Simply saying "I'm an American, I should have priority" doesn't work
Actually, that is exactly how immigation law works. Immiganats from western Europe can only come to the State if they can find a job that cannot be filled by a US Citizen. The Job must be advertised for a period of one year without a satifactory applicant being found.
You are right that he stated he tried several bleeding edge releases, stability doesn't seem to be the sore point. It looks like he stopped using the unstable releases, but he tried them in search of hardware support. If you've just bought a scanner or CD burner, and your current distro doesn't support it, one tends to go searching for one that does.
I think this article was very well written, and all his points are valid. I'm a software engineer, and I don't have time to screw around with configuring Linux either.
The MacOS looks sweet, and it's merger with Unix is brillant. Its major drawback is that it's locked onto a proprietry hardware platform. If Hell froze over, and a OS X release came out for WinTel (WinAMD), Apple might make a lot more converts. However, it would appear selling hardware is more lucrative than selling software.
Sorry, I gotta go. The eye of Bill Gates is eyeing me via the XP desktop. Must resist slipping the ring onto my finger.
Because without electricity, telephones, and motorized transport, our civilization would collapse. This collapse would result in the deaths of approximately 5 billion people. Everyone, either directly or indirectly, relies upon these technological advacements. Sure, people can survive without them, but without them, society cannot scale to what it is today.
Now, as to cell phones, they are not a necesity (sp). They can be helpful, useful, and even life saving. The demise of the cell phone would not cause the collapse of our world. It would mean a few people would die, others would be bancrupt, and others wouldn't be able to check movie times from a restaurnt after a tastey meal.
I agree that some grade-A bad planning has been occuring in Britain on its rail systems, this last decade; however, we should not forget that we built one of the first, and one of the best underground systems in the world. Rail transport in Britain is far superiour to that in the United States, where Amtrak is usually late and runs on government funding, and the local rail (Metrolink in Los Angeles) only opperates during rush hour, weekdays, and not bloody at all on weekends.
This whole music piracy thing reminds me of an episode of Dr. Who. The Doctor and Romana are looking for the 7th element to The Key of Time. The Tardis lands on a planet that has been at war with another planet for hundreds of years. The mad ruler of the planet wants the Doctor to build a force field around the planet to protect it from the nuclear bombardment of its enemy. The Doctor points out that the power requirements of such a shield would increase exponentially. What the Doctor suggests, instead, is a PR campain. And this is the crux of the situation. No matter what the music industry does, their efforts will be thwarted. In the end, no one wins, and everything is laid to waste.
Just buy a big box of magnetic poetry words and a pair of ten sided dice. Pick a word, roll the dice and multiply. Catenate the word with the number, and you're done.
I guess it doesn't matter to the lawyers, or even Congress that the instructions are protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. It should be legal to posess and disseminate said directions, but illegal to use them. The same as plans for making a pipe bomb, or owning a Britainy Spears album.
As a child, I had a small collection of Lego blocks. My construction toy of choice was Fischer Technik, which was a lot more geared towards learning engineering. The manuals would have pictures of projects, but wouldn't tell you how to build them.
I think it's important to have toys which are tools for the child to learn about his or her world. Whether it be wooden blocks, Fischer Technik or Lego, they all encourage the youngster to solve engineering problems
This is a capitalist society, and as such people need to be paid in order to buy goods and services to survive. We live in no Star Trek utopia, we live in a harsh reality of people providing services in exchange for payment. The Encyclopedia Britanica employs a large staff to write, edit, and update their articles. These people need to be compensated for their work.
Who are these gallant folk who are going to write for these free encyclopedias? Universities won't provide the labor; they derive an income from the work of their professors.
Let's look at the price Britanica is asking for this information: $50 per year. That's peanuts boys and girls. The full price of the print edition is $1,200, or 24 years of online service. Even the CD/DVD-ROM versions are only $60. If I had children, I'd consider that a small price to pay to ensure they had an excellent source of accurate information.
That's the crux of the argument. At what point do the cost and benifit curves intersect? The cost is $5 per month, the benifits are reliable information, preservation of the organization producting the information, and a well executed overview of our civilization's knowlege.
Hell, it's all about being penny wise, but pound foolish.
I'm waiting to hear the stories of the parents with the VCR flashing 12:00 who now can't watch ER after the kids have gone to bed.
Re:Been done here for ages, and it works.
on
The Unblinking Eye
·
· Score: 2
I think Britons, in general, are more trusting of police and our government than Americans. Maybe this is because our police force doesn't carry hand guns, or possibly because of a difference in our cultures.
