than respect to command leadership of the project, and 2) using Microsoft marketing tactics on folks whose bovine scatology detectors are stabilized double front.
Neither works.
I'm with the above poster. Bill Joy (and Scott his boss) should be subjected to Barney, the Teletubbies, and Cartoon Cartoon until they kowtow to the Great Penguin and agrees to open up Solaris and all the goodies that go with it, particularly Veritas....they're either clueless or outright lying, and I'm not sure which is worse.
(do I really need to put the ballyhoo about Coke being a registered trademark of a certain Atlanta-based soda company? Y'all are smart, you already know that.)
Hmm, we may have to put this to a vote....
Two alternatives:
1) Chinese medicine.
My wife had tried everything *except* surgery and steroids, and was at the point of retiring at the ripe old age of 23, when I prodded her into going to see a well-known OMD here in Atlanta. The night before the appointment, she could barely hold a fork. When I got home the next day, she looked at me with a smile, demonstrated a full range of motion, and said "Look, they work!" This after about 40 needles worth of acupuncture and a prescription for what we jokingly called "nuclear swamp in a cup" (foul-tasting but effective Chinese herbs). The Chinese have been practicing holistic medicine for 6,000 years, they know what they're up to.
2) Cat's Paw
The previous poster mentioned using a rubber band to create resistance in the opposite direction and thus create balancing exercise for your hands. There is a product designed for just that, it's called the Cat's Paw. It's this little piece of neoprene rubber with holes in it, and you stick your fingers in it and make a motion like a cat kneading its paws, only you're pushing out instead of in. I never could get into the bloody thing myself, but the dude that invented it has references from a plethora of Big Corporations (like Lockheed and Mariott) that swear by the thing. For fifteen bucks it's worth a try, lots cheaper than surgery. http://www.catspaw.com for details.
But yeah, please, leave the knife guys to stuff they really understand, like knees and appendices.
Now, if we added both Torvalds and Who, *that* might be interesting. Timelord vs. Linux god. Hmmm. I think it would be close. Fun, anyway.
--
Do not meddle in the affairs of the BOFH,
for can nuke your accou~({{NO CARRIER
[easy incorporation]
Yes, yes, yes, but then you have to keep the corporation up to date with Delaware, and have someone qualified to represent you there on retainer, and yadda yadda yadda.... it rather increases the complexity by an order of magnitude. It's not perfect, but then what is? It's a deterrent to the kiddies who think they can make easy money and not have to have a lawyer or CPA.
What? I'm denying access to the "little guy"? Hey, chump, you've got your one domain. Use it wisely.
--
Nothing truly worth having in life is ever easy.