American culture is very paranoid. It's whole democracy is based on a paranoid premise. In the 1700's, a group of rebels decided they no longer trusted the British government, and so came about the American Revolution and the United States.
I was born in England, but live in America and went to high school and university in America. What I have observed is that a lot of Americans are brought up with the story that Britain had a bad and wicked government that had to be overturned. This no doubt had verying levels of accuracy.
Built on top of this is the Amendment allowing civilians to bear arms. This is based on the premise that government cannot be trusted, and so you should be able to stockpile weapons in case you need to throw another revolution. This is an ingrained thread of American culture. Always be prepared to overthrow the government.
Unfortunately, this is where the paradox lies. The United States and Britain are representative democracies. We vote for people to represent us in government -- to make decisions on our behalf, to take care of the nitty gritty of governing while we plow the fields and write cracks for the latest video games.
So, on one hand, American culture says to its politicans "Hey, we trust you to run our civilization", but on the other hand it says "Fuck up and you die". Not only that, but everything a politician does is highly scrutanized -- even aspects of his or her private life that has no bearance on his career.
America has also followed a different course through modern history. Persecution of ethnics has occured to a greater degree in the States, students were shot for protesting during the Vietnam war, and Rodney King was beaten within an inch of his life by a bunch of LAPD thugs.
British police and politicans certainly have had their moments, I'm sure, but Americans have reasons to be paranoid of their police and politicians. Some are valid and some are not, but they exist.
We may speak simular languages, but we are different people.
A great flick, and another movie suggestion
on
'Snatch'
·
· Score: 1
I saw Snatch over the weekend and thought it was brilliant. We don't spend much time with any of the characters, but Richie paints them so vibrantly that what time we do spend really stands out.
Some scenes are replayed to emphisise the humor, and other scenes are shown out of sequence to build the humor. This is a film about some pretty nasty people and the nasty things that they do, while keeping it upbeat.
I'd like to throw two more movie suggestions onto the heap, while everyone else is at it: The Englishman is a dark, gritty film about an English thug who comes to Los Angeles to find his daughter, and then his daughter's murderer.
The second film I would highly recommend is Shallow Grave. Directed by Danny Boyle, the director of Trainspotting, this is a story of greed and how it can twist and corrupt people, even making friends enemies. It's a very dark story, but bloody brilliant.
Instead of having ballots for various candidates and propositions, we should have questionaires. Twenty or so questions that would allow a computer to select the candidates and propositions that best matched the opinions of the voter.
Is it just me, or did the Florida fiasco remind anyone of the Supreme Ruler of the Galaxy in the Hitchhiker's Guide? Some dottering old fool with no real opinion on anything.
I bet Micro$oft is quietly lobbying Congress to pass a bill that would levy a tax against any computer sold without an operating system installed. Say a megar $200 tax to cover the cost of the Windows 2000 they didn't sell.
These kinds of comments make me sick. As a perminant resident of this nation for the last 21 years, I have put my fair share of blood and sweat into it. I have paid my share of taxes, and thanks to my job in the software field, it's been more than the average American.
And for what, I may ask? For Congress to pass legislation baring me from claiming Social Security benifits that I rightly contributed to? For illiterate morons to tell me to go home? There isn't anything much more insulting that I could possiblly think of.
Let's have a quick review of the facts, while we're at it. The atom bomb, jet engines, rockets, and C++ were all made possible by foreigners living in the United States.
British, German, and Canadian scientists worked along side Americans developing the atom bomb. Jet engines were invented in Britain, perfected in Germany, and brought here by Germans. Captured German scientists built rockets for the United States. Bjanrne Stroustrup shure wasn't born here, either.
The way I look at it, America get a lot out of us aliens. We put our blood, sweat and tears into this country, and more often than not, we get shafted by small minded idiots like yourself.
Slashdot always looked like a bright, fair minded group of individuals, but I guess there's always a rotten apple somewhere.
NASA has enough trouble getting funding as it is, without having to battle it out with another space agancy.
Many people think that money is wasted on NASA, and that it would be better spent solving problems on Earth. These people are blind to the terrestrial solutions NASA has provided, and to the fact that Earth's resources will be used up one day.
My point is that we currently have one agency with one set of agenda, and the least amount of duplication of effort. If you have more than one agency, they will have to share the same pie as one, will duplicate effort, and may well have conflicting agenda.
As someone pointed out earlier, competition does not work for everything. The United States is a representive democracy. It has people representing us throught various spheres of influence. We elect them on the basis that we don't have the time or experiance to make certain decisions. While we should keep an eye on what they are doing, we have decided to live in this representitive government, and as such give some trust to those who have the time and the expertise.
Slashdot Mirror
5.25" Double Density Floppy
360KB 10K/s
3.75Mins per disk
55556 disks 50 weeks $Free*
* Cause you've got them stacked in a box in the back of your closet, and you've got Blue Shield to treat the tennis elbow you'll have when you're done
Actually, that is exactly how immigation law works. Immiganats from western Europe can only come to the State if they can find a job that cannot be filled by a US Citizen. The Job must be advertised for a period of one year without a satifactory applicant being found.
You are right that he stated he tried several bleeding edge releases, stability doesn't seem to be the sore point. It looks like he stopped using the unstable releases, but he tried them in search of hardware support. If you've just bought a scanner or CD burner, and your current distro doesn't support it, one tends to go searching for one that does.
I think this article was very well written, and all his points are valid. I'm a software engineer, and I don't have time to screw around with configuring Linux either.
The MacOS looks sweet, and it's merger with Unix is brillant. Its major drawback is that it's locked onto a proprietry hardware platform. If Hell froze over, and a OS X release came out for WinTel (WinAMD), Apple might make a lot more converts. However, it would appear selling hardware is more lucrative than selling software.
Sorry, I gotta go. The eye of Bill Gates is eyeing me via the XP desktop. Must resist slipping the ring onto my finger.
Because without electricity, telephones, and motorized transport, our civilization would collapse. This collapse would result in the deaths of approximately 5 billion people. Everyone, either directly or indirectly, relies upon these technological advacements. Sure, people can survive without them, but without them, society cannot scale to what it is today.
Now, as to cell phones, they are not a necesity (sp). They can be helpful, useful, and even life saving. The demise of the cell phone would not cause the collapse of our world. It would mean a few people would die, others would be bancrupt, and others wouldn't be able to check movie times from a restaurnt after a tastey meal.
I agree that some grade-A bad planning has been
occuring in Britain on its rail systems, this last
decade; however, we should not forget that we
built one of the first, and one of the best
underground systems in the world. Rail transport
in Britain is far superiour to that in the
United States, where Amtrak is usually late and
runs on government funding, and the local rail
(Metrolink in Los Angeles) only opperates during
rush hour, weekdays, and not bloody at all on weekends.
This whole music piracy thing reminds me of an
episode of Dr. Who. The Doctor and Romana are
looking for the 7th element to The Key of Time.
The Tardis lands on a planet that has been at war
with another planet for hundreds of years. The mad
ruler of the planet wants the Doctor to build a
force field around the planet to protect it from
the nuclear bombardment of its enemy. The Doctor
points out that the power requirements of such a
shield would increase exponentially. What the Doctor suggests, instead, is a PR campain. And this is the crux of the situation. No matter what the music industry does, their efforts will be thwarted. In the end, no one wins, and everything is laid to waste.
Just buy a big box of magnetic poetry words and
a pair of ten sided dice. Pick a word, roll the
dice and multiply. Catenate the word with the
number, and you're done.
I guess it doesn't matter to the lawyers, or even Congress that the instructions are protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. It should be legal to posess and disseminate said directions, but illegal to use them. The same as plans for making a pipe bomb, or owning a Britainy Spears album.
I think it's important to have toys which are tools for the child to learn about his or her world. Whether it be wooden blocks, Fischer Technik or Lego, they all encourage the youngster to solve engineering problems
This is a capitalist society, and as such people need to be paid in order to buy goods and services to survive. We live in no Star Trek utopia, we live in a harsh reality of people providing services in exchange for payment. The Encyclopedia Britanica employs a large staff to write, edit, and update their articles. These people need to be compensated for their work.
Who are these gallant folk who are going to write for these free encyclopedias? Universities won't provide the labor; they derive an income from the work of their professors.
Let's look at the price Britanica is asking for this information: $50 per year. That's peanuts boys and girls. The full price of the print edition is $1,200, or 24 years of online service. Even the CD/DVD-ROM versions are only $60. If I had children, I'd consider that a small price to pay to ensure they had an excellent source of accurate information.
That's the crux of the argument. At what point do the cost and benifit curves intersect? The cost is $5 per month, the benifits are reliable information, preservation of the organization producting the information, and a well executed overview of our civilization's knowlege.
Hell, it's all about being penny wise, but pound foolish.
I'd have OSHA in there a second time for the retaliation, for I do not believe that is legal either.
I don't want the cursor where I'm looking, I want it where it's supposed to be!
I'm waiting to hear the stories of the parents with the VCR flashing 12:00 who now can't watch ER after the kids have gone to bed.
American culture is very paranoid. It's whole democracy is based on a paranoid premise. In the 1700's, a group of rebels decided they no longer trusted the British government, and so came about the American Revolution and the United States.
I was born in England, but live in America and went to high school and university in America. What I have observed is that a lot of Americans are brought up with the story that Britain had a bad and wicked government that had to be overturned. This no doubt had verying levels of accuracy.
Built on top of this is the Amendment allowing civilians to bear arms. This is based on the premise that government cannot be trusted, and so you should be able to stockpile weapons in case you need to throw another revolution. This is an ingrained thread of American culture. Always be prepared to overthrow the government.
Unfortunately, this is where the paradox lies. The United States and Britain are representative democracies. We vote for people to represent us in government -- to make decisions on our behalf, to take care of the nitty gritty of governing while we plow the fields and write cracks for the latest video games.
So, on one hand, American culture says to its politicans "Hey, we trust you to run our civilization", but on the other hand it says "Fuck up and you die". Not only that, but everything a politician does is highly scrutanized -- even aspects of his or her private life that has no bearance on his career.
America has also followed a different course through modern history. Persecution of ethnics has occured to a greater degree in the States, students were shot for protesting during the Vietnam war, and Rodney King was beaten within an inch of his life by a bunch of LAPD thugs.
British police and politicans certainly have had their moments, I'm sure, but Americans have reasons to be paranoid of their police and politicians. Some are valid and some are not, but they exist.
We may speak simular languages, but we are different people.
Some scenes are replayed to emphisise the humor, and other scenes are shown out of sequence to build the humor. This is a film about some pretty nasty people and the nasty things that they do, while keeping it upbeat.
I'd like to throw two more movie suggestions onto the heap, while everyone else is at it: The Englishman is a dark, gritty film about an English thug who comes to Los Angeles to find his daughter, and then his daughter's murderer.
The second film I would highly recommend is Shallow Grave. Directed by Danny Boyle, the director of Trainspotting, this is a story of greed and how it can twist and corrupt people, even making friends enemies. It's a very dark story, but bloody brilliant.
Is it just me, or did the Florida fiasco remind anyone of the Supreme Ruler of the Galaxy in the Hitchhiker's Guide? Some dottering old fool with no real opinion on anything.
Yeah, it's probably just me.
I bet Micro$oft is quietly lobbying Congress to pass a bill that would levy a tax against any computer sold without an operating system installed. Say a megar $200 tax to cover the cost of the Windows 2000 they didn't sell.
And for what, I may ask? For Congress to pass legislation baring me from claiming Social Security benifits that I rightly contributed to? For illiterate morons to tell me to go home? There isn't anything much more insulting that I could possiblly think of.
Let's have a quick review of the facts, while we're at it. The atom bomb, jet engines, rockets, and C++ were all made possible by foreigners living in the United States.
British, German, and Canadian scientists worked along side Americans developing the atom bomb. Jet engines were invented in Britain, perfected in Germany, and brought here by Germans. Captured German scientists built rockets for the United States. Bjanrne Stroustrup shure wasn't born here, either.
The way I look at it, America get a lot out of us aliens. We put our blood, sweat and tears into this country, and more often than not, we get shafted by small minded idiots like yourself.
Slashdot always looked like a bright, fair minded group of individuals, but I guess there's always a rotten apple somewhere.
Many people think that money is wasted on NASA, and that it would be better spent solving problems on Earth. These people are blind to the terrestrial solutions NASA has provided, and to the fact that Earth's resources will be used up one day.
My point is that we currently have one agency with one set of agenda, and the least amount of duplication of effort. If you have more than one agency, they will have to share the same pie as one, will duplicate effort, and may well have conflicting agenda.
As someone pointed out earlier, competition does not work for everything. The United States is a representive democracy. It has people representing us throught various spheres of influence. We elect them on the basis that we don't have the time or experiance to make certain decisions. While we should keep an eye on what they are doing, we have decided to live in this representitive government, and as such give some trust to those who have the time and the expertise.